LGBTQ+ Community Embraces Rerelease of Avalon’s ‘Testify to Love’ From Founding Member Who Says He Was Ousted for Being Gay

New Release of Avalon Hit ‘Testify to Love’ Makes Waves

On Monday (May 18), Michael Passons thanked listeners for supporting “Testify to Love.” He wrote, “It appears this song is making a few waves. I hope these waves will in some way help change the culture!” A video for the rereleased song is in the works.

Melissa Greene, another former Avalon member who sings on the new track, wrote in a May 15 Substack: “Today, a song I’ve sung a thousand times gets to mean what it always said.” She said she’d been taught, as a Christian, “that some love was acceptable and some wasn’t,” and she admitted being “on the wrong side of what happened” to Passons.

“Michael never needed to be redeemed,” Greene wrote. “He was always whole and worthy. What he was denied was his rightful place in [Avalon], in the song, in a community that claimed to sing about a love big enough to hold him.” The rerelease of “Testify to Love,” Greene added, is her friend’s “restoration…not his redemption.”

Greene is working on a memoir titled “Testify to Love: Why I Left the Church and Keep Choosing Curiosity Over Fear.”

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“Testify to Love” is being rereleased by Ty Herndon’s record label, Club44 Records, in partnership with Passons. Zeke Stokes, who manages Ty Herndon, explained the logistics to ChurchLeaders:

Ty [Herndon] and Club44 secured the necessary mechanical licenses to record and release this new version. The rights are controlled by the writers and publishers. In the music industry, when an artist re-imagines a classic song like this, they don’t typically “acquire” the underlying copyright of the song itself—which remains with the original songwriters and publishers—but they own this specific new master recording.

We worked through the standard licensing channels to ensure everything was cleared and that the original creators are properly credited and compensated. It was a very smooth process, and Ty is thrilled to bring a new perspective to such a powerful song.