Late gospel music hall-of-famer to get exposure

“The thing is, he could be abrasive because quite often his spiritual zeal got ahead of his biblical understanding or his personal maturity,” said Stonehill. But he also described Green as deeply relieved “to see where hope lived.”

Eventually, the Greens’ work grew to include a newsletter, and their organization was called Last Days Ministries.

The couple moved from California to tiny Garden Valley, east of Dallas, in 1979, where they were near evangelists such as Leonard Ravenhill and David Wilkerson (“The Cross and the Switchblade”).

The day of the accident, the Smalleys stopped on their way to Connecticut, where they planned to start a church. Green was to give a brief tour in the ministry’s leased aircraft.

Melody Green declined to go, despite Keith Green’s pleas. She retains a vivid memory of her daughter Bethany calling out “I want to go, too!” and being lifted into the car for a short drive to the ministry’s airstrip.

Besides Keith Green, the crash killed 2-year-old Bethany and the Greens’ only son, 3-year-old Josiah. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed pilot error for the accident.

“I feel that through this many others will catch the vision and burden of Keith’s work,” Melody Green, then pregnant, told reporters days after the crash. “People can’t look to Keith now because he’s gone. So if they ask who’s going to do the work, they’ll see that they will.”

In the 25 years since her husband’s death, Melody Green, now 60, has suffered a stroke, been through a painful divorce and spoken around the world. She lives in Kansas City and is overhauling the ministry’s Web site — technology not available when her husband was alive.

Their two surviving daughters — one was 18 months old and at home at the time of the crash — are now in their 20s.

‘They’re good kids’
In 1996, she sold the Texas property to Teen Mania, founded by Ron Luce. The modern campus, which includes a television studio, has a dormitory named in memory of Green.

She was warmly received when she visited the ministry in 2006 and again in May.

“Last year, I just went into total joy, seeing that things have continued,” she said. “There’s young people here, just like we wanted. They’re finding out about following Jesus, they’re good kids and they’re a great ministry.”

During an interview after a chapel service, she gazed out a large window and spotted the site of the old airstrip.

“I had to really forgive Keith because he was the easiest one to get mad at by taking the kids,” she said. “In hindsight, I think it was really some misplaced anger.”

Keith Green and the two children are buried together less than half a mile away in a small cemetery. The headstone says, “Gone to be with Jesus.”

The singer was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2001. Tribute albums have rolled out, and many Christian artists sing his songs.

But the void created by his death still seems unfilled.

“I keep having people tell me how no one has really taken that place. Everyone thought, ’Well, God will raise someone else up to be similar and do something like that.’ I thought that,” Melody Green said. “He was just a unique person with amazing talent and with an amazing heart for God.”

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