Saturday, February 7, 1998

Ambassador of Music Ron Kenoly is finding worldwise success in 'praise and worship'

By Richard Scheinin / Knight Ridder Newspapers

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Years ago, Ron Kenoly wanted to be the next Al Green. He craved the success of his friend Barry White. Instead, he got saved. "I got God's endorsement," he says. "That's the best one."

Now he's got the record industry's endorsement, too. Kenoly, an associate pastor at San Jose's Jubilee Christian Center, received his first gold record in Nashville in December for his CD "Lift Him Up" (Integrity Music) As Jubilee's "ambassador of music," Kenoly is among the best-known singers in the Christian music field known as "praise and worship." A composer, he talks about casting his friend Lou Rawls in an upcoming production of a musical he has written about the life of Jesus. Rawls would play the role of God. Kenoly would like to see Sinbad play Herod.

Born in Coffeyville, Kan., Kenoly sang in a Baptist church with a chronically out-of-tune piano. He moved to Los Angeles in the '70s, changed his name to Ron Keith, and had a minor hit called "I'll Betcha." But the big break eluded him. Kenoly walked out on his wife, Tavita, but came back and followed her into church. That's when neighborhood kids started calling him "holy Kenoly."

The new man moved the family to Oakland, Calif., took a job in a College of Alameda locker room, got his music degree, became a teacher, then a pastor. He eventually became a star, recording for the Integrity label based in Mobile, Ala. We talked to him in his sunny San Jose home, overlooking the east hills.

Q. You're a Christian singer. What's it like to get a gold record from the secular music industry?

A. It's good to be in that elite group of people who have had better than average success ... But for some artists, the trophy is their goal. And for me it's not necessarily a goal. I don't do what I do for gold records. I do what I do to touch people's lives. That's the statement that I want to make: My goal is to impact people's lives with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. ... I look at it like this: I'm a worship leader. And basically what I do is engage people into singing unto God. I'm more of a facilitator than an entertainer.

Now an entertainer is going to show off all his high notes and low notes and fancy dance steps and impress you. They've got to look good before the audience. But as a worship leader, all I do is encourage the people to sing to God. God is the audience, and God responds to the people.

Q. I hope you won't get angry about this. But I read a newspaper column that compared you to Mitch Miller: Following the bouncing ball, leading people in song.

A. That's exactly what it is!

Q. You don't mind that comparison?

A. No, I don't mind that comparison at all. I think Mitch Miller did exactly what the people needed. You see, there are times when people don't need to be entertained. Every year you go to San Francisco, there will be hundreds, thousands of people, that will come together to sing Handel's "Messiah." Now they don't want somebody to sing it to them. They want to do it themselves.

That's what my ministry is about. It's helping the people release themselves unto God. Thousands of people come when we do a meeting, and the words will be up on the wall, in case you don't know the songs. They flash them on the wall, so you can look up at the words and sing. And this goes right back to what Mitch Miller used to do: He had a screen and a bouncing ball.

Q. You've sold millions of CDs, but I bet most people have no idea what "praise and worship" music is. Will you explain the difference between "praise and worship" tunes and older, more traditional gospel music?

A. Praise and worship music is music unto God. It's to God. It's vertical. Whereas the rest of it is all horizontal: It's all about God.

Q. What does a typical praise and worship song say to God?

A. (He sings): "I love you Lord and I lift my voice, To worship you, O, my soul rejoice." It's to God: "I Love you, Lord." I'm singing to him.

Q. Whereas gospel ...

A. Whereas gospel is from me to you. I'm telling you about something that God has done: "He touched me, O, he touched me, and O, the joy that floods my soul."

Q. What do the two genres share?

A. They share the goodness of God and the revelation of God's ability to make a difference in every one of our lives.

Q. You've told me about the high energy level of the black church music you knew as a kid. Do you miss that in the praise and worship meetings?

A. Oh, no, we still have that high energy level. We still have a good time. We're not absent of spirit and excitement and passion and rejoicing. No, uh uh. All of that's incorporated in it.

Q. When you were in the Air Force, in the late '60s, you sang with a group called the Mellow Fellows.

A. All of us were military guys, all but the drummer. We were stationed at Travis Air Force Base, and we played the clubs and bases all around the Bay Area. We did a lot of soul music, the Temptations, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, whatever was popular at that time.

