Bio - Chad Gray
I was born in San
Diego, CA, and except
for a few younger years, have lived there since the third grade. I grew up in a
church-going, Christian family, but it wasn't until high school, at a youth
camp in Northern California, that I took
personal ownership of my faith. I was baptized in a swimming pool in Etna, CA,
at age 16. After high school I attended Auburn University in Alabama, where I
studied art and got an ‘A' on all projects done with my future wife Melanie. In
Alabama I was
captivated by the history and culture of the South, especially its music. I had
grown up listening to top 40 radio, New Wave, and my parent's old Kingston Trio
vinyl. To a vanilla kid from the So Cal suburbs, the roots music of Muddy
Waters, Hank Williams, Greg Allman and Doc Watson was a revelation. I had a
guitar and learned a few chords, which more than anything taught me to
appreciate what I was hearing on those old recordings. I was hooked. Music
became an indispensable part of my life.
While at Auburn
I began attending a campus Bible study called Reformed University Fellowship.
For worship the student band was playing church music like I had never heard.
The lyrics were old hymns-some of them I recalled yawning through while aching
in the pews of my grandmother's church. The same half-remembered lyrics, but
the melodies were new, beautiful, and catchy. I loved singing them. I started
to actually pay attention to the lyrics, and I was dumbfounded by their beauty
and poetry. The depths of the Christian experience-grace and redemption,
justice and mercy, sin, repentance, doubt, longing, joy, sorrow-captured in a
couplet! Heavy theological concepts-the Atonement, imputed righteousness, the
sovereignty of God-made accessible with imagery and melody. The richness of the
gospel displayed in these hymns amazed me. And there were hundreds of these
honest old songs, being mined from dusty hymnals and lovingly reintroduced to
the church by college kids with acoustic guitars. I was inspired.
In 2000 I joined Melanie back in San Diego. On the recommendation of a friend
I looked up Dick Kaufmann to inquire about a church called Harbor that he and
his wife had planted in a movie theater downtown. We began attending and joined
a community group. By 2004 plans were in motion to begin two new Harbor sites,
one in Chula Vista and one in North
Park, called "Uptown". Dick asked our community group to
become the launch team for Uptown, and eventually asked me to be the music
director for the new church. I agreed on the condition that I could introduce
some of the reworked hymns I had encountered while at Auburn.
In 2005 I began talking to Russ Kapusinski about his need
for a music director at the Harbor Chula Vista site. It was immediately clear
that we shared the same love and appreciation for these resurrected hymns. Russ
was keen to find someone to begin introducing them at Chula Vista. As he put it, these songs
"are like a second sermon". If you miss the gospel in Russ' preaching
you're sure to hear it in the songs. Our predecessors in the faith had an
amazing grasp of the gospel and an inspiring command of language. The honesty,
beauty and gospel-centeredness of their lyrics continue to move us to worship
today. At Russ' request I became the Music Director for Harbor Chula Vista, and
we've been praising God with our new old songs ever since.
