The Songwriter Who Never Knew His Wealth

Rich Mullins wrote Awesome God, one of the most recognizable worship songs of the twentieth century. His royalties could have afforded him a comfortable life — a nice house, a new car every few years, the kind of security most musicians only dream about.

He never saw a dime of it.

Mullins asked his local church board to manage all his finances. They paid him a salary equal to the average American worker's income — roughly twenty-four thousand dollars a year — and distributed everything else. He never asked how much was in the account. He didn't want to know. He was afraid that knowing would change him.

In his final years, Mullins moved to a small home on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, where he taught music to children. He drove an old Jeep. He wore jeans and a t-shirt. He played his hammered dulcimer for kids who had never heard of Awesome God and didn't care that he'd written it.

When Mullins died in a car accident in 1997 at forty-one years old, the world lost a man who had quietly sacrificed what most people spend their whole lives chasing.

Jesus said, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). Sacrifice doesn't always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like a man on a reservation, teaching children to sing, choosing faithfulness over fortune — and never once looking back.