Q. Was it fun?

A. Of course it was! It was innocent. It was meaningful. When I left the Air Force and went to Southern California, that's when the real problems of life happened. It was a survival thing down there. I had a wife and little boy, Tony, my oldest one. And hey, "I've got a make a living at this."

Q. It was no longer innocent?

A. The jet-set lifestyle, the agents, the promoters and producers -- like snakes in the grass, I'm telling you. You can't beat 'em, so you find yourself eventually joining them. I was going that direction, because I know that a lot of things that I did -- and I'm not going to glorify the devil by talking about them -- a lot of things that I did I was just flat-out ashamed of. I didn't even expect that I would live to see 35 years old.

Q. You're 53 now. Recently, you sang in front of 200,000 people in India. What does that feel like?

A. It's kind of frightening, and I don't mean in a negative way ... But when that many people come together at one time in the name of the Lord, God wants us to do more than have folks have a good time. He wants the people's lives to be impacted so that when they go away from that place, they go with something good and rich, and encouraged and healed and inspired. He wants them to go away with something divine, rather than just goose bumps and feel-goods.

Q. But is there a part of you that's still a pure entertainer? You must have certain lines you repeat from night to night.

A. Well, I'm a minister, OK? I used to be an entertainer ... We look at the life of Jesus, OK? Now Jesus was not about entertainment. He went around healing people, preaching, giving insight, teaching, sharing parables, explaining to them what the kingdom of heaven was like. And as a result, people's lives were changed. As a result, there was revelation of the love of God and the goodness of God. Wherever he went, there were thousands of people that followed him.

Now most of those people were following to see what he was going to do next. Would he cast out a demon? Would he bring sight to the blind? Would he walk on water? What's he going to do next? See, they didn't have HBO. They didn't have AMC Theaters. They didn't have NFL and NBA -- they didn't have all of these different social events to go to. No, "Hey, the holy man is coming to town. Let's go and see what he's going to do."

Well, to them, to the masses, it was entertainment. But to Blind Bartimaeus, who'd been blind all his life, and Jesus touched him -- see, that was ministry, and that's what Jesus was about.

He was about changing people's lives. So yeah, there's an entertainment value in ministry. But there's not always a ministry value in entertainment.

Q. Don't you think that with any good music, at some level, there's a spiritual search going on? Is there a universal spiritual element that crosses musical categories?

A. (pause) Yes, there is. But it can either be positive or negative. Music has the ability to provoke people to do things. You go into the grocery store and they play a certain type of music at a certain time, because subliminally that music will have an effect on the way that person shops. So there's something that's going to motivate or provoke people, one way or the other.

In the night clubs, it was always to encourage partying or relationships or to bring someone out of the depths of the blues or despair -- or just to identify with somebody that's in a bad situation. In the church, the music is to inspire and encourage and bring hope to people and help them to realize that God still sits on the throne and he's able to touch our lives and make our lives new and fresh and victorious and powerful. So there's a message, a spiritual element in every kind of music, and it's either of God, or not of God.

Q. After leaving Los Angeles, you worked in a college locker room in Alameda, handing out towels. What was that experience like? For years, you'd craved success.

A. That was a transitional period, a character-building period of time. Because I had come out of a lifestyle that was just very destructive. It was destroying me, it was destroying my family, it was destroying God's ultimate plan for my life. So it was a time of learning the Bible. It was a time of eliminating bad habits. It was a time of renewing my mind. It was a time of learning how to be a husband, a father, the right way. It was a time of going back to school and developing a discipline for my life.

Q. You've said that your wife, Tavita, pulled you through it. Does she travel with you these days? You're on the road a lot.

A. Sure, she's going on the next tour. We'll go to Puerto Rico, Curacao, and Caracas, Venezuela. We'll go to about five cities in Brazil. Then I come home for about a week. And then I go to the South China Sea, go to Manila, Cebu, both in the Philippines, to Singapore, to Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. Then to Osaka, Japan. Then to Seoul and Pusan in South Korea.

Q. How has traveling changed you?

A. I don't think it's changed me. It's the fulfillment of a desire that I've had all my life. I can remember in the eighth grade, in Mrs. Gray's class in Coffeyville, Roosevelt Junior High School, I memorized every country in the world and its capital. There were 186 countries in the world at that time. Because from birth to 18 years old I never went more than 200 miles from Coffeyville, Kansas. And I dreamed of going someplace. And that childhood dream is a reality now.

(c) 1998, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

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