The Jewish Roots of The Christian Faith
Author and Scholar Dr Craig A. Evans joins Michael to discuss his book, A Handbook on The Jewish Roots of The Christian Faith.
Dave Ghazarian found himself atop a piano bench starting at age five in the suburbs of Toronto, Canada, where he began his musical journey studying classical and jazz piano. After seeing the inspiring “Back to the Future”, he felt drawn to play the guitar, which he did in basement garage bands, churches, and Christian campus groups while attending The Ohio State University. Leaving a Pharmacist’s career behind, he walked from his graduation podium into a van and trailer as Church of Rhythm’s lead guitarist.
He soon then became one of the founding members of the Grammy nominated band, Superchick, and also spent time as the lead guitarist for Rebecca St. James and Audio Adrenaline. Recently, he is known for critically acclaimed jazz recordings under the name, David Ian. He and Peter have been friends and toured on and off together for many years. They are both stoked to finally be in the same band!
“You know, I grew up in an Armenian family, so you have to start when you’re like five. Yeah, right. I started playing piano actually when I was five, hated it. I had a lunch break from elementary school and every day we had an hour break. Half of it I had to study. Play piano. So I mean honestly, I had to probably study piano for ten years before it started to be something that I enjoyed. That’s how it was in my family.
Actually I didn’t even have the option to quit so I didn’t even ask. I never really even thought about it. I hear about people doing that now and I’m like, wow why didn’t I think about doing that. But yeah, after about ten years, I discovered I really liked doing it so I started taking it on my own. I started learning jazz, piano. Probably my biggest inspiration to switch to the guitar, I was at the opening day of Back to the Future.”
“Well you know I’d been playing in bands for many years before I was approached by them, which was I guess almost a couple years ago now and just got a call out of the blue from the a guy named Kevin Max. Of course I knew who he was. We had probably met somewhere along the way, and he said, “ Yeah, I’m Kevin Max.” I said, “Oh, I know who you are.” But he was talking about putting the band back together and have me play. Honestly, I was kind of blown away, and it was one of those bands that we had played with over the years with groups that I’d been in. Just the idea of being asked to be a part of that, was a great honor. I was with them for just about a year.
“I started playing with a band called Church of Rhythm. At Ohio State University, I studied pharmacy and was pretty heavily involved in Campus Crusade. I helped them lead worship and by the time I graduated college, pretty much resigned myself to be a pharmacist. That’s what I was studying to do. I still was playing pretty actively in Campus Crusade, every opportunity I had to play, I was playing.
That’s all I kind of looked forward to, not to say I wasn’t enjoying my life at the time. It was a lot of just studying stuff that I had no idea what I was studying, you know, chemical names and it just didn’t’ make a lot of sense to me, but you know again, Armenian background. You have to have a real career to fall back on. I was part of a group that they had put together for a Christmas conference at Campus Crusade, and by this time it was my senior year and I just resigned myself to, you know I’ll probably just be a pharmacist.
This is nice to do and I’ll just figure out ways to incorporate music. I met a band that was called Church of Rhythm, who was a guest artist at the conference and they were ironically looking for a guitar player, so I had some chats with them. Last quarter of my senior year, I was flying in and out doing shows. I literally walked off the graduation podium and practically walked into a van and trailer, started touring and haven’t looked back since.”
“You know even if we give a brief message, we’re kind of in and out. To kind of bring it back, I was a long standing member of a group called Super Chick that came out of Church of Rhythm, and one of the messages that we always try to relay, one of our themes was basically that God has given everybody a gift, like a unique gift, and that your responsibility is to find out what that is and use it just to the full, like maximize it, bring it out.
The hope is that what we’re doing on stage is just a platform to show kids that’s the message. This is what we’re doing. Now find what you’re doing and be just as excited about it. That’s why it’s so important to us to have so much excitement on stage. I guess just to show the passion for what we’re doing which is a true passion and if we’re going to play rock music, we’re going to play it as loud as we can; if we’re going to play a ballad it’s going to be a real ballad. It’s almost going extreme to help influence and inspire people for God.”
“We were catering to junior high, high school. I remember a girl that was probably, I don’t know, maybe junior high when we met her. She kept coming to shows and she was one of our super fans, and one day she finally came to a show and she had her graduation cap from college and it had Super Chick written all over it. She just explained to us how “The message of our music, the encouragement of just endurance and being great and doing greater things than you can imagine. I couldn’t have done it without that message and without you guys, and just following you guys and watching you guys do it.” I was just blown away, to be even part of that.”
“You know I think it’s like what Peter had said. I went through so many seasons of bands. Like I said, I started playing for a band called Church of Rhythm, two of the band members, myself and a guy named Max, we found ourselves as the last standing members of the band. So we were like, “What are we going to do?” So he had like what he felt was a calling to kind of minister with a girl fronted band called Super Chick because one of the themes of Church of Rhythm, one of the songs that he had sung was written was about self esteem and things like that, and in the context of that.
A lot of girls were approaching him to talk about their issues with that and we thought that’s not really appropriate for guys to be talking about guy to girl ministry so we said we need to address this in a form of a band, to put a girl in front that has that same vision and that same mind set and have her be that voice for these girls and have her be the one talking to them.That became that season in our life so we were living on nothing at the time.
