The needle punctuated the air,
a relentless gavel handing down 
sentences, the craft-store-bought 
fate punching white nylon futures 
through the presser foot and into dead 
canvas my mother’d scrapped 
from old projects gone wrong.
This was her first attempt 
at the sewing machine after the doctors 
finally cauterized the last retinal bleeds 
and she’d begun to learn braille, walk 
with a cane, find passing cars by ear. 
She insisted that 20/1240 vision 
didn’t mean she couldn’t 
sew, so my father resigned himself 
to hovering, wavering on his heels 
in attempted help. I can do this, Allen, 
met my father’s hands and every word 
he spoke, her back hunched like the edge
of a waterfall. I could see my father 
work his frustration like a glass blower, 
the liquid fire descending down into the mold 
of his stomach to set. In his eyes, ghastly 
potentialities—severed digits, pulpy flesh— 
shaped themselves silently, but my mother 
only leaned more over the machine. I don’t 
remember why she lifted the presser foot, 
the blood when the needle passed through 
her finger, or whether we went to the hospital, 
but I can see my father that night, cradling 
her thumb in an ice pack on the sofa, 
my mother’s tears carrying all the fear 
of losing her life as a nurse, failing 
as a mother and a wife, down into the soft plaid 
of his shirt, the one that always 
smells of pine. He whispered over and over, 
You don’t have to see. 

Chris is a globe trekking, touring spoken-word poet — sharing his art with anyone who will give him a shot. Having performed well over 700 shows in 48 states and 10 countries, he finds himself equally at home in the middle of a metal show or a living room and has developed a reputation for breaking down the barriers between himself and his audience, inviting everyone in the room into an experience, one he hopes is wrought with honesty, passion, and love. He is married to fellow punk-rocker Amanda, lead vocalist of the band Visitor Pass.

Their self-booked world tour, “The Mount Everywherest Tour” just completed its European leg alongside fellow DIY artist, Kevin Schlereth. To learn more about Chris, click here.

