Tony Cummings spoke to a seminal figure in the development of modern worship music, WAYNE DRAIN

Without realising what was happening, Wayne was being caught up in the early years of what was to be the modern worship movement. He explained, "Folks got that little cassette tape and they would find my address and say, 'We want this music, can you come?', or I'd be at a conference or a festival. I used to lead worship in Lindale, Texas for a lot of the Jesus Go Fests."

In 1980 Wayne recorded a new worship album, 'Second Wind'. That album contained the first recording of a song which decades on is still sung in numerous churches, "Showers Of Blessing". 'Second Wind' came to the attention of Britain's Kingsway Music. Remembered Wayne, "They said they wanted to release the cassette. John Noble was going to do something with Rainbow Music, and the head of Kingsway was actually in their church then. But they said, 'You've got to change the title, you don't say 'wind' and get away with it very easily in Britain - change it to "Staying Power"'. And so they did a new cover, and that was I think the first bona fide cassette that was released in Britain."

In 1981 Wayne recorded another cassette album, 'Speak A Fresh Word'. Remembered the singer/songwriter, "That was probably the best one we did in our own strength - we recorded that in Dallas, paid for it ourselves. It was from that cassette Dave and Dale Garratt recorded four of the songs." Along with Calvary Chapel's Maranatha! Music, New Zealand's husband and wife team David and Dale Garratt were the first parties to establish a series of modern worship albums and songbooks. By the late '70s the Garratts' Scripture In Song releases were being distributed in Christian bookshops around the world. Wayne explained how he met up with David Garratt. "I went to an Easter conference in New Zealand where I met Noel Richards for the first time. I had this song called 'My Feet Break Forth And Dance' and I sang that. One night we sang it for like 45 minutes and folks just wouldn't stop. David Garratt was at that meeting and he was crawling across the floor towards his wife - I didn't know what he was doing - and he was saying to her 'We have to do this song, we have to do this song.' So he met up with me afterwards and we ended up writing some for Scripture In Song. So I started writing for them and they recorded some of my songs on an album called 'A Sound Of Joy'."

By the early '80s Wayne was regularly visiting Britain. There he connected with a radical fellowship in Cardiff, the Springwood Church. The Springwood musicians were a worship team whose improvisational prophetic worship was in many ways to pioneer the use of spontaneous worship which has become part and parcel of the modern worship movement. Wayne has vivid memories of ministering with the Springwood musicians. "One night we were at a meeting in Bristol, where I was leading worship, and something started happening with the men. I started singing this chorus, 'We don't need to be wimps, we need to see ourselves as Christians, not as losers but as winners', and I started singing 'We're gonna win' - that was the chorus. These men just started going around, their fists in the air, little boys were getting lifted up onto their dad's shoulders, they were marching around like a group of bull elephants, and we were singing 'We're gonna win', and that went on for ever. I went home and wrote the rest of that song with a friend of mine, Tim Green. That song became the title cut of the album 'We're Gonna Win'. And then Fletch Wiley produced and arranged a lot of songs for the Garratts when they recorded it, and Jerry McPherson - guitarist that played with Amy Grant for a number of years - did some guitar work. Some really good musicians."

Wayne looks back on his years with Scripture In Song with a mixture of affection and amusement. "They had a little stable of writers that were friends, like Ramon Pink who wrote 'We Place You In The Highest Place', Bob Fitts who went on to be with Integrity and wrote a number of songs, myself and a few others. They really were helpful in developing our songwriting. David was ruthless, he had certain rules: 'No minor sevenths, under no circumstances do I want a minor seventh. Bob Fitts wrote this great song 'Blessed Be The Lord God Almighty' that started off with a minor seventh but he changed his mind!"

Why was David Garratt opposed to minor sevenths? "It could have been an integrity thing, because he was always harping on 'We don't want to manipulate emotions with music, we want to draw people to the Lord honestly', because there are certain chords you can hit that will evoke certain emotions, and he wanted to be pure. I remember him saying over and over, 'If God does something, let's let God do something, let's not manipulate it.' So it could have been that. I think he thought those kind of chords. . . I know he thought the minor chords for a lot of the Jewish music was boring and made him sad, so he didn't like a lot of minors. And he thought that the minor sevenths and the minor ninths just created this sort of melancholy mood that he thought was more man-centred. I think he's moved on from that since. 'Blessed Be The Lord God Almighty' became a pretty big hit."

Although he was very reluctant to take up the role, Wayne eventually became a leader of the Fellowship Of Christians. He admitted, "I kept waiting for a real leader to come in, I was just holding things together until the real leader came. I was a business and economics major in college and I just thought I'd be a businessman after the music thing ran its course. Then I got a degree in elementary education, stayed a little bit longer at university because we didn't know what we were doing yet, so I thought, 'Well I'll get another degree and stay another couple of years' so I did that. By that time, I just deeply cared for the folks at the church. I'd led a lot of them to the Lord and walked with a lot of them through tough things and for the first time in my life I cared for someone other than myself. I had a real love for them.

