Kristyn Getty

Born Kristyn Lennox, Kristyn Getty forms one half of the husband-and-wife duo Keith & Kristyn Getty, a pair now counted among the foremost creators of Christian hymns in the twenty-first century, among them the enduring modern standard “In Christ Alone.” Raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in a household that counted her uncle—the mathematician and noted Christian apologist John Lennox—among its members, she first performed in church during her teenage years. After completing a degree in English literature at Queen’s University of Belfast, she encountered the musician Keith Getty in 2002. The pair wed in 2004 and promptly launched their joint recording career under the name Keith & Kristyn Getty, issuing the debut album In Christ Alone in 2006; two years afterward the project reached the Billboard Top Christian Albums and Top Heatseekers charts.

The same charts registered their return with the 2009 release Awaken the Dawn. In 2011 came Hymn Makers: Speak O Lord, while their inaugural holiday collection, Joy: An Irish Christmas, simultaneously entered the Top Ten of both the Billboard Christian Albums and holiday album tallies. The 2013 album Hymns for the Christian Life became the duo’s first entry on the Billboard 200. Selections from these early projects were later documented in a live setting on the 2013 release Live at the Gospel Coalition.

By that point the couple, who divided their residence between Portstewart, Northern Ireland, and Nashville, Tennessee, together with their children, issued The Greengrass Session in 2014—an effort the pair characterized as “six hymns from the old world and the new”—and secured the number-two position on the Top Bluegrass Albums chart. Their next holiday project, Getty Christmas, appeared the following year. In 2016 they delivered Facing a Task Unfinished, titled after a 1931 hymn they had newly arranged for the recording; among its featured collaborators were Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Chris Tomlin.