I get why Peter started to sink— 
the winds offer pretty convincing arguments 
sometimes, like Glenn Beck and his chalkboard. 
The last hundred years in Chechnya are a decent 
reason for atheism. Sarin gas’s existence and the thought 
that someone made it on purpose are two more. 
It’s not hard to become Bishop’s armadillo, 
raising its weak mailed fist to the sky. 
Stoked on the wave instead of the ocean, 
Christcore, community, all my friends, and me 
got slammed on the beach like false idols 
in a purge, broken open like oysters. We spit out our pearls 
like loose teeth, returning the bits of stained glass 
we’d enshrined with our idolatrous gold 
and wood. I don’t know if God did it or shaped it, 
if it was our mid-20s arriving or the efficacy 
of deconstruction or just some will-o’-the-whisp 
Screwtape found on Craigslist—who can say? 
We are all flat little rectangles interacting 
with an infinitely-dimensioned entity 
in an incomprehensible reality, 
and, sometimes, it’s just hard to tell. 
We hold our pieces of colored glass 
with bloody fingers. Love fits in a hand, 
eternity in your lungs, yet God is love and eternity 
endless. The duality confounds, the nearness and presence 
and coming-ness of the Kingdom, all at once 
here and coming and inside us. Understanding 
is a tightrope strung up between two towers in the fog, 
Arminius and Calvin each holding an end with Piper and Dies, 
and Jesus, dancing and strolling and asleep in the middle 
like on the boat in that storm. Steve McAlpine 
says all God’s characteristics mutually inform one another— 
there is no Venn diagram, just lots of whole pies, 
the Chicago-deep-dishness of God, the pepperoni 
and mozzarella always mutually informing one another— 
so maybe its two circles joined, me and you, rolling over 
and on top of one another in our bed, turning 
on an axis, the way I found the universe’s center 
on a curb outside a Dominos when I was 17—life 
and death and 16th century literature and Gaddafi, 
the Planeteers and Eli Whitney all flying around 
while I ate pizza with Ricky in the stillness 
of a sunset. There’s nowhere to go, 
everywhere to be. It’s all a kaleidoscope 
turning, God a gem, illuminated from within, 
us constantly spinning, revealing new shapes and colors, 
but always one and always deeper. Eternity is a place, 
a point in time, and also the endlessness 
we are always descending into—savor it. 
Let your roots down. Let yourself grow. The whole 
world is holy, every atom shaking, all of matter 
working out its faith in fear and trembling. 
I feel like I should take off my shoes, feel the telegraph-
tapping of it all on my bare feet. 
The heliocentric solar system is a sacrament— 
I say it like the Lord’s prayer, each planet 
passing through my fingers, each one going around 
and around the sun, going over and over a coat of paint, 
the way Yusef’s poems are him talking around 
and around a subject, walking around the pond, 
saying so much more about it, the way electrons 
orbit their nuclei, the way I imagine Mary, 
going over and over the Word she’d been given, 
treasuring it in her heart. Walt Whitman published 
Leaves of Grass over and over again, expanding 
and revising and basking in the light of it all. 
Barry Lopez put his arm around my shoulder 
and brought me to his microscope and showed me 
every brushstroke of America—every state, city, 
town, hamlet, neighborhood, house—is a world 
all unto itself. Antman fell to the bottom, shrinking 
smaller and smaller, finding new level of existence 
after new level of existence until he finally found 
love in the stillness at the bottom of it all. 
I am buried by my smallness, beating my chest 
at the back of the sanctuary, consumed 
by all the sweat and weight and dirt. God lifts me 
like Peter from the water, like a flower 
to the light, and reminds me of Vienna 
that day in March. I see it like a feeling, 
like I’m there again. I love the flowers 
and the doors—Sie sind so schön. Ich habe keine 
Freundin gehabt, als ich ihnen gesehen habe, 
aber jetzt habe ich eine Frau und ich will ihr 
sie geben, die ganze Stadt, wrapped up in a bouquet, 
Ich liebe dich, I love you, the words of God, 
the axis, run through like a nail, what it all turns upon. 
Everything spins on a potter’s wheel, electrons 
around their nuclei, the record on its turntable, 
the earth on its axis, pizza dough on an index finger, 
the moon around the earth, the gooseneck kettle pouring 
its concentric circles on the coffee grounds, the planets 
around the sun. Paul said he only knew Christ 
and Christ crucified when he was among the Corinthians. 
That’s two things, but, really, just one, and everything else— 
eating and talking and theology and laughing 
and tent-making—must’ve come from that seed. 
We are caught in the slow motion, the present 
and the future and the past, the record spinning, 
the song playing, the abiding, the stillness, 
the waiting, all the colors of light returning 
to white, each of us and every moment and everything 
holding up its piece of the glass, 
and God spinning them all together. 
It crushes me, breaks me open just like Norelle said, 
like the alabaster jar, and all my fear and anger and love 
and yearning and thrashing and hope and worry and longing 
all pour out, and it’s myself and my spirit and all I have, 
where I am in the process, and it’s bare before God, 
a drink offering, and the light washes in, 
and I am reminded and know again that I am loved, 
that my friends will love each other again, that my mom 
will see again, that she already does and will again, 
and I can’t keep it all together— 
the apologetics and the questions and the hurt 
and Rwanda and the hypocrisy and the good intention and the love 
and Andre’s affair and the fear and the abuse and the hopes, 
everyone blundering forward in some kind of upward tornado 
of grace, but, somehow, He is gravity and a hand 
and a silence and an easy yoke and a relief and a voice and a song. 
Before I can even try to pull all the ravaged ends back together 
again, He is there like Spiderman on that ferry 
but better, and the web holds flawlessly, and the water 
begins to feel like solid ground again, and there is nothing 
and everything, and I am encompassed, consumed, and one, 
Yes and Amen and Hallelujah the deafening and silent 
and final and honest and grateful murmur 
of my prostrate spirit, and then I, the uncertain, 
thankful, confused, certain, speechless, humbled, 
rejoicing, scale-less pot, finally say to the Potter, 

Keep going.

Chris is a globe trekking, touring spoken-word poet — sharing his art with anyone who will give him a shot. Having performed well over 700 shows in 48 states and 10 countries, he finds himself equally at home in the middle of a metal show or a living room and has developed a reputation for breaking down the barriers between himself and his audience, inviting everyone in the room into an experience, one he hopes is wrought with honesty, passion, and love. He is married to fellow punk-rocker Amanda, lead vocalist of the band Visitor Pass.

Their self-booked world tour, “The Mount Everywherest Tour” just completed its European leg alongside fellow DIY artist, Kevin Schlereth. To learn more about Chris, click here.

Lately, “the end of the world” has felt less like a distant eschatological debate, and more like the air that we are breathing.

In the Twin Cities, recent immigration enforcement efforts have left scars that will not disappear simply because the visible emergency has passed. Children learned fear on their way to school. Families stayed home. Businesses watched doors that once opened freely, remain closed. Churches and neighbors attempted to respond, often with trembling hands and incomplete plans.

