1. "Calling Out Your Name" (1991)
“I can feel the earth tremble beneath the rumbling of the buffalo hooves, and the fury in the pheasant's wings. It tells me the Lord is in His temple and there is still a faith that can make the mountains move and a love that can make the heavens ring”

MG (Mark Geil): Never has there been a finer example of the setting-to-music of the power of God’s creation. Mullins invokes fury and rumbling, flame and thunder, and a whisper of a prayer to paint a sonic homage to the great wide open. If Bruce Springsteen penned a masterpiece of youthful ambition and wanderlust in “Born to Run”, then Mullins’ masterpiece is superior in its wisdom. We run wild, but we run wild with the hope of eternity in the presence of the Author of the thunder in the sky.

AC (Alex Caldwell): Evangelicals have often been suspect of songs that incorporate nature imagery with worship, but Mullins wrapped up a worship song about the presence of God in nature with a hammer dulcimer refrain that haunts me to this day. This song makes me want to drive through Nebraska with my arms upraised. One of his finest moments...

2. "Sometimes By Step" (1992)
“Sometimes I think of Abraham, how one star he saw had been lit for me. He was a stranger in this land, and I am that, no less than he.”

AC: This haunting, simple melody came out of a camping trip Mullins and his best friend Beaker took. Sometimes the most simple things can be the most profound. The bagpipe version of this song on The World As Best I Remember It Vol. 1 shows the universal reach and sentiment of this song.

MG: This is one I sing all the time (sometimes quietly to myself and sometimes, if no one else is around, in full off-key voice), whenever I have occasion to gaze upon a starlit sky. Oh God, You are my God.

3. "Hold Me Jesus" (1993)
"And I wake up in the night and feel the dark. It's so hot inside my soul, I swear there must be blisters on my heart, so hold me Jesus."

AC: This was Mullin’s most nakedly honest song; a prayer for strength from the Father to get him through the night. Mullins was painfully honest with his audiences about his struggles (alcoholism, struggles with being a single man) and about the God who can see us through every moment.

DC (David Craft): The sheer number of artists that this song has been covered by speaks to its greatness. “Hold Me Jesus” recognizes the pain that we can feel in life, and how we are led there by our own depravity: “surrender don't come natural to me; I'd rather fight You for something I don't really want than to take what You give that I need.” This song examines our need to simply rest in Christ, trusting in Him when we are at the end of ourselves.

4. "Creed" (1993)
“I believe what I believe is what makes me what I am. I did not make it, no it is making me. It is the very truth of God, not the invention of any man.”

MG: Behold, the hammered dulcimer! Who might have guessed a musical rendering of the Apostle’s Creed could sound so glorious. In a 1986 interview Mullins noted that he’d shifted from piano playing to the ancestor of the piano, the hammered dulcimer. “You hit it,” he declared. “That’s my favorite part of it. You just hit that thing all over the place!” He fell in love with the instrument when he literally paddled up to a dulcimer festival in a canoe. Only Rich Mullins.

AC: Another triumph of mixing denominations! Mullins took the Aposte’s Creed, something mostly unfamiliar to his audience, and set it to a rousing hymn celebrating God’s truth. That hammer dulcimer is fantastic here too. (“I did not make it, no it is making me…)

5. "Hard To Get" (1998)
“You who live in radiance, hear the prayers of those of us who live in skin. We have a love that's not as patient as Yours was, still we do love now and then”

AC: When I brought home The Jesus Record I didn’t listen to it right away. Instead I waited a few days, then one quiet evening when I had the house to myself, I lit a candle in Rich’s honor and sat crossed-legged on the floor and hit play on my CD player. This simple, beautiful and heart-wrenching song came out and devastated me. God is “hard to get”, and this obvious fact is glazed over by so much of Christian music. This bare-bones track said more in four humble minutes than anything I had heard before. Praise God that He is so big that you can spend a lifetime trying to fathom Him and his ways. I want my faith to be based in something that is bigger and more mysterious than I can fathom.

DC: Personally, this is by far my favorite Mullins song. The scratchy sound of the demo recording adds to the realness and emotion when he sings out lines such as “I can't see how You're leading me unless You've led me here; to where I'm lost enough to let myself be led.” In an era where Christian music was overly saturated with only positive and feel-good messages, “Hard to Get” was a successful attempt to bring the reality of the struggles of faith into the limelight. Perhaps today this is needed more than ever.

