More Than Wonderful

Lanny Wolfe spent nearly three decades running the music departments of Bible colleges affiliated with the United Pentecostal Church International, first at Christian Life College in the mid-1960s, then at Gateway College of Evangelism through the early 1970s, then at Jackson College of Ministries from 1974 until 1993. Wikipedia itself categorizes him as an Oneness Pentecostal. That career, training worship leaders inside one specific Pentecostal denomination, produced a song that reached far outside it.

More Than Wonderful, published in 1983, swept the 1984 GMA Dove Awards, the gospel music industry's own annual honors, winning both Song of the Year and Songwriter of the Year, the same ceremony marking the first time the Dove Awards were ever televised, broadcast on the Christian Broadcasting Network. Sandi Patti and Larnelle Harris recorded the song together for Patti's album of the same title, and their recording won a Grammy Award while the album itself took that year's Inspirational Album of the Year at the Doves.

Nothing about the song's lyrics announces Oneness doctrine. It is a devotional song about the greatness of God, the kind that moves easily across denominational lines, and it did exactly that, becoming a standard performed and recorded far beyond the UPCI colleges where its writer spent his career. The song's reach says something about gospel music as a genre: a composer trained entirely inside one Pentecostal tradition's own institutions produced work that a wider, doctrinally mixed Christian audience adopted as its own, awards and all, without that audience needing to know or care which denomination had shaped the person who wrote it.