And this is only one emergency among many: wars, genocide, political instability, rising costs of groceries, and climate change. Everything feels urgent. Everything feels fragile. Everything begs for our full emotional attention before we’ve even taken a seat at the breakfast table. Which makes whimsy feel, at first glance, almost offensive.

And yet, the more crisis seems to fill the world, the more I find myself drawn to small and seemingly unserious things. Children’s books, candlelight, fantasy maps. Cute little mushrooms spotted on a family walk and the way my children laugh at the unexpected twist in a bedtime story. Stained glass windows or the ridiculous dignity of a well-named imaginary city. It’s not being “too cool” to dress up for the renaissance faire with your family. It is finding little trinkets to adorn your home. It’s filling that home with a million smaller pieces of mismatched art from local artists instead of one big beige canvas from Target. The list goes on, and even looks different for every person.

For a large portion of my life, I did not think much about whimsy. There were always “more important” issues to worry about. The world is so often concerned with ensuring that what we focus our attention on is useful, urgent, or measurable. This leaves us asking, “What right do I have to delight in whimsy when my neighbors are afraid?” But I have begun to believe that whimsy is not a refusal to look at suffering. It’s a refusal to let suffering become the only true thing we see. By whimsy, I do not mean cuteness pasted over pain. I do not mean sentimentality or yearning for years past. It is not a means of ignoring reality. It is quite the opposite. Whimsy is not denial. It’s seeing beauty with mud on its boots.

When everything is an emergency the imagination begins to shrink. Our brains focus on the most pressing issues, and creativity and imagination go out the window. We lose the ability to picture anything except collapse and the failures we see in the world. Quickly we become fluent in outrage and clumsy in wonder. We know how to doomscroll, diagnose, critique, and brace ourselves. Despair tells us that nothing can change. People cannot be trusted and beauty is naive, while cynicism is wisdom and tenderness is weakness. Whimsy interrupts this cycle. It trains us to notice what fear would have us overlook.

Beauty and whimsy were never meant to replace justice. They keep us human enough to pursue it. As humans, we need structured societies. God granted us structure during creation, and purpose. We operate, and should operate within structured societies that serve our collective well-being. But, people also need friendly faces and home-cooked meals. They need friends to laugh with, flowers in their hair, and spaces where our grief can breathe. We need small signs that the world has not become entirely hostile.

The Christian story does not end with the world discarded, but with the world renewed. Not with creation abandoned, but creation healed. Not with grief explained away, but with a loving God who knows us intimately, wiping away every tear from every face. This means joy is not decorative to reality. Joy belongs to reality’s future. So when small things bring joy, light, and life into the world, perhaps they are not interruptions or distractions to the serious work. Perhaps they are little rumors of new creation. A child’s laugh. The speckled blue of robin’s eggs in a new nest on your porch, a quilt sewn from scraps of fabric from thrift store shirts, a strange family story around the dinner table, a painting that gives grief color. A candle lit in a room that feels far too heavy. A song that makes sorrow feel less alone. If these tiny little pieces of beauty can reach us now, and give us joy in a world still groaning, how much more profound will joy be when all things are made new?

Jesus seemed remarkably uninterested in explaining the kingdom like a policy memo. When it came to God’s most important work, he did not call another prophet to a mountain top, he himself delivered an addendum via metaphor and symbolism. Jesus spoke in seeds, birds, bread, lamps, coins, children, wedding feasts, fig trees, lilies, fish, vineyards, and thieves in the night. He used ordinary things as doorways into ultimate things. This is not whimsy in the shallow sense. It’s the deep strangeness of a world charged with beauty and meaning. The kingdom comes to us, again and again, through things small enough to miss.

At the end of the day, I am trying to become less embarrassed by the small things that keep me tender. I find pleasure in making up stories for my kiddos. I find peace in keeping beauty in all its forms in our home. I never stop telling dorky jokes. I find moments to play Dungeons and Dragons with friends, exploring imaginative worlds and telling stories. Even in the hustle and bustle of daily life, I find myself noticing more and more little rumors of creation in the least expected places.

I do not know how to heal everything that feels broken. I do not know how to carry every emergency without becoming numb. I do not know how to explain the ache of this cultural moment to my children, except to keep showing them that beauty belongs here amidst it all. So I will keep looking for whimsy at the end of the world. Not because suffering is imaginary, or because grief is small. But because Christ is making all things new, and even now, if we are listening and looking, we can hear the rumors of new creation.

