Robert Marcus Cull

Robert Marcus Cull is an American songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and pastor born in Los Angeles in 1949. According to United Methodist Discipleship Ministries and Hymnary, his parents encouraged piano study when he was six, and he soon began playing in church. He eventually learned more than a dozen instruments and attended Southern California College, now Vanguard University, an Assemblies of God institution in Costa Mesa. During his college years he encountered performers connected with the emerging Jesus Movement and also attended nearby Calvary Chapel, whose ministry became closely associated with the new praise-and-worship music of the period.

Cull joined the Accents, a group that performed new Christian songs associated with Maranatha! Music, and Maranatha released his first two albums in the early 1970s. He later married singer Joy Strange, who performed with Maranatha! Music and the group Parable; they recorded together before their marriage ended. Cull eventually served as pastor of Midcoast Country Chapel in Wiscasset, Maine, retiring in 2014.

Cull wrote both the words and music of Open Our Eyes, Lord. In his own later account, preserved by hymnological writer Lindsay Terry and summarized by Discipleship Ministries, the song arose while he was preparing for a concert at a religious school in Hawaii. Concerned that the people he had met seemed uninterested in speaking about Jesus, he prayed for a genuine vision of Christ and wrote the short chorus in about ten minutes before singing it at the gathering. The song subsequently reached Calvary Chapel in California and was included in Maranatha! Music's Praise II project in 1976.