We had a friend that was very kind to us and let us just kind of live in this house and this was in the suburbs of Chicago. I call it the “dark ages” of my life because we felt like, “What are we doing?” We’re creating something, starting something but nobody knows about it, is it really going to amount to anything? Sure enough God took it and made it something bigger than us. So from that had so many great ministry opportunities, touring many countries, and just mostly around the U.S. From that, I played with Rebecca St. James for a while. I think it was later on that Peter called me to join his group and that was just another great season of opportunity for me.”
“We get that question a lot because people will look at what we’re doing and they’ll say, “That’s exactly what I want to do because it looks like so much fun.” Probably for a lot of the reasons I was inspired, by watching Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. I look at that, I’m like well that looks like a great idea. I want to do that. We try and remember the good part. That’s the inspiration. And so many people ask that question and I wish it was as easy as asking me, “How do I become a pharmacist? How do I become a lawyer? Or a nurse? Or a doctor?” Because as hard as those things are to do; It’s actually pretty easy. There’s a formula.
You make the grades. You do your undergrad and then you do this graduate program, and then you start a practice, but for being in a band or doing music as a ministry, or just music in general, there doesn’t seem to be a formula to follow. The best answer I have for that is just based on my experience of doing that. God puts opportunities in front of you and you’re going to see an opportunity and say, “Well that’s not a rock band. That’s not playing for thousands of people. I’m not going to do that. I’m waiting for the big one.”
My story is one of very small beginnings; playing in a church of thirty or forty people, and from that there’s a high school student lead ministry that wants to sing a couple songs, so you bring your guitar and you start leading a couple songs. From that maybe in college, you start playing on a campus group. None of this stuff is very glamorous, but it’s being faithful to all the things God puts right in front of you right now. That’s my biggest story and my biggest answer: if you’re faithful, you always have that vision in your periphery of what your goal is. You have this ideal of I want to do this on a large scale. I want this to be huge.”
“God used it in ways that we didn’t know when we started and just that we were faithful with our time. I mean that’s my biggest thing now. We kind of having this running joke with me and my wife, at the beginning of every year, we’ve only been married for four years, the end of the year looks drastically different than what we had expected at the beginning of the year. This has happened every single year since we’ve been married, so we kind of joke around and say, “What is it going to look like in December this year? We might be living in Africa.”
I mean,it’s maybe not that drastic, but it’s not what we had set out to do, but the important thing to me with everyday is when I wake up is, I have to be doing something today that’s building something, that’s working toward something. I dont’ want to look back on a year and say, “Man I just kind of slept in and all that time. What was I watching, TV? What was I doing with my time? I could have achieved so much more; I could have done something to build God’s kingdom; I could’ve done something to enable me to do bigger things for God’s kingdom.”
“So I grew up with this heritage and it’s kind of a rich heritage that a lot of people don’t know about. My parents you know, our relatives came from Armenia and my grandparents, there was actually a massacre as in a genocide that drove a lot of them out of their country and my parents ended up being born in Egypt. So I guess there’s this thing if you’re Armenian, you’re Christian because we take pride in being the first nation that accepted Christianity as their religion. Where that kind of breaks down is, a lot of times that’s it. Whether it started that way or it evolved into that, it’s just kind of one of those things where if you ask an Armenian, ‘Are you a Christian?’ ‘Well of course I’m a Christian. I’m Armenian.’
We’re the first nation to accept Christianity. Its kind of how my Dad, who was a great influence in my life grew up in the Orthodox Armenian Church. I think as a teenager he had a friend that lead him to Christ. More than just culturally, we go to church; we do this liturgy. He showed him what it was like to be a true Christian and have a relationship with Christ. It transformed his life. He totally transformed and moved my family to Toronto.
So coming from seeing the tradition to seeing the reality in Christ in your life, he was so determined and he just took it very seriously to make that the environment for his family to grow up in. So I was really blessed to grow up in that environment. We were always going to church; we went to church twice a day; twice a day on Sunday’s and then a couple times in the middle of the week. His encouragement was “Yeah, play music, do whatever you’re doing, but do it for God.” So even now, my wife is Armenian as well, if you know Evangelical Armenians which are Armenians that know Christ in the sense of being born again with Christ, you pretty much know all of those Evangelical Armenians in North America is kind of how I ended up meeting my wife.”
“Knowing that you’re using your gifts. I guess that gives me joy, and not only that, but knowing that you’re not complacent; you’re not done. A lot of people think, “Oh, you’re in the Peter Furler Band or you’re in Super Chick band, you’re done; you arrived. On my end of it, I haven’t even started and it gives me joy to see what more I can accomplish with the gifts that God has given me; what more I can do to honor Him with that.
E: Dave, it’s been great to have you today. Would you do us a favor and pray for us? Pray for these kids that are listening to us? and thanks for what you’re doing.”
“Dear God, Thank you so much for this opportunity. Thank you for the gifts that you give us. No matter if we think they’re gifts, God, there’s so many things that you’ve empowered us to do. I just pray that people listening would just realize that they have so much to offer to the world. Not only that, but that everybody is an example in their own way. I just pray that you would keep us faithful to live to that calling, God. Take the abilities and gifts you’ve given us to use them for your glory, grace, and to represent you best. We pray all these things in Your Name, Amen.”
For more inContext interviews, click here.
Author and Scholar Dr Craig A. Evans joins Michael to discuss his book, A Handbook on The Jewish Roots of The Christian Faith.
Dr. Erwin Lutzer joins Michael to discuss his most recent book, The Eclipse of God, and the need to return to the Lord.
Dr. Dave Gibson joins Michael to reflect on a lifetime of lessons and to discuss his most recent book, Treasures Along The Road.