A Liturgy, a Legacy, & the Songs of Rich Mullins
A Review of Andrew Peterson’s live album
Album Release: October 21, 2025 (on what would have been Rich’s 70th birthday)
Event: “A Liturgy, A Legacy & the Songs of Rich Mullins” — live tribute concert & recording recreating Rich Mullins’ 1993 album in full
Original Concert Date & Venue: September 24, 2017 — Ryman Auditorium (Nashville, TN). (Live album released in 2025.)
First Notes
From the very first song, the night’s trajectory is set. “Hello Old Friends” begins; an expectant hush holds the room. Two guitars begin to play, and recognition erupts as the audience sees how faithful the artists are—they reenact the false start, complete with the count-in: “one… two… three.” Scientists tell us time is elastic and that, in the presence of extreme gravity, things slow down. The audience is drawn into the sphere of Jove, time begins to slow, and an immense silence descends on the hallowed hall. A beat later, the crowd answers—barely audible at first—whisper-singing. Andrew Peterson succeeds in bringing festal joy from Rich’s songs. What follows this night is not mere replication, but a dance where everyone knows the steps—it is a well-worn Liturgy.
Peterson Exceeded His Aim
Andrew Peterson’s tribute concert succeeds in resurrecting the experience of the first listen to “A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band”; the night at the Ryman delivered on his aim and exceeded it, creating a sacred space for performers and audience.
The musicians preserved Mullins’ songs largely note-for-note. The original string arrangements were reconstructed, and hammered dulcimers were used to capture the instrument’s distinctive percussive color.
Peterson acted as a gracious host and curator. He entrusted music direction to Ben Shive (veteran producer/arranger), and he welcomed a company of respected artists to lead songs: Jill Phillips, Brandon Heath, Andy Gullahorn, Jeremy Casella, Leigh Nash, and Andrew Osenga, among others. Even Rich’s producer Reed Arvin was at the piano for “Creed,” lending the endeavor an authentic seal of approval. Peterson’s presence was warm and guiding, never dominating—a curator of a communal experience.
The Ryman crowd became a vast choir two thousand strong. In key moments, the audience became part of the music. When the call of “Everywhere I Go, I See You” went out, it was as if canyon walls echoed their response. The boundary between stage and seats blurred.
Peterson’s intention was to re-create the album; what he ended up reawakening was something much deeper.
Why the 1993 Record Matters
A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band” Revisited
Rich Mullins’ 1993 album “A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band” has long been regarded as a landmark—both a creative and spiritual touchstone. To understand the power of Peterson’s revival, we must look back at what made the original record so significant. Rich Mullins set himself three distinct challenges for this album: to write songs that mirrored a worship service; to pay homage to his father’s home and his family’s traditions; and to record live in the studio.
“Here in America”—track one—takes the listener on a walking tour of our beloved country. A dangerous business, to be sure. Functionally, the song can work as a Call to Worship. Consider the key line: “And if I were a painter I do not know which I’d paint, the calling of the ancient stars, or the assembly of the saints…” These two choices feel mutually exclusive, but they are not. Within the context of a worship gathering Deep Heaven throws open Her gates—gates that have been lightly locked—and calls us to enter freely with the starry hosts and all the saints who have gone before. Rich could have painted them both together, because they are one and the same.
Tracks 2–6: The Liturgy
“52:10”: a scripture reading from Isaiah 52:10, set within an orchestration that, for many, transcends anything else in Rich’s catalog. Where past songs dwelt on the glories found in God’s creation, this piece addresses the Triune Creator of the heavens and the earth directly.
“Hold Me Jesus”: has us kneel in a brutally honest corporate confession of sin.
“Creed”: stands directly in the confessional center of orthodoxy. A corporate confession draws the baptized from every continent and every generation into one voice: “I believe in God the Father, Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth, and Jesus Christ His only begotten Son, our LORD…”
“Peace (A Communion Blessing from St. Joseph’s Square)”: having been called into Deep Heaven with angels and archangels, having confessed our sins and received absolution, and having been cut apart on the altar of God’s Word, we are now brought to the Table: “In His blood and in His body, in this bread and in this wine… peace to you, peace of Christ to you.”
Tracks 7–12: The Legacy
“78 Eatonwood Green.” Named for the home of a family Rich met on his travels in Ireland, this instrumental points from the cathedral toward home. Rich understood—instinctively—that if the world is to be transformed, it is transformed first at a warm hearth and around the family table.
“Hard.” The lyric makes plain Rich’s love for the Epistle of James. His earlier, tongue-in-cheek commentary on James gave us “Screen Door.” For Rich, faith always works by love.
“I’ll Carry On.” This is the heart of the Legacy side of the record. “I kissed the earth of my daddy’s grave, and said goodbye to my brave young companions…” He honors his father—despite their differences—the traditions he was raised with, and vows to “carry the songs I learned when we were kids.”