Christopher Scanlon is the co-founder of Mending Together, a non-profit that equips people with tools, resources, and confidence to support displaced neighbors with trauma-informed care. He lives in Minnesota with his wife and three kids. You can learn more about his work, here.

Tension is holy, intrinsic to abiding in Jesus and living in His world.

Do away with it, and you’re a heretic.

Heresy as a word is oft-misappropriated in our modern vocabulary. Theological hall monitors treat it as a complementary and unlimited water supply. They sprinkle it on anything and anyone that falls outside of their specific denominational lines. Someone speaks about God’s love too softly? Describes it as reckless, perhaps? Heretical. Someone’s understanding of the charismatic gifts varies by tradition? Heretic. Someone likes listening to music with blast beats, drop C tuning, and screamed vocals? Believes in universal health care? Well…

The early Church used heresy far, far more judiciously. It was almost only reserved for trinitarian deviations and bastardizations, most notably about the person and nature of Christ. How do we reconcile Yeshua of Nazareth as fully God, fully man? We don’t. We accept it, in all its un-resolvability and mystery. The issues arose when people tried to smooth all that tension out. Arianism, Modalism, Tritheism, Subordinationism, Partialism, Macedonianism, Unitarianism. All were afraid of the uncontainable, wondrous mystery of the God-made-flesh-man who now indwells by His Spirit, and thus sought a way to break it down more palatably.

Tension is holy, and intrinsic to the Christian faith, because it is intrinsic to Jesus’ very nature. To remove it for the sake of simplicity or rationalization, is to deny the very center of incarnational existence.

I’ve long said that the more biblical one’s theology becomes, the less systematic it becomes. And before you raise your pitchforks, no, this does not mean anything goes and that I cannot coherently articulate my beliefs. I firmly sit within creedal orthodoxy; a biblically subordinate and robust faith will always do so. But too often we associate “sound doctrine” with those who have built systems of theology that smooth out scripture’s tensions. Progressivism and fundamentalism commit the same sin; a failure to take the living word of God on its own terms. The former often wants to remove the notion of sin altogether. It banishes God’s holiness, the fear of the Lord, and divine justice. The other wants machines; a means of dissecting and controlling every aspect of understanding faith. And thus, it removes the tensions inherent in Scripture. When a theobro tells you he’s just “more biblical” than the rest, it most often means he is fine-proof-texting some hard verses, without taking others seriously in the slightest.

And now you might justifiably be asking, “why is a guy who writes songs for a living going down this rabbit hole?” Because art, when embodying its divine source, traffics in tension. Imagery, language, and metaphors that leave no room for possibilities fall short of reflecting humanity as it is. There is still a market for that, don’t get me wrong. Faith spaces have built an entire industrial complex around it. But, people regard it as hollow for a reason. To make something that asks some of us, our very participation in it, to apply wisdom to it, is to walk in the tension our Lord did.

Everyone asked Jesus to take a side on something. The Pharisees asked him questions about the sabbath and taxes; both religious and political. His own followers asked him questions of their place in his reign (in an earthly kingdom sense), and of what they should do to live their faith piously. In these instances, the presupposition was tribal. Where do you fall into camp? Famously, he answered with stories, enigmas, and further questions.

“Render unto Caesar,”

yes…but what qualifies?

“Would you not…”

I don’t know, Lord, would I?

Jesus’ rhetoric mirrored the scripture he knew and embodied in Proverbs: the dissonance of ideas, thrown together, with wisdom forming as we sort out that dissonance. And yet, both then and now, the human tendency is always to banish wisdom, rather than cultivate it. Art is that cultivating catalyst. My song Goliath, a first person telling of David’s life, reckons with the fact that he was both a man after God’s own heart, and yet too marred by sin to build God’s temple. Is his sin why he is a man after God’s heart? No reading of the text could get us there. And so, we have to stare it down and reckon with it. To explore its contours.

No one could look at the binary Western political spectrum and conclude that pure allegiance to one side or the other makes sense. That is, unless wisdom has been stricken from the face of the earth. Life shared by a nation or with neighbors is too intricate for the juvenile, score-keeping tribalism that has woven itself into not only government, but people’s own personal identities. In the realms of the theological and political, it is far easier to make rigid systems. It is more difficult to heed wisdom’s beckoning to something harder, but much greater.

