Jonathan Mark Witt Holder was a missionary kid: born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised as Marcos in Durango, Mexico. His Anglo American Pentecostal parents devoted their lives to helping evangelical churches in Mexico.
Most Americans have never heard of Marcos Witt, but he estimates that over the past 40 years he has sold roughly 27 million copies of his albums worldwide. (Most of these sales were through nontraditional venues, like churches, that do not report numbers to tracking agencies).
He has sold out arenas in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Santiago, São Paulo, San Salvador, Miami and Los Angeles. He has won six Latin Grammy Awards, including one last year for his 34th solo album, “Viviré” (“I Will Live”). For his fans, he is more than a singer-songwriter. He is a conduit to the divine. “My music carries the breath of God,” he told the media. “Through our songs, God is hugging people.”
In the 1980s, Witt revolutionized evangelical worship in Spanish by infusing praise songs with disco and new-wave stylings to appeal to a younger generation. In 1994, he founded the first of dozens of schools all over Latin America to train other musical worship leaders. In the 2000s, he built one of the largest Spanish-language evangelical congregations in the United States at Lakewood Church in Houston.
At the same time, he inspired the next generation of Christian musical artists with their Latin Grammy wins. “He brought to the forefront that it was possible to do this overtly Christian music, music of praise, and still have it sound well produced and have it sound cool,” Leila Cobo, chief Latin content officer at Billboard magazine, explained. “He’s not making rinky-dink music on a little organ.”
His breakout album from 1988, “Adoremos!” (“Let’s Adore!”), and its follow-ups “Proyecto Alabanza Adoración” (“Project Praise and Worship,” 1990) and “Tú y Yo” (“You and Me,” 1991) attracted younger Latin Americans by setting Scripture -inspired lyrics to the accompaniment of keyboards, electric guitars and drums. Many older pastors accused Witt of Satanism when these albums came out. The drum set, they said, was an instrument of the devil, and no godly music could sound anything like Bruce Springsteen or Billy Joel. But younger Latin Americans flocked to his concerts, filling stadiums. They were smitten not only by his pop and rock stylings but also by his way of addressing God.
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