6. "The Color Green" (1993)
“And the moon is a sliver of silver, like a shaving that fell on the floor of a carpenter’s shop. Every house must have its builder, and I awoke in the house of God”

MR (Mark Rice): While the fact that Mullins was a spectacular player on the hammered dulcimer is no secret, it is less known that he was brilliant at another obscure instrument; the pennywhistle. Rich was partly of an Irish heritage, and in the later years of his life that started coming through more in his music. In “The Color Green” (the video for which was filmed on the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland), Mullins created equal parts a Psalm, an Irish song, and a theological statement that is a joy to listen to. Oh, yeah, and that pennywhistle!

7. "If I Stand" (1988)
“And there’s a loyalty that’s deeper than mere sentiments, and a music higher than the songs that I can sing. The stuff of earth competes with allegiance I owe only to the Giver of all good things.”

DC:“If I Stand” probably has one of the best choruses in all of Christian music. I could speak at great length about this song, but it speaks better for itself: “so if I stand, let me stand on the promise that you will pull me through: and if I can't, let me fall on the grace that first brought me to You. And if I sing let me sing for the joy that has born in me these songs: and if I weep let it be as a man who is longing for his home.” This song so perfectly encapsulates the walk which we as believers must endure in following after Christ. There are times of joy and times of sorrow; times of great faith and times of doubt. Rich recognized this truth, and used this song to point us towards the Savior, even in in the times of brokenness.

MR: The name of the album that introduced this song was Winds of Heaven... Stuff of Earth. This title came from a line from this song (“The stuff of earth competes with the allegiance I owe only to the Giver of all good things”), that encapsulates an idea that is a stumbling block to almost all believers; that we get so distracted with the things of this world. “If I Stand” serves as a prayer that our actions on earth have a heavenly origin, because heaven matters, and the earth doesn’t.

8. "My Deliverer" (1998)
“Through a dry and thirsty land, water from the Kenyon heights pours itself out of Lake Sangra's broken heart. There in the Sahara winds Jesus heard the whole world cry for the healing that would flow from His own scars.”

AC: The Jesus Record was a landmark event in my college life. Rich was gone (he had just come to my college and played a great show) and all I had was this album as his last word and testament. Every song is imbedded in my spiritual DNA, and reminds me that it all comes down to Jesus. Ten songs about Jesus, starting with the cry of Israel for a deliverer was a perfect coda for Mullins. It was what he was all about.

DC: This special piece has been used in programs all the way from Sunday morning worship to various Christmas events. Its reflection upon the world’s need for a Savior comes from a different angle, as it examines Jesus’s knowledge of our desperation for God’s promise to be fulfilled: “there in the Sahara winds, Jesus heard the whole world cry for the healing that would flow from His own scars.” This song is haunting in both melody and message, and speaks deeply to the doctrine that Jesus was as much a man as He was God.

9. "We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are" (1996)
“It took the hand of God almighty to part the waters of the sea, but it only took one little lie to separate you and me. Oh, we are not as strong as we think we are.”

AC: Mullins wanted to write a break up song because he didn’t feel like there were enough good ones in Christian music. This devastating song that saw me through a the end of a relationship in college. It still chokes me up today.

MG: This is a masterclass is combining eternal truth with vulnerability and everyday life. After a chorus that declares that our hells and our heavens are so few inches apart, a bridge finds Mullins telling a bit of his own story, and I can imagine just a touch of timidity in his voice when he said these words to someone the first time: “If you make me laugh I know I could make you like me, ‘cause when I laugh I can be a lot of fun.”

10. "I See You" (1991)
“Well the eagle flies and the rivers run. I look through the night and I can see the rising sun. And everywhere I go I see You”

MR: Mullin’s producer Reed Arvin once said that if Mullins were making music today he likely wouldn’t ever receive radio airplay on mainstream Christian stations. I tend to think there is some truth in that statement. In all honesty, perhaps the most marketable thing Mullins ever did was die. At the same time, I think it is a bit of a lie to say Mullins wouldn’t be marketable at all, and “I See You” is evidence of that. This particular song might be even better now than it was then. True, it does have that call-and-response worship leading style that many now would say is old fashioned, but I think it it contains so many other aspects that would become hallmarks of modern worship (big dynamics, vertically direct, endlessly-repeatable chorus) that I might venture to say it was ahead of its time. But yet, a simple read of the lyrics, and it is easily identifiable as Mullins.

AC: Another hymn to the maker of all that’s beautiful and good. Mullins did these like no other.

