Micah Fiechter on Music Bible: Bringing Scripture into Everyday Life
Micah Fiechter’s dad had a request for a sermon he was preparing. He wanted his son to set 1 John 4 to music. That chapter gave Micah a question worth spending time on. How do you write a melody people can sing when the words are already there, and every one of them needs to stay?
In this episode of Faith and Family Fellowship, I sat down with Micah Fiechter, founder of Music Bible, to talk about how that request grew into a free app that sets Scripture to music, word for word and verse by verse.
If you’ve ever tried to quote a verse and found yourself singing it instead, you already know something about how this works. A melody gives you a way back into the words. Sometimes it brings back the very line you would have skipped over on the page.
For Micah and his team, that means working around the wording of the New American Standard Bible. A songwriter can usually shorten a line or swap a word to make it rhyme. Here, the musicians have to find a way for the tune to follow the text. We talked about that production work and why Music Bible offers the same Scriptures in styles ranging from worship to country and hip-hop.
I keep coming back to the chapter his dad picked. “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19, ESV). A few verses earlier, John points us to what God actually did. He sent his Son. A few verses later, John asks how we can claim to love God while hating a brother we can see. That little verse carries the weight of the whole passage.
If you want to try Music Bible, start where Micah started. Read 1 John 4, then listen to it on the drive home. Pay attention to which line you’re still singing when you pull into the driveway. Open the chapter again and read the verses around it.
Explore the free app at themusicbible.org.
Comments