Keith Getty On Singing the ‘Great Hymns of Christmas’ for ‘Sing! An Irish Christmas’ Tour
By Movieguide® Staff
Christian music artists Keith and Kristyn Getty find purpose in sharing the truths of scripture through song, and what better way to do that than with a Christmas tour?
“I think the encouragement that we constantly want to give families in America and this age when the Christian faith and the Christian family is under attack is, let’s stop being negative and defeatist or cynical,” Keith Getty told The Christian Post in a recent interview. “Let’s fill our own lives and our family’s lives up with the joy of the Lord and the truth of the Gospel, and there’s no better season to start that than at Christmas.”
The award-winning couple recently announced their nationwide tour, “Sing! An Irish Christmas.”
“We don’t do Rudolph and Santa; it’s the great hymns of Christmas,” Getty said. “But in the Irish tradition, they’re just a ton of fun. So the first half of the show is always like an Irish party, and the second half of the show is a lesson carol service, where we read through the [Christmas] story. To get to do it with our band and all their virtuosity and fun is just fantastic.”
The tour starts on Dec. 12 and will conclude on Dec. 23, just before Christmas Day.
The Getty’s tour across the U.S. will hit famous venues New York City’s Carnegie Hall on Dec. 15 and Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center on Dec. 23.
“We want to touch people knowing that many, many are coming with different emotions this year,” Getty said. “This Christmas, there are lots of Christians who are delighted to sing God’s praises, but there’s also a lot of Christians here feeling very fearful, feeling very downcast. feeling desperate.”
The Getty’s are known for their hymn writing, which included songs like “In Christ Alone” and “Christ Our Hope in Life and Death.”
The Getty’s also share four children, who all perform in their Christmas concerts. huckle.
“If you want to catechize, if you want people to carry something to their deathbed, if you want to understand something, it’s better to sing it than to teach it because teaching it requires such a level of memory that human beings aren’t even capable of. Whereas, if they’re singing something, they’re saying it to themselves, they internalize it for the rest of their lives,” Getty said. “If I was to give you 50 Bible verses, I’m willing to bet that 40 of them you would know because you sang them.”
Getty added that he hopes their newest project, a Sing Hymnal, will encourage people to learn about the God of the bible, “not just the God that loves our praises or just the God that’s loving in kind of a generic way.”
“The Psalms, and the great hymns of history … tell us about the wonder of God,” he said. “And they tell us about the glory of God and the wonder of the Christian story, and this Gospel story that we have in Christ. And then after that, our emotions play a part in it. So we tell the story … [not] in a clunky kind of way, we tell it in a beautiful way. And then naturally, our human emotions respond.”
“The emphasis is on God, the emphasis is on the story,” he continued. “Our response is secondary, but it’s real, and it’s fantastic.”
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