This Friends
Forever Missions Gahtering will be talked
about
for years....you don't want to miss
our Jamaica 15 year celebration,
February 22-24. 2008 with one of our guests . . . . . .
Papa San was raised
in Spanish Town, just outside of Jamaica’s capital, Kingston. He grew up in an
environment where hard work and grinding poverty was the daily norm. But fervent
revelry ruled the weekends. Spearheaded by any neighborhood resident with
charisma and a potent enough sound system, music, dancing and singing prevailed
well into the wee hours of Friday and Saturday nights as the sounds of reggae
blasted from P.A.’s loud enough to be heard and felt for many city blocks. Papa
San’s own father manned such a sound system every week—dubbed “Black
Universe”—and his naturally gifted son soaked up the music like the Caribbean
sun. The strains of reggae greats like Bob Marley, Dennis Brown, and John Holt
were interspersed with a wide range of American pop and rock music, from
venerable crooner Nat King Cole to disco diva Donna Summer, all adding
additional color to young Papa San’s musical palette. By the early age of 12,
he had already begun performing with artists more than twice his age,
cultivating his prodigious gifts with words and music. Little did he know,
acclaim beyond his young imagination only a few years away.
Papa San was raised
by his grandmother and taught the doctrines of the Rastafarian religion. He
explains that he never had any teaching about Christianity or the function of
the church. “As a child growing up, I always believed that if I just achieved
certain material things that everything would be all right,” says Papa San. “As
I became older, I had lots of success. I had lots of things, and had tried lots
of things, but I never found the satisfaction I had expected. I had given some
bad messages in my songs, and I myself at one time had been involved with
firearms, and had run-ins with the police. I had two brothers and two sisters,
and both my brothers were killed in street violence. “Life began to take some
different turns down roads I had never anticipated. I would have said I had a
relationship with the Creator, but I was obviously moving in the wrong
direction,” he continues. “One day, I opened the Bible and began to read it,
and the Holy Spirit started ministering to me, saying in my heart: `You need to
get yourself straight. You have to get yourself right.’ I wondered if God
could really forgive me of my sins over all the years and accept me into His
Kingdom. My wife and I went to a church and the pastor told us about Christ.
My eyes began to open and I knew that I had to receive Him, regardless of what
anyone else thought or said about it.”
In what could safely be called the world’s first new-school, Dancehall “hymn,” Papa San’s words punctuate an almost choir-like anthem on Real & Personal’s “Oh Zion,” all undergirded with reverent but relentless rhythm. As the song fades with a lone female voice—sounding both as close and distant as heaven itself—repeating the single line, “There is a place for us,” the vision of unity and one-purpose of all God’s people that is the heart of Papa San and Real & Personal shines brightly, with a clear and holy light. There is indeed “a place for us,” and just like the singular, untouchable sound that Papa San can truly call his own, it goes infinitely farther than any preconceptions or easy definitions could begin to convey, and speaks not to just one genre or culture, but to the very heart of mankind.
Yes, Papa San is back, in a big-very big-way. But then again, he never left. Nor did he ever take his eye off the prize for a moment. “I want to see souls saved for the Kingdom,” he says, “and not just a few, but millions!’ It’s as simple as that.
His creed; “Jesus calls us to be fishers of men, music is the bait that I use to draw all those who don’t know Him, but the message is what will arrest them. And once the message of God’s word has arrested a person, it will never let them go!”
“That’s who I am and what I am called to do…“