Sing Again

Erin Doom

Sep 11

4 min read

Updated: Sep 22

An Early Listening Room Manifesto

Commemoration of St. Theodora of Alexandria

Anno Domini 2026, September 11

“Life goes on—and so must the song.”

Those words appear in “Praise to the Lord,” the first song on Behold the Man, the independently produced album recorded by Rich Mullins and Zion in Cincinnati in 1981. It's an early song—bright, direct, and unmistakably marked by the Christian music of its day. But it contains something much more enduring: an account of what songs are for.

The heart receives a song. Life threatens to bury it. We sing it again.

That may be as concise a manifesto for the Listening Room as I know.

Rich moved to Wichita when I was in high school. He soon became involved with my youth group, so I got to know him a bit. He later became a customer at Eighth Day Books, where the books were chosen because they had survived long enough to deserve another hearing.

Rich was a serious reader, and so I suspect that when he placed someone “down in the madding crowd,” he knew what stood behind the phrase: Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, and behind Hardy, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” I can't confirm the connection, so I won't claim it as fact. But it sure sounds like the kind of phrase a reader carries until it quietly enters his own language.

Gray’s “madding crowd” is the clamorous world of ambition and conflict. Rich’s crowd is likewise a place of noise and spiritual disorientation. Somewhere within it is a person “dying to hear” the song that once reached the singer himself.

The answer to the noise is not more noise. It's a song remembered and sung anew.

That “again” matters. Rich doesn't imagine the Christian life as a single experience followed by uninterrupted fervor. The heart once learned a song when it received the life of Christ, but life continued. Distraction accumulated. The song grew faint. And so it must be sung again—and again and again.

Praise is not merely the expression of a spiritual condition we already possess. Praise is a practice through which the heart is recalled to what it has received. The singer is changed by singing. Only then can the song pass through him toward someone else.

The song does something to the singer before it does something through the singer.

Here the movement of the Listening Room intersects with the movement at the center of Podvig:

Behold. Practice. Become. Behold.

We behold something beautiful, true, or holy. We return to it through practice. Through that sustained attention, we begin to become what we love. And as we are changed, we acquire the capacity to behold more clearly.

Then the pattern begins again.

It ascends, not as a closed circle, but as a spiral: behold, practice, become, behold—ad infinitum. Every act of renewed attention returns us to the beginning, but not quite to the same place. We hear more because we have practiced hearing. We see more because we have allowed what we saw to act upon us.

That is why we listen again.

“Praise to the Lord” also initiated another kind of ascent. A copy of Behold the Man reached Amy Grant’s manager. Grant recorded a transformed version, “Sing Your Praise to the Lord,” for Age to Age. It became a major Christian-radio success and paved the way for Rich’s professional career.

The song that told believers to keep the song alive carried Rich’s own music beyond the colleges and churches where Zion had performed it. It brought him into the Christian music industry—an industry that gave him a livelihood, an audience, and a platform, but one with which he would maintain an increasingly complicated relationship.

Rich entered that world through a song of praise. He would spend much of the rest of his career resisting the ways that world could turn praise into performance, vocation into celebrity, and Christian witness into a marketable product.

Yet even here, at the beginning, the corrective is already present. The original recording is not principally a star’s solo performance. It is the sound of a group summoning everybody to sing. The musician’s task is not to replace the voices of the people but to awaken them.

Rich’s connection to my own life did not end with Rich. His brother David later moved to Wichita to serve at Central Christian Church—the place where I had met Rich. David became part of the Geek Group, the weekly gathering that formed one of the foundations of what would become the Hall of Men. We read books, drank beer, smoked pipes, and eventually made retreats together in Colorado. Through those years I got to know David better than I had known Rich.

Later, I invited David to present his brother at the Hall of Men. When someone presented a hero at the Hall, an image of the hero was placed on the walls of the Ladder. David spoke of Rich, and Rich’s image joined the communion of heroes gathered there.

The Mullins thread therefore passes through more than music. It runs through books and bookstores, brothers and friendships, weekly gatherings and mountain retreats. It runs from Zion to Amy Grant, from Central Christian to Eighth Day Books, from the Geek Group to the Hall of Men—and from Rich’s image on the walls of the Ladder into the Listening Room.

This is how a song carries on. Not as an artifact sealed inside the year of its recording, but as something handed from person to person, entering new rooms and awakening new communities. We behold those who have gone before us. We practice what we have received from them. We become capable of handing it on. And, by handing it on, we help another person to behold.

And so we sing again.