Our Story

As a small child, I grew up singing Scripture songs, because I had the privilege of being Jodi Eulene Patterson’s neighbor for several years. Eulene wrote many, many Scripture songs and would eagerly share them at vesper services. I remember one time she excitedly told us how she had been on a long walk and had nothing with her to write with when she suddenly had a beautiful melody and a powerful verse of Scripture come together in her mind. So, as she walked, she saw an Alabama clay bank beside the trail, grabbed a stick, and wrote out the notes to that song. Later, she went back with a notebook and wrote the music down.

As I had my own four children, singing Scripture became an important part of our family worship each day. Then, with the advance of technology, I had the idea to develop an app to put all of the Scripture songs we knew into an app so that we could keep them in order and memorize them more systematically.

Teaming up with a 16-year-old aspiring app developer, in 2012, Scripture Singer went to the App Store and the Google Play store.

Reaching out to Scripture-Memory enthusiasts through the app, the suggestion came that we put the entire book of James to music. Later, the power of having one of the Gospels set to music also came forward, and both times, my childhood friend, Jodi Eulene Patterson, now nearly 90 years of age, came forward, to make the music available by writing these songs! Eulene always prays that God’s angels will “sing to her” as she asks for God’s help. Certainly, each song she has composed is a gift from God, but it seemed that especially as she was aging during her composition of the book of Matthew, God specially intervened to see that project to completion.

Now our team, with members in Washington, Tennessee, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Michigan, are all working together to put those chapters of Matthew on the app as well as many other new Scripture songs! Praise be to God!

~ Craig Cleveland