Who Will Save the Children?

Album: Our Recollections (1996)
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Songfacts®:

  • Compassion International, a Christian charity dedicated to helping children in poverty, asked Randy Stonehill to write them a theme song. The result was "Who Will Save the Children?" This song encourages us to take charitable action on behalf of God: "And we are his hands, we are his voice/We are the ones who must make the choice/And it must be now, there's no time to waste/It must be you, no one can take your place/Can't you see that only we can save the children."
  • During our interview, Stonehill revealed that he toiled long and hard over this song: "I would sit out on the balcony of this hotel on the island of Kauai overlooking the water, and every day for an hour or two I would chip away at this idea. And it was important to me, because I have such respect for Compassion International, and I just wanted it to be right. And man, I chipped and I honed and I edited, and I just worked on this thing like chipping away at some kind of a sculpture." Compassion International loved the finished product: "When I showed it to Compassion International, they looked at me and they said, 'Buddy, this is really powerful, and it's kind of spooky in a wonderful way, because we don't know how you could articulate the picture of life in the Third World without us ever having taken you there.'" (Here's our full interview with Randy Stonehill.)
  • Stonehill told us he believes God played a part in the writing of this song: "I believe that it's one of the few songs of my entire career where I had the sense that God, perhaps, was breathing on it."
  • This features on Stonehill's compilation album, Our Recollections.

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