“You Gotta Get Up.” Warm with yuletide fires. This song reminds us that the liturgical calendar circumnavigates the sun: each winter it travels down the cobblestone street from the parish church, passes through the front gate, and crosses your threshold like a welcome family friend. Those rhythms shape us as Americans and as Christians, and they live in the deep magic of Christmas carols.
“Land of My Sojourn.” The album’s closer. Rich loved the road, but his first love was his native soil. Chesterton comes to mind: “‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” Rich had no illusions about America; he knew she needed work, yet he loved her like a mother. “But some mendicants wander off into a cathedral, and they stoop in the silence, and there their prayers are still whispered, and I’ll sing their song, and I’ll sing their song in the land of my sojourn.”
Having written a record that accomplished his first two stated goals—to write songs that mirrored a worship service and to pay homage to his father’s home and his family’s traditions—Rich tasked his longtime producer, Reed Arvin, with assembling a band capable of recording it live.
Prior to this, all of Rich’s records had been tracked with professional musicians playing at different times, and in different locations. These sessions yielded many takes, giving Arvin options to cut together the music in the most meaningful way. But playing live meant that the songs would need to be meticulously arranged and rehearsed prior to recording—they were still working on 2-inch tape in those days, and it wasn’t cheap. This required significant organization. Arvin was up to the task. He was to Rich Mullins what Sir George Martin was to the Beatles. They set their faces and put their shoulders to the plow, cutting grooves in vinyl. The songs were good—really good—and the production value was even better, ornamenting the music with exactly what it needed and nothing more.
In the years since its 1993 release, it has been widely considered one of the best Christian music albums ever recorded—the Pet Sounds of gospel music. The joy it has brought people over the years is hard to overstate.
Listening to those recordings as I drove down the dusty back roads of Edmond, Oklahoma, had a transformative effect on me. Rich Mullins, in many ways, became one of my first masters, an instructor in beauty, and his choices have deeply affected my aesthetic sensibilities. From that moment, other music, in many ways, lost its appeal when I realized I would never hear those songs again for the first time. I chased that “felt change of consciousness,” as Owen Barfield calls it in Poetic Diction, but the well of “A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band” eventually dried up and nothing else seemed to satisfy my desire for the intensity of that experience. Barfield explains our experience of beauty and why those transformative experiences are so few and far between:
“[The] appreciation of poetry involves a ‘felt change of consciousness’… Appreciation takes place at the actual moment of change. It is not simply that the poet enables me to see with his eyes, and so to apprehend a larger and fuller world. He may indeed do this, but the actual moment of the pleasure of appreciation depends upon something rarer and more transitory. It depends on the change itself… [and] if ever we go back to linger lovingly over the exquisite phrasing of some fragment of poesy whose essence has long been our own, and of which the spirit has become a part of our every waking moment, if we do this, is it not for the very reason that we want to renew the thrill which accompanied the first acquisition of the treasure? As our lips murmur the well-known—or it may be the long-forgotten—words, we are trying, whether deliberately or no, to cast ourselves back into the frame of mind which was ours before we had learnt the lesson. Why? Because we know instinctively that, if we are to feel pleasure, we must have change. Everlasting day can no more freshen the earth with dew than everlasting night, but the change from night to day and from day back again to night.”
What happened on September 24, 2017, at the Ryman Auditorium was an evening when musicians, songwriters, performers, and audience participants—two thousand in all—experienced that felt change of consciousness together; it was nothing short of magical.
Andrew Peterson recalls hearing the rough mixes of “Creed” after they had sat forgotten on a shelf for years:
“Eight years passed. Then one day, out of the blue, Ben Shive sent me a text. He had dug out the recording, did a little mixing and cleanup on the song ‘Creed,’ and was surprisingly moved by the experience. I heard the recording and was moved, too. Basically, I ugly-cried in the car. He’s a busy producer/writer, so it’s crazy that he found the time and energy to do it after hours, but every few days he’d send another text with another song from that night. They were stunningly good—and the audience was as joyous as I remembered. ‘People need to hear this,’ we said to each other.”
(Peterson later wrote this account when the project resurfaced.)
C. S. Lewis writes about deepening our experience of joy when we encounter beauty. He calls it Aesthetic Joy, and he shows how education enlarges our capacity for it—how becoming conversant with medieval cosmology and Greek and Roman mythology can broaden one’s experience of, say, reading Shakespeare (see An Experiment in Criticism, Preface to Paradise Lost, and The Discarded Image).
For me, I don’t know whether it’s been a deepening in Covenant Renewal worship and liturgical rhythms, or a growing desire to honor my fathers and my tradition, but listening to the live concert—turned up on my car stereo, driving down the highway—I experienced a deeper satisfaction than perhaps I did the first time. The everlasting night changed to everlasting day, and with the change came refreshing dew. Andrew Peterson has accomplished a rare feat. He has fashioned, as it were, a moment out of ether and mixed the stuff of heaven with the stuff of earth.
Shane Hull lives in Parrish, FL, with his wife, Kelly. They have two sons, Aidan and Noah. An avid reader of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, he worships at Auburn Road Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Venice, FL, and hopes to see a CREC congregation planted in Sarasota, FL.
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