Jesus’ description of the narrow road tend to be, at least in my Evangelical tradition, interpreted exclusively as concerning personal piety and holiness for reaching eternity. And let’s face it, that piety is almost exclusively focused on biblical sexuality, personal devotional time, theological correctness, and participation in church life. And yet, the context of the chapter speaks far more to living a life that patterns its being and doing on Christ, and that has not only implications for the eternal, but also the now. “For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” And what is it that Jesus models in his life among others? It is a leaning into the tension. It is inherent to his very god-man nature and evident in how he moved and loved while walking this earth. Finding it is to seek after something that few will endeavor to, unto their own destruction.

Chesterton exquisitely posited that “Christianity got over the difficulty of furious opposites by keeping them both, and keeping them furious.”

Art, at its best, enters that fray. It doesn’t simply make sense of it logically; it harnesses it. Art that is dangerous does not by default exist outside of Creedal orthodoxy. In fact, it may be exegeting it by the very means Christ Himself intended.

Joshua Leventhal is an American-born, Canadian-raised recording artist who currently resides in Vancouver, BC. He is married to a fellow creative, the love of his life—Kaitlyn Rose, who is a full-time abstract painter. Josh is passionate about the possibilities that exist within storytelling and the holy tension that is played out in every human story. His next project “Tapiseri” is a three volume work that focuses on the grand story of the Bible. Expect Vol. I in the coming months.

Chris and Amanda Bernstorf are a couple punk-rockers currently residing on the east of Michigan. Chris is a touring spoken word poet, and Amanda is the principle member of the pop punk band Visitor Pass. We caught up recently to hear about their upcoming self-booked world tour and more.

Tell me about yourselves — How’d you get started in spoken word [Chris]? How’d you get started in pop punk [Amanda]?

Chris: My life was a void where I ate crackers and waited for Amanda to appear, and then I met Amanda and everything good happened from there. No, the short version is: I’ve been writing for a long time. When I got to college, I saw Bradley Hathaway’s poem “Manly Man” and it grabbed me in a way I hadn’t experienced from art before. I went to college expecting to be a museum curator, which I’d just made up. I didn’t know what I was gonna do. I interned at a museum before college. It was awful.

I became really disillusioned. I’d bought into the message that if you believe in yourself you can make the world better. Then in college I got this other message from everyone around me: you idiot, we don’t change the world. You get a job, be safe, and hope nothing bad happens.

One day after poetry class, I wasn’t as close to the Lord then, so I didn’t attribute it to God at the time, but I was getting up from class and a table appeared in my mind. Everything cleared, and there was just the sentence: I have to be a poet. It was so deep and calm. Looking back later, I was like “Oh, that was God.” I walked down the stairs thinking, well, that’s what I’m gonna do. Seeing Bradley Hathaway and performers like Levi the Poet and Listener, I found my way into performing poetry at punk shows and organizing shows.

But Amanda’s the real talent in the family.

Amanda: [laughs] My brother is seven years older, and he was my “in” to music as a kid. He’d burn me mixed CDs off Limewire. I remember being in 2nd grade with this little blue boom box, listening to mixtapes. My brother brought me a CD with Brand New, Taking Back Sunday, and Relient K. I’d never heard anything like it. I played it over and over again.

I’ve always wanted to play music or be in bands, but I grew up in the “you can’t do that” environment—it’s not a stable career. My mom wanted me to be happy, but parents want better for you. They don’t want you pursuing music as a dream. So I pushed it aside for a long time.

I got pretty far down another path before I just felt: I don’t really care about any of these things. The only thing I ever cared about was music. The only thing holding me back was knowing it’s unstable, that I probably wouldn’t make anything of myself. But the closer I got, the more I was like, oh yeah, money doesn’t matter. This feels like the right thing. I was in smaller bands in middle and high school, but it wasn’t until I moved here that I started doing DIY house shows and taking it more seriously. Now it feels ingrained in my life. I don’t know why I would do anything else.

Chris: Amanda ran a legendary house venue here with her two roommates—Amessa house—and they were in a band called Amessa that toured and played close to a hundred shows without asking to play a show. It’s absolutely insane [to get booked as a new band without ever asking for a show].

Amanda: It was a really special time. That’s all God. My bandmates would agree we were still just learning—I was learning how to be a bandmate, how to play guitar. The whole project felt like the Lord’s doing.

There seems to be a connection between your spiritual journey and a willingness to commit to this music thing. Why is that connection there?

Amanda: It’s just part of who I am as a person. I feel called to this the same way someone feels called to be a doctor. I’m open to believing that at some point music won’t be the thing anymore, that we might be asked to do something completely different. But I think this is what God has for us at this moment—this scene, these people we’re meant to minister to and be part of.

