By the time Andrae Crouch wrote "Soon and Very Soon" in 1976, he was already carrying two full time jobs. One was recording artist, with a string of hits behind him. The other, less visible to a national audience, was co-pastor, alongside his sister Sandra, of Christ Memorial Church of God in Christ in Pacoima, California, the congregation their father Benjamin Crouch had founded. Crouch had been living inside COGIC his whole life; his first group, formed back in 1960, was named for the denomination outright, the Church of God in Christ Singers, the COGICS.
"Soon and Very Soon" went out first on his album This Is Another Day, published as sheet music the same year through Lexicon Music, and copyrighted twice within three weeks in October 1976, once for the record and once for the score. What happened next is the part worth telling. Within three years the song had jumped denominational lines entirely, showing up in a National Baptist songbook, then Methodist and other Pentecostal collections through the 1980s, including COGIC's own hymnal, Yes, Lord!, in 1982. Decades later, Crouch's own choir sang it at Michael Jackson's memorial service.
A denominational historical archive belonging to a different Pentecostal body, the Assemblies of God, later titled its own account of Crouch's life "The COGIC Minister." That framing gets at something the song's later, wider life can obscure: this was not written as an outsider's tribute to Pentecostal worship. It was written by a man doing his own church's work, in a season when he was, quite literally, its pastor.