For many, the phrase “Third World” brings to mind stark images of poverty, despair, and desolation. A place to be avoided. A people to be pitied. What, then, would a Third World Symphony sound like? Could something beautiful come from a place like that? Shaun Groves brings the answer in a triumphant return to music that ponders the presence of poverty and our response to it, celebrates the gifts the third world can give us, and praises God throughout.
It’s probably not fair to call Third World Symphony a comeback album for Groves, since the phrase tends to evoke an image of a washed-up performer struggling to draw just one more hit from a near-empty well. This is more like a new and very different chapter, like a debut album chronicling a season in which Groves came face to face with another world and was changed to the core.
Put simply, Shaun Groves is a Texas-born singer-songwriter with an accomplished career: three critically-acclaimed studio albums, number one songs (“Welcome Home,” “Should I Tell Them”), seven GMA Dove Award nominations, ASCAP “Christian Songwriter of the Year.” But there’s so much more to Groves than that. He’s an engaging speaker, a prolific blogger, a man of many gifts and an immense heart to match. It’s the Third World that challenged and softened that heart to the point that Groves reevaluated his life’s work and his understanding of the gospel.
The journey that produced Third World Symphony started with a single trip to El Salvador, where Groves traveled to visit Yanci, the little girl his family sponsors through Compassion International. In El Salvador he saw shocking and sobering poverty. In Yanci he saw rescue and hope. Compelled to act, Groves and family simplified their lifestyle in order to give more and he hit the road, speaking about justice and mercy and releasing children from poverty. Along the way, music became not a career but a small piece of a much bigger mission.
While Groves spoke to audiences and congregations around the country, he expanded his reach through blogging. His poignant and perceptive missives on what it means to be saved garnered a broad online following, such that he was able to completely finance his new album in a matter of weeks through a fundraising campaign on a site called Kickstarter. The funds were raised quickly, but the birth of the album took quite some time.
“In November of 2007,” Groves recalls, “I began thinking that maybe I’m not through making music.” That’s when he was in Ethiopia with Compassion, having dinner with pastors and church leaders from all over the country, celebrating the reality that years of terrible persecution were finally over. “It was a night of reading scripture, singing songs, laughing, and telling incredible stories. Stories of jailhouse survival, of generators going out in the middle of electrocutions so lives were spared – miracles. Everyone seemed to have a story. By the end of the night I was just amazed. I felt like a kid at the adult table.”
In his gratitude for the experience, Groves felt compelled to offer something. He suggested to an elderly pastor at his table that perhaps he could gather up a box of worship CDs and send them to him before reaching a humbling realization. “We know your music,” the man said. “And it’s good music. But it hasn’t been where we’ve been.” Groves realized that none of his previous songs had been born of persecution, of desperation, of prison-breaking perseverance, and he realized how much the third world was teaching him. “That’s where the idea for this record started.”
On that trip, Groves understood that our connection to the third world should be a relationship in which both sides benefit. “There’s a lot of talk about poverty and about social justice, but so often it’s, ‘What can I do to be a hero to them? What can I do to bring some beauty to them, to bring some help to them?’ When I stop and look at my life over the last 5 or 6 years I see that it works more so the other way. Years of meeting people and hearing their stories have been incredible gifts that have given me life, have given me help, have rescued me.
“I know that through music and speaking we’ve been able to release children from poverty, but I feel like those children have even more so released me from wealth, from a narrow perspective. They’ve taught me about grace, and what it means to be truly thankful. They’ve taught me about simplicity and generosity and purpose, and about beauty and joy that exists in places that are rusty and broken and corrupt. So I guess in a sense this record is a tribute, trying to redeem the term ‘third world’. Too often we just feel sorry for them, but they’re beautiful, life giving people I love to be around.”
Third World Symphony is, then, not so much a heavy-handed call to action for Americans to give and serve. It’s definitely not a Sally Struthers-style weepy lament on poverty. Instead, Groves has honestly addressed the reality of the struggle in the third world (“The widows need life to raise the dead and all the beggars plead for their daily bread” from “Come By Here”) while recognizing that rescue involves a merciful God: “’Til the weak are strong, let Your kingdom come” from “Kingdom Coming.” The very natural impulse to act is then grounded not in pity but in compassion, with God working through His people: “You have loved us all so we love all” from “All is Grace.”
In a grand way, Third World Symphony is about bridges, not just between here and abroad, but also between the opposing gospels that often flavor discussions of social justice. One side, Groves explains, focuses on salvation as our hope for eternity after we die. The other declares Jesus the great humanitarian who gave sight to the blind and food to the poor. “These two gospels don’t get along, and they both try to ignore the other,” Groves notes.
“In reality, they both have the whole gospel. It is true that Jesus cares about my soul and He’s given me eternal life. And because he now lives in me, I care about what He cares about, and I want to live the way He lived among us: He fed the 5,000, and He was about fighting injustice. I’ve tried to write songs that put both of those gospels in the same room together and show how each is lacking without the other. A gospel that offers no hope in death is incomplete. And a Good News that isn’t good for the poor is not the Good News of the Bible.”
It is a testament to Groves the songwriter that he can make that concept as accessible as a moving four minute song. “Down Here” identifies the need for social justice in the here and now: “What in this life ain’t passing? / Big deals and beggars end in ashes / All go from cradle to casket / Down here.” The song then shifts, lyrically and sonically, to the gospel of salvation: “Up there / The One who has no start and no goodbye / The One who mourns our fall and hears our cry.” Finally, the gospels merge as the One up there comes “to live with us and die for us down here”. A triumphant closing chorus declares His name: “Emmanuel, God with us.”
Just as most who encounter the third world walk are changed by it, the album also addresses our shared needs. A powerful arrangement of the hymn “Just As I Am” declares that we are all wounded and in need of the Lamb of God. “No Better” is a humble song of confession set to a surprising banjo melody. And “Enough” speaks to the tension of living in plenty after witnessing poverty: “Please don’t give to me wealth or poverty / But God, I only ask for enough.”
One more important point: given all that time between albums, how does this new one sound? “Songwriting’s not like riding a bicycle – you don’t just hop right back on and get to it!” Groves confesses. “It was a much slower process this time around. I wrote 90% of ‘Welcome Home’ in an afternoon.
‘Kingdom Coming’ took two years!” This time-consuming attention to detail and craft has paid off. These songs have the familiar feel and voice that have garnered chart-topping songs and seven GMA Dove Award nominations, but they also contain simultaneous hints of growth and freshness. “Musically and lyrically it’s different than the things I’ve done in the past. Fewer ‘Me’ and ‘I’ lyrics, a lot of ‘We’ and ‘Us’. I think when you take a break from writing you get out of some of your own clichés and habits. I had gotten a little lazy. But I took so much time off I couldn’t remember how I used to write!”
Fortunately, Shaun Groves remembered how to write, and now it feels inadequate to just declare that “Shaun Groves has a new album”. Instead, it’s a symphony that casts a loving light on a people who don’t really mind being called the third world, sends a tender prod of awakening to people who might not appreciate what it means to live in the first world, and delivers humble and heartfelt praise to the God who sustains and saves us all.