Chris: I think we’ve learned as we’ve gotten older that, like – I’m a Christian. I’m not a punk. Being punk is very important to me, but I’m a Christian first. Anything above that would be idolatry. God’s given us role models who show that you can be passionate about what God’s given you, but the thing is never God. He might have you do something else, and that’s fine. Your identity is who you are in Christ, not what you do.

But it feels really special to love this. Music feels like a deep “yes” in my heart. I see so many mirrors of who God is, and it feels beautiful.

I foolishly thought our corner of the world was the only place that gets it. We met people here in Michigan who run a restaurant—carbon copies of us. They took us in and gave us jobs when we needed them. They have the same rhythms as us, but they’re not music people. They’re like, “we don’t care if we make a penny. We want to feed our community and take care of people around us.” How could you not be drawn to things like that, that mirror the gospel?

Amanda: The risk thing is maybe one of the main reasons I feel more pulled into this. I grew up with rhetoric about stability—you love God, go to church, but there’s an unwillingness to sacrifice personal comfort or anything that costs you. I felt an extra push toward music because of the risk, because I know I have to trust God and it’s not something I’m doing under my own power. It’s not easy. Maybe that’s a good position to be in—you have to rely on God, not yourself or your finances. That’s not something I’m good at, but it’s something I’ve felt pressed toward.

Chris: Everyone says “be like Christ,” but when it comes time to get crucified, there are a lot of really good reasons why we all have to be somewhere else. I’ve [experienced] that my whole life. Yet I think of Christ in the Garden before his death saying, “I don’t want to die,” and God the Father says, “you have to.” Jesus says, “okay.” That’s so beautiful. I don’t think sacrifice needs to come through music, but music is where God showed it to me.

It reminds me of our friend, Josh Mozug—it makes me want to cry. We pulled up to his house here in Michigan on tour, with a couple days off before a show at Take Hold in Grand Rapids. He was going through a really hard time, but he was like, “I only have $20 to give, but I want to take care of you guys.” And he did. Then all of us—me, Josh, and the people I was touring with—pulled our money together, went to the store, and bought food for the week. That willingness to give what little you have feels so much like the parable of the Widow’s Mites. I’ve consistently experienced that generosity in our corner of the world.

Punk is often the gospel without Christ, so it’s problematic for that reason. But I was thinking about this: me and Household played a show in South Dakota, and the locals didn’t really seem interested in us. But there’s a code—when you’re local and there are touring bands, you give up your part of the door split. I’ve been all over the country, and people who clearly don’t want anything to do with my faith or me as a poet will still take care of touring musicians. That’s what punk does. That radical generosity has moved me so much. And I’ve experienced it from Christians involved in this world too—this sense that we need to tell people about Christ, and the discomfort that comes with that is fine. We want to embrace it.

What is it about that scene that you find compelling? And what are you learning from embracing risk?

Chris: For the second one—God meets you. It’s so simple. In taking risk, God meets you. Our friend Steve Speakman said something that really stuck with me: “God loves a trier.” I wasn’t looking to hear that at the time, but it’s stayed.

I reflect on 16 years of my adulthood doing this, and I was an idiot so many times. I still haven’t read the whole Bible. I’ve had a lot to say about it but haven’t found the time somehow, and that’s super bad. I’ve made so many mistakes. I’ve risked when I shouldn’t have. I’ve manufactured my own poverty. I’ve been selfish and hurt people. I’m definitely not the right person for this. But having the willing heart God gave me—which Amanda knows often isn’t even that willing; it’s more like an involuntary fall off a high dive–God calls that good.

Christians talk about Abraham’s faith, but Abraham’s so soft. He pretends his wife is his sister. He doesn’t nail it. But God’s like, that’s a good faith. As imperfect as I am, as in-process as I am, as not-enough as I am—God’s strength really is made complete in weakness. God really will give you what you need. I’ve had moments on tour where I’ve been like, God, I’m hungry, will you feed me—and food appears.

For punk—I’m so thankful for the faithful Christians in my early life, but I grew up in suburban Christianity and there was just such a sense of restraint. Kevin Schlereth said it one time, “Many Christian music things fail because they’re all built on music industry models with a Jesus sticker on them.” But the kingdom of heaven is diametrically opposed to the kingdom of earth*. There’s this inherent friction when we do this because it’s not working the way Christ works.

Growing up in suburbia, there’s all these rules. You have to be good at singing, really good at your instrument. There needs to be an event, and we need to advertise. Just piles of red tape.

