40 Days of Christian Music at The Ark Encounter, a festival like no other of its kind, is set to kick off on July 29 and will go through Sept. 6 in Williamstown, Kentucky.
Over 100 different artists participate in the annual event, which takes place near the replica of Noah’s Ark. This year’s event includes Crowder, Katy Nicole, Matthew West, Big Daddy Weave, Ernie Hasse & Signature Sound, The Isaacs, Jordan Feliz, Cochren & Company, Terrian, The Inspirations, Caleb & John, Jon Reddick, and Charity Gayle, to name a few.
Speakers participating throughout the event will be Ken Ham, Ray Flynn, Tim Lovelace, Tyler Gaulden, Tianna Coetezee, and Javon Ruff, among many others.
The 40 Days of Christian Music festival is “all about bringing all genres of Christian music together and using it as an opportunity to see new people come in the kingdom of God while experiencing worship with other believers who are already believers,” festival creator Ray Flynn told ChurchLeaders.
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Flynn is president of Ray Flynn Ministries and founder, president, and chairman of the board directors for Abraham Productions, Inc.
“It takes every bit of a year to pull it off,” Flynn said. “The logistics behind it are pretty crazy because you know you’ve got different different genres of music each day.”
Flynn expressed how much God is in control of the entire festival. “Yes,” he said, “the coordination of it all is extreme. But you know even when we don’t get it exactly right, the Spirit of the Lord always shows up and people worship the Lord.”
“So we tend to forget about all of those little details once it gets going because it’s really all about Jesus,” he said.
In just four years of doing the event, Flynn shared that organizers have witnessed thousands of people making professions of faith. Flynn said, “That’s pretty sobering to me just to think about what God has done in such a short period of time.”
One of the event’s speakers, Tyler Gaulden, who is the senior pastor of Hillcrest Baptist Church in Lebanon, Tennessee, told ChurchLeaders that he is excited about the “array of people that attend the festival. There are people from different backgrounds. This is not just one genre of people.”
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“Christians are notorious for getting into camps and clicks and denominations, and the 40 Days of Christian Music has done a great job, especially over the last several years, of being a bridge across many waters in the Christian world,” Gaulden said. “That is what I like seeing the most during that 40 days. You have churches and believers from all walks of denominations that come together for one goal: to worship Jesus.”