11. "Boy Like Me/Man Like You" (1991)
“Well, did You grow up hungry? Did You grow up fast? Did the little girls giggle when You walked past? Did You wonder what it was that made them laugh?”

AC: Mullins personalized faith like few other writers, and this humble song about where Jesus was born and raised, and juxtaposing that real boyhood with Mullins own life in Indiana is a masterstroke of writing. Jesus was man like us, familiar with our sufferings and acquainted with grief like us. He knew what it was like to be in our shoes.

MR: It is so easy to forget about Jesus’ humanity, but the fact is that Jesus didn’t begin publicly preaching until he was thirty! What happened before then? What was Jesus like as a child? What would it be like to be friends with him? What would it be like to parent him? What did he do for fun? Dare I ask, did he ever get scared by something like a monster under the bed? Rich and Beaker apparently wondered this too, and the result is Rich asking Jesus if he ever has similar experiences to him. Plus, there is the little line, “Did you ever make angles in the winter snow?” Think about it…

12. "Here In America" (1993)
“Saints and children we have gathered here to hear the sacred story, and I'm glad to bring it to you with my best rhyming and rhythm”

MG: Though it was saved for his finest album, Mullins said he wrote this song sometime around 1976, when he was hitchhiking his way across the titular land. “It was just, I think it was after having been eaten by red ants and sleeping in a culvert that I really realized what a cool country this really was.” The song makes us hear the water falling and feel the ocean's crashing, and it lends us a lyric that’s the mission of so many fans of Rich Mullins: “There so much beauty around us for just two eyes to see. But everywhere I go, I’m looking.”

MR: It is strange to think how one of the most highly-regarded projects in CCM history opens with the voice of Rick Elias declaring that he is “barely ready to do this.” It is equally as strange to think that the song that immediately proceeded the finest example of a modern liturgy was an accordian-led tribute to America. But it worked. A Liturgy, A Legacy, and A Ragamuffin Band was an album all about heritage, both sacred and secular, and “Here In America” is a perfect way to set up both.

13. "That Where I Am, There You..." (1998)
“Remember you did not choose me, no I have chosen you. The world will show you hatred, the Spirit show you truth that where I am, there you may also be”

AC: The last song on the last Rich Mullins album was as triumphant and as close to scripture as any song about Jesus out there. That great guitar figure (which I still can’t play on the acoustic guitar) and those words from the gospels were a perfect ending to Mullin’s legacy.

DC: So many of Mullin’s songs are more somber in message and tonality, with minor keys and chords defining many of his best works. “That Where I Am, There You…” is at its heart a song of encouragement. It’s fun and catchy melody that connects with believers both young and old also carries timeless truths about reliance on God’s promises. Being the final song on Rich’s last album is also quite fitting as he closes with the line “in the world you will have trouble, but I leave you my peace, that where I am, there you may also be.”

14. "The Love Of God" (1989)
“Love within them leads them on to the battle on the journey, and it's never gonna stop ever widening their mercies and the fury of His love”

MG: It seemed that Mullins understood more than many that God’s love is merciful and joyful, but it’s also a reckless, raging fury. Ephesians 3 says this love surpasses knowledge, and yet we can be filled with it. That was Mullins’ aim, to be tossed about by it but lifted up. I’ve always found it interesting that this song falters a bit on the chorus, which--after the poetry and profundity of the verses--simply repeats the phrase, “The love of God.” But maybe it’s quite perfect, given that we can declare that love’s existence without ever fully comprehending it.

MR: This is a very unassuming song upon first listen. It’s pretty short, and much is instrumental, and the chorus is a mere four words. But the verses are Mullins at his finest. A "reckless raging fury"; only Mullins could have so succinctly, and yet so accurately, summed it up.

15. "Elijah" (1986)
“When I leave I want to go out like Elijah, with a whirlwind to fuel my chariot of fire. And when I look back on the stars, it’ll be like a candlelight in Central Park, and it won’t break my heart to say goodbye.”

MG: “Elijah” appeared on Mullins’ 1986 eponymous debut for Reunion Records, but for many the definitive version is found on his 1996 Songs compilation. It was in 1997, though, that the song took on an extra measure of poignancy when Mullins was killed while traveling to a benefit concert in Wichita. He was a man on the road to salvation, sticking out his thumb and waiting for a ride, ever-listening to the music from the other side.