When you go to a punk show, it’s often just people who got off work and made it to the gig. There’s often no stage, or if there is, everyone’s on it. We just went to see Drain and No Pressure—I feel like there were probably 225 people on the stage at times. The music belongs to everyone in the room. You can participate.

So much of music culture is built around charismatic people on a big stage with lights and smoke, and you stand in the audience and consume it. That’s the power structure at many shows. At a punk show, it’s like: these are our songs, this is our night, we do this together.

So many pieces of art have pointed me to God, and having that sense of ownership—it’s the gospel. Jesus says come and follow me. He lets people touch the holes in his hands, in his side. DIY music, punk music, and house shows create that environment in a way that other art I’ve experienced really hasn’t. Nothing compares to being in the Take Hold room with Household.

Amanda: It breaks those boundaries and makes you feel like this is your community, we’re in this together—not that separation where I’m the artist and you’re the consumer. Everyone’s part of it, no separation. We went to a show and some of those bands are a big deal, but people are running into the singer, getting shoved into him. At a normal show people would be like, “get back.” But at those shows, no one cares. You’re not a performer and they’re not a fan—you’re just a person singing the songs. I think that’s how it should be, despite maybe our own internal desire to be put on a pedestal.

CHRIS: I love house shows for that. Even if you’re a cool artist, you’re gonna stand in the same line for the bathroom as everybody else, because you’re just in a house. That equalizing thing is so important. The invitation to come be part of it—you matter. If we don’t come to the shows, this doesn’t exist. Everyone here makes it happen. There’s idolatry and problems—it’s not some perfect utopia—but those rhythms feel so much closer to the gospel and to my experience with Christ.

It sounds like the DIY space sets a table as opposed to a stage.

Chris: That’s a great way to put it.

Amanda: That’s beautiful.

Audiofeed Festival is happening this week. You’re both heavily involved. What excites you about it?

Amanda: I love Audiofeed—it feels like all of our friends, a gathering of people I don’t see often because they’re from different states. At its core it’s what you said—a table for everyone to come to, all different kinds of people, wherever you’re at with Christ. Having that space where anyone feels welcomed and safe to talk about whatever it is, to be excited or angry or whatever—that’s what the church tries to be.

Chris: It’s cool you said the table thing. Audiofeed existed for about ten years with one team who did an amazing job, but they got tired and passed it on to a larger group. Nobody ever really knew what Audiofeed was—too Christian for non-Christians, not Christian enough for some Christians, because it’s this really uncomfortable [middle] space. I remember one year there was a Blue Lives Matter flag and a Pride flag in the same place. Kevin talks about this a lot—cultural narrative would dictate that’s biologically impossible, like a war would happen. But Kevin describes Audiofeed as the table, and that became the language the new group came up with. When Christ is at his table, he dined with everybody. Some were just there to eat. Some were true believers. Some were curious. Some came to mock him. But the table’s open.

I’m excited that my friends who maybe aren’t believers, or aren’t believers the way they used to be, can have a place to remember Cornerstone [Festival], remember Take Hold, and be genuinely heard and engaged with rather than pushed aside.

This team has really doubled down on hospitality. If you look at exit surveys, people who come back say: I come back for the community. The music and art are really good, but I come back to see my friends every year.

They’ve cut back on how many bands there are and added a lot more connective stuff—a mixer the first day, a free coffee station that grew after a vendor dropped out. Now the whole fest brings a bag of beans from where they’re from, and every morning we make pour-overs and chat and pick each other’s beans and talk about where they’re from. There’s meaningful space to connect.

There’s this little family of festivals—Bloodline, Winter Wind Down, and Novelty Collective—all smaller regional flavors of the Audiofeed community. It feels like a gathering of the tribes. Sanctuary ran a stage for the European extreme metal, black metal world [at Audiofeed for a bunch of years]. There’s a seminary tent. Indie music. Pop punk. Everyone goes back out all year and does their thing, then comes back [to the fest]. It’s restful and encouraging and invigorating.

Audiofeed also kicks off your worldwide tour with Kevin Schlerith. Tell me about it. How can people follow along or support what you guys are doing?

Chris: The goal is to go everywhere we can. I did a tour like that in 2015 with my friend Andrew—we did the whole contiguous 48. Kevin and I did the “Everywhere-er We Can” tour in 2016—contiguous 48 plus Alaska and I did Hawaii on my own as well. This is now the “Mount Everywherest” tour. We’re trying to do the whole world—contiguous 48, Europe, Asia, and Australia. If you know anyone in any of those places who’d like to host a living room show, a venue, a bar, a church—just have them hit us up.

