Five Decades of Giving Back and She’s Just Getting Started

A half-century ago when churches used hymnals kept in racks on the back of each pew and pianos or organs provided much of the instrumentation for worship, Oklahoma’s AG District Youth Director informed a 22-year-old university piano graduate that she should give back to the next generation of Assemblies of God musicians.

That’s why in 1975 Linda Robins first volunteered as an evaluator for her home state’s Fine Arts Festival, the contest she herself had entered as a student just two years after its 1964 inaugural event.

Back then, the contest was called “Teen Talent,” and her role was as a “judge.”

This year’s Fine Arts Festival honored Robins for 50 years of service—an achievement that hadn’t been on her bucket list.

“I never set out with the goal in mind to be the longest living Fine Arts Festival judge in the history of the program,” says Robins, 72, “but the good Lord did. I’d follow Him every year” to evaluate the next one.

National AG youth director Owen C. Carr launched Fine Arts Festival as “Teen Talent Search” to help students discover, develop and deploy their ministry gifts. This year’s national event in Columbus, Ohio, marked 60 years since the first one, which took place in Springfield, Missouri.

Robins grew up in Oklahoma City in an AG church of 50 congregants pastored by her grandfather E.D. Bagwell. She played the church piano. Her mom, the former Billie Bagwell, an AG pastor’s daughter and herself a credentialed minister, preached revivals and in church pulpits as a substitute in Oklahoma and Texas. Linda Robins and her brother and sister formed the Robins Trio, a musical ensemble that performed at their mom’s services.

“Our whole lives were in church and ministry,” she says.

In 1966, word came to their tiny church about the new Fine Arts Festival for high school students.

“My family said, Linda, you ought to do this. I was a little Lone Ranger, the only one who’d go from my church until my siblings were old enough to participate,” she says.

From 1966 to 1970, Robins entered the piano solo category in her area’s Fine Arts, advancing to sectionals, district, regionals and then to nationals. While she didn’t win a national award, “I was there and got my feet wet,” she says.

Fast-forward through a storied ministry career, all centered on Jesus’ musical call on her life: as an elementary and secondary music educator, earning master’s and doctoral degrees, serving as a church music minister, chairing the Nelson University (formerly called Southwestern Assemblies of God University) music department, and leading the 15-member traveling vocal ensemble called The Harvesters.

And she’s evaluated Fine Arts piano and vocal categories in AG districts beyond her home state into North Texas, South Texas, West Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Kansas. Since 1989 she’s sat behind the evaluators table at national Fine Arts events to judge piano solo and piano solo classical, two of the festival’s 78 total categories that encompass music, dance, drama, visual arts, and communications. At the national event, students range in age from grades six through 12.

In her decades-long tenure as an entrant and later as an evaluator, Robins has witnessed sacred music move beyond hymns, camp meeting songs and Southern gospel revival music into folk, soul, jazz, rock, blues and beyond—styles brought into churches by secular musicians who converted to Christianity during the Jesus Movement of the early 1970s.

National Fine Arts instrumental division coordinator Stephen Fava notes that investing 50 years in guiding youth takes sacrifice and commitment. He notes that Robins plans each year around the national event.

“She understands the value in it—what it’s all about, who it serves,” says Fava, 37. “She sees the product and the fruit of it: students who go through Fine Arts and the children of the students who go through Fine Arts, and how they’re being used in ministry.”

Meredith Jones, 43, began in middle school entering Fine Arts vocal events in the early 1990s. Jones sang one of her festival entries as her audition before voice faculty at Nelson University. Robins, as the music department chair and director of The Harvesters, invited her to join that vocal ensemble.

“She wasn’t just an evaluator. She loved students and felt called to this place and called to developing students,” says Jones, who today directs Nelson worship services. “You can see that in every facet of her ministry work and life. Being part of her group prepared me for what I’m doing now.”

Ashton Peters, 36, National Fine Arts coordinator, notes Robins’ care, concern and attention for each entrant. Her heart for teenagers to develop their God-given gifts is revealed in her prayer for each student before and after their presentations.

“In an event that size, it’s so easy to get caught up in the event presentation, making sure it stays on time, for getting the next student up” to perform, Peters says. “But she keeps each student the center of the experience, after Jesus. She treats each student like they’re the only one there.”

For the rest of her year, Robins plays the organ at Capitol Hill Assembly of Oklahoma City and teaches private piano students.

Does she plan to retire? “That’s on God’s timetable,” Robins says. “I’ll do it until the good Lord sees fit for me to do something else!”

She cites a recent conversation with Peters regarding the next annual national Fine Arts: “Don’t forget me!” she told him.

Peters responded, “Are you kidding me? You’re just getting started!”