Soon and Very Soon -- Andrae Crouch

This 34-year old gospel music star’s career was well on track, and yet he was thinking about the end already, apparently. Was Andrae Crouch feeling the need to say good-bye when he sang “Soon and Very Soon” in the 1970s (circa 1976), or was he just urging others to join in the sensation he felt, an upbeat attitude that coaxed those joining in to celebrate, with abandon? You couldn’t watch much of a rendition of this song or need to read very many of the song’s lyrics to discover it was the latter purpose that Andrae intended to promote. Rejoice, not with complicated theological reasoning, but with just a few simple yet powerful concepts that tell us we will break the earth-bound rules and experience a revolution on the other side. That’s what Andrae wanted you and me to grasp.  

Andrae Crouch would probably respond that his parents, his family, and the wider environment in which he lived played a crucial role in his spiritual and musical formation during his early years in California, where he would most likely be when he wrote of a rapidly-approaching time.

Andrae’s parents encouraged him to play the piano, including during an impromptu moment at a church service in the Los Angeles area when he was reportedly just 11 years old. His parents’ street-preaching, hospital, and prison ministry efforts also undoubtedly spelled out clearly to this boy how deeply committed they were to the Christian message. California’s prominence in the Jesus movement likely also imprinted on Andrae that God was at work in his environment. So, it wasn’t too many years after that first church service that the 14-year old Andrae wrote the first of many gospel songs, an expression of the growing Christian music seed within himself. The precise circumstances of “Soon and Very Soon” emerging from Andrae’s consciousness is not recorded, but it’s not really much of a mystery how he must have felt at the time. Hallelujah!, he exclaims several times, while repeating that ‘we’re’ making a journey to see God. That ‘we’ was important to Andrae’, who must have urged others to join in with clapping hands on numerous occasions when singing about this joyous anticipation. ‘No more crying’, and ‘no more dying’ are the only other thoughts that Andrae sought to communicate in this song, yet their departure from human experience was something he knew would speak volumes to anyone who’d experienced sadness and death. The Crouches were no more immune than others in this respect, especially in the 1993-94 period when Andrae would lose both parents and his older brother. One can imagine that the expectancy of what he’d sung for so many years grew as these events and his own health struggles in 2014-15 ensued.

Andrae’s own ‘soon and very soon’ time transpired in January 2015 when he was 72. As compared to the life expectancy of others in the western world, Andrae’s lifespan was a bit below average, though his death’s cause was not abnormal. So, one can deduce that Andrae received what he expected as a mortal. What about as an immortal, someone who expected to gain eternity, to receive his new body, as an ancient wrote about (1 Cor. 15)? Andrae sounded confident and eager. What about you?

     

See more information on the song story in this source: The Complete Book of Hymns – Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs by William J. Petersen and Ardythe Petersen, Tyndale House Publishers, 2006.

Brief information about the author is here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/c/r/o/u/crouch_a.htm  

See author’s biography here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andra%C3%A9_Crouch  

This site tells of the background of the religious environment in which the author-composer lived: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_movement

See this site for statistics on life expectancy: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274513/life-expectancy-in-north-america/