Haldor Lillenas

Haldor Lillenas (b. Stord Island, Norway, November 19, 1885 – d. Aspen, Colorado, August 18, 1959) – Composer, pastor, author, and publisher. An ordained minister in Church of the Nazarene, Lillenas wrote approximately 4,000 hymns (including the “Wonderful Grace of Jesus”) and is regarded as one of the most important Gospel hymn writer and publishers of the 1900s. In addition, his Glorious Gospel Hymns (1931) was the first hymnal of Church of the Nazarene. Lillenas worked as an evangelist and served as a pastor in California, Illinois, Texas, and Indiana. From 1923 to 1926, he pastured at the Indianapolis First Church. In 1924, he founded the Lillenas Publishing House in Indianapolis, and six years later, his business was bought by the Nazarene Publishing House of Kansas City, Missouri.

Doug Oldham (b. Indiana, November 11, 1930 – d. Charlottesville, Virginia, July 21, 2010) – Singer and musical minister. Indiana native Doug Oldham graduated from Anderson College in 1952 and started singing at tent revivals led by his father, William Dale Oldham, in the early 1960s. Around that time, he met Bill Gaither and started traveling with him, with Gaiter on piano and Oldham handling lead vocals. In fact, Gaither was one of the first Southern Gospel singers to perform Gaither songs, including “He Touched Me.” After leaving the town of Anderson in 1968, Oldham became a big star in Gospel music in the early 1970s, when he began singing on television’s Old Time Gospel Hour with Jerry Falwell. He also traveled with the Billy Graham Crusades. Throughout a fifty-year career, Oldham won two Dove awards, recorded over sixty albums, sang for six U.S. presidents, and traveled the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. In 2006, he was inducted in the American Gospel Hall of Fame.