Celebrating 25 years of Colin’s music

Where were you when you first heard one of Colin Buchanan’s songs for kids?

It’s been 25 years since Buchanan released his album Remember the Lord, famous for songs like “Isaiah 53:6”, “The Old Black Crow” and “Remember the Lord”.

In that time, God has worked powerfully through him to shape the faith of not just a generation of children, but their parents and grandparents, too. To celebrate, Buchanan took his show on the road, visiting Jamberoo, St Andrew’s Cathedral, Quakers Hill, St Ives and many more churches along the east coast.

Buchanan has released more than 25 Christian children’s albums since 1998, has over 43,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and has turned at least 80 Bible verses into songs we can’t get out of our heads. Baa baa doo baa baa!

from page 32 on May 24, when it was revealed Wallace tapped out on Day 30.

The show features his efforts to get food by trapping possums and fishing, to no avail.

“Someone at church was telling me on Sunday… ‘We’re praying, Michael, that you stay dry’,” he told sydneyanglicans.net. “‘We’re praying, Michael, for this and that. Oh, we forgot to pray that you had food, but God answers our prayers’. I prayed for food out there too, and I didn’t get any, but it’s really our needs that are important.”

In an interview in a bush setting far more hospitable than the one he faced in Tasmania, Wallace commented that he was “out there for a good length of time [but] my wife needed me at home and I needed to see my wife and be put back in society with my family.”

He’s grateful for the prayer support that he and his wife received from their church, and also spoke of his hopes for Christian witness during the show. Despite being alone, he preached himself a sermon each week.

“People said, ‘Did you have more than one hot rock bath?’” he says. “Hot rock bath day was every Sunday and sermon day was every Sunday.”

His sermons included one themed on a Colin Buchanan song and another on “Amazing Grace”.

“So you got to see me sing ‘Amazing Grace’, but we didn’t hear what grace was all about, really,” he says. “I used the acronym ‘God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense’, which is a nice easy way to say what grace is. It didn’t make the cut but the crew got to hear it.”

Viewers saw Wallace struggling with energy levels from lack of food, as he had plants but no protein. He laughs now at some of the social media coverage from having a Christian on the show.

“One of the comments on social media was, they had a bingo box of, you know, tick what’s gonna happen,” he says. “This person finds that, this person does that and Michael prays. Well, the people who know me know that prayer is important, but they can have a conversation with me without praying.”

Asked whether he had learned anything about his relationship with God from being in the wilderness, Wallace says that time alone in the bush is not new to him, as he spends up to six hours a day on his own in bush regeneration.

But he is praying for God to use his witness on the show to touch viewers.

“I’d like them to see that there’s resilience, that I relied on God, that God’s important to me, and that I’m not ashamed of being focused on as a Christian, being spotlighted as that,” he says.

“I just hope it’s an encouragement to others to say, ‘Yes, I’m a Christian’ and not be ashamed.” SC