MR: Call it odd or mildly disturbing that one of the first great songs Mullins wrote was about his longing for death, but the fact is that we all die. In culture, we determine that is such a bad thing, but is it really? Is the final call of God to draw us to him from out of this world something to be feared? Mullins posits that it is a thing to be joyful for! And in the meantime as we wait for that call and every moment on Earth is a gift, “Lord, I'm begging for one last favor from You; here's my heart, take it where You will.”

16. "Sing Your Praise To The Lord" (1981)
“I could never tell you just how much good that it's gonna do you just to sing anew the song your heart learned to sing when He first gave His life to you. Well, life goes on and so must the song.”

MR: This song is arguably the reason we even have a Rich Mullins to begin with. As a member of a band called Zion, he first recorded this song in 1981 on their independently-made record Behold The Man. Amy Grant heard it and chose to record it as the first single in what would become the first platinum-selling CCM album ever, Age to Age. This essentially started Mullins’ professional career as a songwriter. Of course, the version most identified with Mullins is his 1996 one when Mullins recorded it for this compilation Songs.

DC: While "Sing Your Praise To The Lord" contains one of CCM's more bizarre instrumental introductions, Mullins is somehow able to knit it into a beautiful piece. Playing with skillful key changes and a curious rythm, this song is unbelievably catchy and quite unforgettable.

17. "Surely God Is With Us" (1998)
“Who's that man who says He's a preacher? Well, He must be, He's disturbing all our peace! Where's He get off, and what is He hiding? And every word He says those fools believe.”

AC: Jesus was misunderstood by many in his day, and in ours. Who is this man that so many have fallen in love with and given their lives to? If we ever forget the foolishness of God, God help us.

DC: "Surely God is with Us" so clearly demonstrates the colorful nature Mullins' songwriting. The repetitive line of "who's that man" from each perspective brings out such depth and creativity. After examining these many different roles that Jesus took on, he expresses a praise at the omnipresence of Christ.

18. "Awesome God" (1988)
“When he rolled up his sleeves, he ain’t just putting on a ritz. Our God is an awesome God.”

MR: There are few Christian songs that have ever been a bigger coup than "Awesome God." There was a time that the chorus to this song was possibly the most widely-recognized CCM lyric in the world. But Mullins himself was merely amused (and a little annoyed) by the attention of “Awesome God,” one time saying, “it's one of the worst-written songs that I ever wrote.” I don’t know if I’d really go that far, but it certainly isn’t the lyrical tour de force that much of his other great songs are. Still, we probably have this song to thank for all the other truly great music that Rich created in the last nine years of his life.

AC: CCM Magazine rated “Awesome God” the best Christian rock song of all time, and it’s hard to argue that point. This was the first worship song I ever raised my hands to, and the first one that showed me that emotions and intellect can both be engaged in worship. That melody and those words...powerful still.

19. "Peace (A Communion Blessing from St. Joseph's Square)" (1993)
“Though we're strangers, still I love you. I love you more than your mask. And you know you have to trust this to be true, and I know that's much to ask. But lay down your fears, come and join this feast, He has called us here, you and me”

MG: This lovely song, parenthetically titled “A Communion Blessing from St. Joseph’s Square”, is a profound telling of what it means to be part of the Body, connected to other believers, but existing one in another in a world parched by spiritual drought. Consider the implications of two parallel lines. The song opens, “Though we’re strangers, still I love you.” But the second verse is flipped: “Though I love you, still we’re strangers.” It’s a great example of Mullins’ lyrical genius, painting pictures of eternity but aware that we have to live here in time.

AC: I picture Mullins in a austentatious setting, like a worship service behind the Iron Curtain in a big square, and singing this humble song of the communion of the saints.

20. "Growing Young" (1992)
“I've seen silver turn to dross, seen the very best there ever was, and I'll tell You, it ain't worth what it costs. And I remember my Father's house. What I wouldn't give right now, just to see Him and hear Him tell me that He loves me so much!”

MR: The theme of the prodigal son is no stranger to music (such as the countless covers of Benny Hester’s “When God Ran”), but I don’t know if any of them are as visceral or Gospel-charged as this one. Co-written with Beaker around the time Mullins discovered and met Brennan Manning, “Growing Young” is an incredibly tender and hopeful song. Mullins has said this was one of the easiest songs he has ever written (“We started playing around and the next thing we knew it was done because it was kind of our testimony”). Those who have seen the movie Ragamuffin can only help to wonder if Mullin’s earthly father (who died shortly before the song was written), in addition to his heavenly father, may have helped inspire the song as well.