Kindling

A Short History of “The Most Feared Band in Christendom”

Kindling is Steve Kinzie, Shawn Kirchner, Lee Krähenbühl, and Peg Lehman. There is a story among us that the group was born of spontaneous combustion—appropriately enough, over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, at the 1996 Annual Conference of the Church of the Brethren. There were fireworks aplenty that year: the Brethren-Mennonite Council for LGBT Concerns (BMC) had, for the first time, been granted a Conference luncheon. Church conservatives were angry; advocates of inclusivity were jubilant; and, in the midst of all this, Steve, Shawn, and Lee were invited individually to provide music for the event.

We knew each other, but had never played as a trio before. We hadn’t rehearsed a thing together. BMC organizers requested the song “A Dazzling Bouquet” (aka “Mine is the Church Where Everybody’s Welcome”), which had been composed in a cakewalk-stride piano style. We had three guitars, and Steve suggested we improvise a three-part bluegrass arrangement. It worked—beautifully. “We ought to play together again when we can,” we agreed.

There were even more “fireworks” in the evening. Lee and Peg were performing for a “brown bag supper” later on, and Steve and Shawn had come to listen to the sound check—but a bomb threat was called into the then-named Sabin Convention Center at 525 Elm (now the Duke Energy Convention Center). We wondered whether some disgruntled soul had been upset enough by the BMC luncheon to do such a thing. The Center was evacuated. Several of us musicians ended up in the lobby of the Hilton across the street, which featured a piano. Shawn, being Shawn, organized a singalong. Also present were Steve, Lee, Peg and Jim Lehman, and a couple of dozen unnerved Brethren conferees. (A Young Adult talent show had been disrupted; Peg and Steve generously yielded the floor to a young woman whose mother was eager to have her perform a novel version of Malotte’s “Lord’s Prayer.”) Shawn started playing. The other three of us also broke out our instruments. We started singing and playing along. It worked—even more beautifully. We repeated it the next night. “We ought to play together again when we can.”

So we did. Kindling were (and are) scattered all over North America, so the task wasn’t easy. We determined to work up a setlist of our own original work, and other covers that we thought would express values of peace, justice, spiritual openness, and inclusivity—a sort of house band for progressive voices in the denomination. We planned working retreats to develop more arrangements. We played for congregations, youth groups, District and National Youth Conferences, the BMC “Dancing” events, a memorable off-site concert during the 1997 Annual Conference in Long Beach, and the inaugural Song and Story Fest immediately following.

Kindling Live! was recorded the next year, and Spark the Fire! in 2002. Between the two albums, Kindling performed at the Saturday Evening Concert of Annual Conference, perhaps the high-water mark of the band’s activity in the denomination. It was a smash with the audience—and evoked a strong backlash from conservative groups. The band was, in the words of the Conference organizer, “too hot to touch” for the denomination to schedule thereafter. The president of Manchester College remarked jovially to Lee, who was teaching there at the time, that Kindling was “the most feared band in Christendom.”

Fletcher Farrar reviewed Kindling Live! for Messenger in its issue of January/February 1999, and had this to say:

“Kindling[‘s] music . . . has not only brought hope and joy to my fireside, but it has explained to me the times and my role in them. . . If it is true that they who sing pray twice, then it may also be said that they who sing for me pray for me twice. Kindling’s music adds a dimension of truth to spiritual messages that we mere writers can’t approach. I first heard them at a late-night concert during the 1997 Annual conference in Long Beach, Calif. It was an extra-conference unofficial session, but there was more church there than at much of the sanctioned meeting. . . this music answers my troubled prayer. Thank you, God, for Kindling.”

After a long hiatus, Kindling gathered in August of 2024 to perform in honor of the birthday of Jim Lehman, husband of Peg and honorary roadie:

Reunion Setlist, August 11, 2024
SET 1
Kingbird
Get Up and Go
Where Everything is Music
Zion
Silver Engine
Chains of Hate
Home Is Where the Heart Is
Cornerstone
Feels Like Home
We Are Not Going Away

SET 2
Abandon
If The Earth Mothers
Singing Myself Home
What a Friend
Living In Between
To the One in Whom We Sing
Let the Loving Guides
Resolve
Her Name

ENCORE
Up Over My Head
Leaning On the Everlasting Arms
Feed Us with Light

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