Twelve years after his death, a recovered 2008 EEW interview reveals the musician, painter and devoted son behind the celebrated preacher.
By Rebecca Johnson // EEW Magazine Online
Dr. Myles Munroe preaches during an Oral Roberts University chapel service in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (AP Photo/Oral Roberts University)
When award-winning journalist Dianna Hobbs, founder of EEW Magazine Online, told Dr. Myles Munroe that she had discovered a video of one of his songs on Myspace, the internationally known pastor laughed. "Oh no! You've found me out. I'm busted," he said. It was August 2008, about six years before his death, and Hobbs was interviewing the Bahamian minister for a feature titled "Myles to Go."
The conversation covered his views on fatherhood, single motherhood and raising daughters, but it also turned to a side of Munroe beyond the pulpit.
He was a musician, songwriter and recording artist long before he became internationally recognized for his preaching.
"Yes, I began in music," he told Hobbs. "My speaking came afterward."
The interview disappeared from EEW's website after the magazine's original site was accidentally deleted. This fall, its first page was recovered through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, preserving Munroe's firsthand account of the musical beginnings that helped shape his life.
The discovery comes as EEW remembers the 12th anniversary of his death. On Nov. 9, 2014, Munroe and his wife, Ruth, were among nine people killed when a private jet crashed while approaching Grand Bahama International Airport. They were traveling from Nassau to attend the 2014 Global Leadership Forum, which Munroe organized. Dr. Richard Pinder, a senior vice president and pastor in his ministry, also died. Munroe was 60.
Dr. Myles Munroe and his wife, Ruth, married in 1978. They died together on Nov. 9, 2014. (Bahamas Faith Ministries International Fellowship)
The founder of Bahamas Faith Ministries International, Munroe had written dozens of books on purpose, leadership and the Kingdom of God. American audiences knew him through Trinity Broadcasting Network, where he appeared as both host and guest. He and Ruth, who married in 1978, had two children, Charisa and Myles Jr.
But in the 2008 conversation, Munroe was happy to talk about the music he had written and produced.
He told Hobbs he had produced records and composed songs that he said were well received across generations. Among them was "Brand New World," a song he said he wrote in 1970 and that numerous groups had subsequently recorded.
When Hobbs told him how much she loved the song and that she had been singing it herself, he was delighted.
"Oh, I'm so proud, I tell you; you make me feel so encouraged," he said.
The song continued reaching new generations after his death. In late 2024, Jamaican gospel artist Rondell Positive released his own recording of "Brand New World." He told the Jamaica Observer that he first heard the song at about age 3, when his father taught it to a group of young people.
Munroe's musical career had begun in his youth. He told Hobbs he started writing songs at 14 and, by 15, had formed a group with other Christian teenagers. They fasted, studied Scripture and composed their own music, which they called Contemporary Christian Music.
Their sound was unfamiliar to the churches around them.
"All the churches turned against us because they called that 'devil music,'" he recalled.
The young musicians continued writing.
"We couldn't find hip music in the church, so we wrote our own songs," Munroe said. He estimated that he wrote about 90% of the group's material.
Music was one expression of his creativity. Munroe also painted portraits and landscapes in watercolor, oil and acrylic, and worked in sculpture. Some of his paintings, he told Hobbs, hung in private homes in the United States and the Bahamas. He also earned a degree in fine arts from Oral Roberts University.
When Hobbs asked how it all began, Munroe went back to his childhood and a prayer his mother prayed in an old wooden shop.
His mother, a committed Christian raising 11 children, held weekly gatherings for the neighborhood's little ones. Every Friday evening during the 1960s, she brought them onto the family's property, where she taught Bible stories and led them in songs.
The meetings took place in a small, abandoned wooden shop. Inside stood a broken-down upright piano that no one knew how to play.
The family could not afford lessons. Still, his mother longed to have music accompany the children's singing.
Munroe remembered hearing her pray aloud, asking God to send someone who could play for them.
Then she prayed for her own children.
"So one day she laid hands on me and she said 'Father I pray that one of my children will be able to play music so we can enjoy music with these children,'" Munroe recalled. "And she touched me and prayed for me."
Later, while he was playing with the old piano as children do, something unusual happened.
He discovered that he could anticipate the sound of a note before his fingers struck the key.
"There was a sound in my head," he explained. "I didn't know at the time that this is what they called musical ears."
Soon, he was playing chords. He could hear the next chord in his mind before he played it.
The ability stayed with him. When his mother eventually enrolled him in formal piano lessons as a teenager, his teacher became frustrated because he could reproduce music after hearing it once but wasn't reading the sheet music.
"So she would punish me for not reading notes," he recalled.
Dr. Myles Munroe greets a congregation. “Anything I heard once I could play it,” he told EEW in 2008. (Bahamas Faith Ministries International Fellowship)
The young musician continued developing his abilities, eventually writing and recording songs, studying fine arts and finding his calling as a preacher and teacher whose work would reach audiences around the world.
Yet when he looked back on the beginning of his musical life, his memory returned to his mother's prayer in that humble wooden shop and the neighborhood children who gathered every Friday to sing.
"So I was a child playing for children," Munroe told Hobbs. "And the rest is history."
Editor's note: This feature draws on Dianna Hobbs' original August 2008 interview with Dr. Myles Munroe, published in EEW Magazine under the title "Myles to Go." His words appear as published in the archived interview. Only the first page of the original feature has been recovered. The missing continuation included discussion of fatherhood, single motherhood and his relationship with his daughter.