Wayne with Noel Richards

"Then I went to a meeting at Little Rock and this guy prophesied over me, about the two things I'm doing to this day - 'You'll pastor a great church and you'll prophesy to the nations'. Something shifted in the core of me and I thought, 'That's who I am. I'll lead this church and I'll prophesy to the nations,' and that's what I've done all these years. I've been to the same church all these years and I'm their senior pastor. We're in some kind of transition right now and it's time for me to do some other things for the next few years. Basically about two months out of the year I'll be away in another part of the world doing something on the prophetic side. Music has always been a part of it, worship has always been a part but now, a lot more, I'm excited about raising up young guys and young girls to do what God's called them to do."

With his role as a church leader touring and recording decreased. Also, family commitments took their toll. He explained, "We started having children and that yanked a knot in my tail for a couple of years, had to figure out how to do that. I was really focussed on the church and the festivals were starting to change and starting to dry up a bit and things were changing. It was more about the local church. The Fort Lauderdale guys came on the scene and it was all about the local church and when I came to England it was all about the house church. So my focus shifted from recorded music and concerts to just leading worship at my church or at conferences. It was kind of the era of the conference, so I led worship for Bob Mumford and Derek Prince and some of those guys. I did some things with Graham Perrins and the Springwood musicians - but I didn't record much during that time. My philosophy was, when I have the songs, God will give me a way to record them. But I put songwriting on a back burner for a while."

Suddenly in 1994 things came off the back burner. He recounted, "I was flying to New Zealand and I was burnt out. I was thinking, 'I don't want to do this anymore. I want to get a real job and just get up in the morning and go to work and come home and forget about it.' I was flying to New Zealand to do this Nations conference with Scripture In Song and I met a guy there that I hadn't met before, Kevin Prosch. He got up and led worship that night and it was another one of those moments. He and I were on the stage together with a bunch of other friends and he just started singing, prophetically singing over the congregation, especially over Australia and it just made chills go up my spine. I said, 'Lord, what is this,' and he said, 'This is what I'm doing now.' So I said, 'Do you have something you want me to say?' and he said, 'I want you to go to specific nations and say, "The time is now".' I said, 'The time is now for what?' and he said, 'You just go and say, "The time is now".'

"Within my quiver of arrows I had music or preaching, and so I wrote the song 'The Time Is Now'. Some other songs came and I put that album together very quickly. My younger brother produced it. It was pretty poor, it wasn't a great recording, but I believed in some of the songs. I ended up going to four nations. Then in '94 I'm over in England, watching proper little English guys pogo around the room and laugh and laugh and laugh, and my wife calls me on the phone and says, 'Something's happening here. Two of the elders went up to talk today and they fell on the stairs and began laughing.' I said, 'Well June, this may not be the Devil, the same thing's happening here'. Then I realised, 'Oh, this is what's happening. The time is now, the time is now for a refreshing'. I didn't know what it was until that moment but those seminal things happen. I got to see what God was doing with Kevin and then Kevin and I did some concerts together in Hawaii and different places and found a real kindred spirit: both southern boys and both from similar backgrounds. It was all about the prophetic inspiring the music and the music carrying the prophetic. So I became all about that. That's where the album 'The Time Is Now' came from."

The Toronto blessing, as the time of refreshing came to be called, gradually ebbed away but there were still plenty of significant times of ministry ahead for Wayne. One was in 1996 when Kingsway Music were to release a various artists album which contained one of Drain's most influential recordings. The ancient Irish hymn "Be Thou My Vision" with its English translated words by Mary Elizabeth Byrne and verses by Eleanor Hull had long been a hymnbook favourite. But it took Wayne Drain's arrangement with its thudding bodhran rhythm which took the song into modern worship circles across the globe. Wayne explained how his recasting of "Be Thou My Vision" came to be featured on 'Worship Together Live 2: Sweet Rain'. "I'd been with a friend, Phil Keaggy, in America. On a lot of his concerts he would do a hymn. I didn't come up in a background with hymns, so much, so it was kind of a new world for me.

"Then I found 'Be Thou My Vision', but I didn't like it in 3/4 so I thought, 'What would it be like in 4/4 and could we blend ancient and modern?' Around this time Les Moir (Kingsway Music executive) started talking to me about the 'Worship Together Live 2' album. I said, 'I wonder if we could put decks together and ancient Irish instruments'. He got excited about that and said, 'We need to do this. There is a church down in Bognor Regis called Revelation Church that's experimenting with a lot of stuff. Let's go down there'. So we went down and we had Nick Haigh who was a champion Irish fiddle player who also played the bodhran. They found a little hotel down there which they thought had pretty good acoustics and so invited a bunch of friends in and that's where we recorded. Kingsway had the recording studio up in the back room. All those musicians, great musicians that night."

The stunning Wayne Drain rendition of "Be Thou My Vision" turned out to be one of the absolute highlights at the Champion Of The World worship concert at Wembley Stadium in 1996. Wayne has vivid memories of that historic event. "Part of me was thinking, 'What am I doing here?' I'm up on the stage and I've got a little 17 year old guy I brought from my church - he was one of our worship leaders I brought with me - and we're coming up from underneath the stage and I'm hearing 45,000 people and I'm a little panicky to be honest. Then Nathan, this young guy that was with me, put his hands on my shoulder like he was the dad and said, 'You were born for this' and I go out there like 'Yes I was'. I've never felt another tinge of nervousness. We played a couple of songs and I remember it was one of the most magical days. I mean together, Delirious? and Matt and Noel: it just seemed it was one of those days that everything came together and egos were checked at the door and it was a really good day. It was a highlight, it sure was."