Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY
/
Died: Mandisa, ‘Overcomer’ Singer and American Idol Star
Died: Mandisa, ‘Overcomer’ Singer and American Idol Star
Oct 10, 2024 4:26 PM

  Grammy Award-winning contemporary Christian singer Mandisa Lynn Hundley, a former Lifeway Christian Resources employee and top-10 American Idol finisher, was found dead Thursday at her Nashville home, her publicist announced on social media.

  No cause of death was given.

  We can confirm that yesterday Mandisa was found in her home deceased. At this time we do not know the cause of death or any further details, according to an official notice posted April 19 on the official X account of the performer known simply as Mandisa.

  We ask for your prayers for her family and closeknit circle of friends during this incredibly difficult time.

  Before finishing in the ninth spot on American Idols fifth season in 2005, Mandisa worked for Lifeway as a telephone customer service representative from 20002003, Lifeway told Baptist Press.

  She partnered with the Lifeway womens ministry team, performing and leading worship at some events, and later performed at Living Proof Live events.

  Our team at Lifeway is heartbroken to hear of the passing of our friend and former co-worker, Lifeway CEO Ben Mandrell told Baptist Press. Her teammates recall the joy and kindness she brought to work every day. Our heartfelt prayers are with her family.

  Lakisha Mitchell, late wife of Southern Baptist pastor Breonus Mitchell, inspired Mandisas hit Overcomer, the title song of the album that garnered a 2014 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album. Breonus Mitchell, senior pastor of Mount Gilead Baptist Church in Hermitage, Tennessee, remarried in 2018.

  Obviously we are saddened by her transitioning, he told Baptist Press. Mandisa was just a bright light, a bright witness. She was true to her faith, even though she dealt with the depression and the issues with Kishas transitioning, shed just rebound. And I think that song, Overcomer and her work just epitomize her life, how shes just been this big overcomer of so many issues.

  Lakishas death from breast cancer in 2014 after the albums success caused Mandisa to spiral into a deep and lengthy depression which she overcame. But she continued to struggle with her mental health, sharing her issues publicly and in her 2022 book, Out of the Dark: My Journey Through the Shadows to Find Gods Joy.

  Shes just been a tremendous overcomer, Mitchell said of Mandisa. The Scriptures say we sorrow not as those who have no hope, and this is the hope we have, that even in the midst of death there is life. Were saddened, but at the same time celebrate another young life, but a life well-lived.

  Overcomer also snagged Pop/Contemporary Album of the Year at the 2014 Gospel Music Association Dove Awards. Its lead single was certified as a platinum hit by the Recording Industry Association of America and was the title song of the Kendrick Brothers 2019 movie by the same title.

  The Fisk University graduate sang with the Fisk Jubilee Singers while earning her baccalaureate.

  Her 2007 debut album True Beauty gained her first Grammy Award nomination, leading the Top Christian Album chart and rising to No. 43 on the Billboard 200 Album chart.

  Many lamented her death.

  Mandisa loved Jesus, and she used her unusually extensive platform to talk about Him at every turn, K-Love chief media officer David Pierce posted on X. Her kindness was epic, her smile electric, her voice massive, but it was no match for the size of her heart.

  Mandisa struggled, and she was vulnerable enough to share that with us, which helped us talk about our own struggles. Mandisas struggles are over, she is with the God she sang about now.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY
Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi
In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...
Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley
Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...
C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender
From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...
Creating an Economy of Inclusion
The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...
Jesus and Class Warfare
Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...
Up from the Liberal Founding
During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...
Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church
Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...
How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind
Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...
Adam Smith and the Poor
Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....
Mistaken About Poverty
Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2024 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved