Does anybody remember Servant? I know many of you must. For many years, Servant was at the forefront of the Christian rock scene. I saw them live when I was only 14 years old in 1986. Well, a few months ago when I was going to visit my sister in Cincinatti, I decided I would try to track  them down and get the scoop. I met Owen Brock, founding member, at the University of Cincinatti, where he was just finishing a degree, and we gained a good rapport before I started asking questions. Here's what transpired:
LID:  Okay, Owen, why don't you start out by giving us some background  info on what Servant was about, how long it lasted, and your basic experience in it?
O.B.:  Yeah, all that in a couple minutes, right? (laughter)  I guess the band started in 1976. Sandie and I had been really involved in youth ministry, ministry work, community lifestyle during the Jesus Movement. We were involved in theater, we helped with an organization that started the Greenbelt Music Festival, so we really had some roots in trying to communicate our faith in a relevant way to our culture. The best way for us to do that, for us, seemed to be through the arts, through music and theater,and so eventually Sandie and I ended up in the west coast of Canada, British Columbia with a fellow who became our manager. There was a smattering (?) of musicians up there and we still had the same vision, so a guy named David Holmes who played drums for us and Bruce Wright who played guitar, and Robbie Martens who played bass, the five of us--there were some changes that occurred during the first year or so. A few people moved in and out. We just started playing in coffeehouses and, really there was no real Christian music scene at that particular point, or very little. I shouldn't say there was none, I know Larry Norman was still doing some concerts and Andre Crouch was doing some things, Daniel Amos--Rez Band was doing a few concerts. There was really just a handful of things going on and so we were basically just playing in parks, universities, coffeehouses, and whatever we could--pretty nomadic--and after that we started playing bars on the west coast of the states, a lot of biker bars, lumberjack bars, we did a lot of that, and eventually we started playing a bunch of concerts with Randy Matthews and some other people. Then, somewhere along the line somebody liked what we were doing and offered us a record deal, so we kinda helped create this record entity. Tunesmith Records--gosh, that was like a million years ago. So we had started this band and Sandie was six months pregnant, and it just kind of rolled on from there and the Christian music industry just continued to grow and became

more influential in a lot of peoples lives. A goal of once reaching the non-Christian-we started to realize there were a lot of Christian kids who were looking for some kind of identity in their own culture and started to minister to those kind of needs as well. And we tried to incorporate our, what had been a consistent vision for us, to do social-type ministry working with those who are on the more difficult side of our society-we did a lot of work with refugee resettlements and things. And that was really an outgrowth of the community that developed-I don't want to say around the band because it was pretty much simultaneous. The ones who were in leadership in the band, a lot of us were also in leadership in the community wanting to live a New Testament experience. Really impacted by things like Sojourners, Jim Wallace and other community movements that were going. We were placed in Chicago and a lot of different places, just trying to find a way to live out our lives in a sincere fashion. From that point on, the band and all the other ministry we got involved in was really an offshoot of all that, or an outgrowth of all that.
L.I.D.:  So, about how long did the band last from that point on?
O.B.:  Well, lets see, it started in 76. I guess it lasted to-I think we figured it was 12 years, because I've been at school here 5 years, I'm just graduating, we did our last show on New  Years up in Canada, so I guess 12. The last couple years we had-the first 9 years we were the same people pretty much , after the initial rumblings and Bruce, David, Robbie, and ourselves, and Matthew Spransy joined us on keyboards and Bob Hardy joined us singing. That was pretty much the core for a long time.   When we moved to Cincinatti in 1985, we changed everybody, really, except Sandie and myself and Rob. Everybody kind of moved on.   Rob stayed with us for probably another year or so-my dates are probably a little blurry, but by then we had brought in a bunch of new people and we played out  2 and a half to 3 years or so. The last couple of years we did some touring down in Australia and New Zealand and some other places. We weren't playing as much, probably only about 40 concerts a year or so.  The last record was made in 1985 and we did do some recording for ourselves after that--about 4 or 5 songs. It just became the point at which we felt that we had. . it was kind of a difficult decision. We knew we had been in the midst of something really important that God was doing and we had no misconceptions about our own talent or abilities. We knew that whatever we were doing was a gift from God and that He had really nurtured our lives. We probably had more to say than the actual musicianship-none of us had had much of a music background. We felt that we were in the midst of what God was

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