We share our art for free. We’re hopeful people will help us, but we’re passionate about decoupling from economic transactions and recognizing that people are human beings made in God’s image. We want to interact with people as people, not as units to extract value from. If you can’t pay—great news, we don’t need any money.

Follow us on Instagram and Facebook. We both have email lists. We also have a Patreon—a dollar a month goes insanely far for us. You can also join for free. We’re trying to create spaces where people don’t have to be on social media but can still find out about our art.

All of our art is free. We want to give it as a gift. Everything we have—breath in our lungs, faith in our hearts—is a gift from God. So we give everything away for free.

Amanda: I think it’s a gift that we get to do this, so we just want to give everything back as a gift. We’re grateful to do it, and we hope people will see that and want to join us in it, how ever that looks.

To learn more about Chris and Amanda and how you can support their work, click here.

Tell me about yourself — where are you from? How did you get started in worship music?

I’m born and raised in the UK — English, from a little commuter town called Bracknell. Not a particularly creative town, but looking back, there was actually quite a bit there: an art center, an amazing forest I didn’t appreciate as a kid. And there was a church there called Kerith Community Church — about a thousand people, which is very large for a church in the UK. It started as a Baptist church but got swept up into a movement called New Frontiers, very much charismatic and evangelical. Worship was a big part of that church.

My mum was a piano teacher and an English teacher. My dad was always listening to music — he introduced me to Springsteen, Thin Lizzy, the Dixie Chicks, the Eagles. I learned how to harmonize by singing with my mum in the car. She had this greatest hits of Sting and the Police, and she’d always put it on. I have a very strong memory of harmonizing to “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” — that’s how I learned to separate my ear.

When I was 12, the church had a youth band and wanted to start a second one. They’d envisioned something like a touring Hillsong United vibe — delusions of grandeur, looking back, but it was an exciting moment. They knew I played instruments. I was learning drums at the time, but I always sang. They grabbed a few of us and said, “We’re going to start this new youth band.” The first time I led worship I was 12. We led in the kids’ ministry. It was a disaster — absolutely terrible. But I led in that youth group from 12 to 18.

Our youth ministry went from 50 young people to 500 in about a year. So from around age 13 or 14, on a Friday night, I was regularly co-leading worship for around 400 under-18s. You make a lot of mistakes in that context, but you also learn a tremendous amount. And they were integrating the youth band with the adult band on Sundays too, so I grew up in a culture where of course you give young people responsibility, of course you let them lead. When I moved to other churches later, I realized that wasn’t normal at all.

I also realized I loved songwriting. I was a heavy metal fan — my first band was called “Konspiracy Theory” with a K. I played drums; we were doing Metallica-style stuff. The guy who led the youth bands told me once afterward: “Sam, you’re a much better singer than you are a drummer.” He wasn’t wrong. I was also in an emo band called “When’s the Invasion”, where we did screamo. And then someone introduced me to John Mayer, and I realized [listening to him] I was feeling all the same things I felt with heavy music — but less angry. So I moved into the singer-songwriter world and started writing my own songs as a way of processing and expressing myself.

At university I was in a seven-piece band called “Sam Jackson and the Struggles” — a Springsteen kind of thing. But toward the end of my time there, I was writing songs that didn’t fit the band anymore. So, we disbanded. I really felt like we were one opportunity away from something. It just never came. After that I moved into more singer-songwriter territory and developed as a lyricist. Confessional songwriters like Damien Rice and Glen Hansard became big influences, along with bands like The Lone Bellow. I was still leading worship through all of this — and I was a worship pastor up until a couple of years ago for a church in the Midlands.

Was that church still connected to the New Frontiers movement?

No — I moved through a lot of different things since Kerith. Actually, I deconstructed my faith at university. I studied politics, philosophy, and religion and went into my degree very confident — “I know what reality is, I know how God works”. Then I had an encounter in my hall with a girl studying medicine who asked me questions I had absolutely no grid to answer. I realized my faith was built on the zeal and passion of my youth pastor. That framework was beautiful and formative, but it couldn’t hold up under real scrutiny.

By my third year, I was pretty much a nihilist, and genuinely depressed. I was semi-convinced that the fastest way to become wise was to admit nothing really mattered and nothing really existed. It just made me miserable. But — and John Mark McMillan has this wonderful phrase — I was “Christ-haunted.” I couldn’t quite get away from him.

I was invited to a retreat a friend was running, and I had what I can only describe as a mystical encounter with Jesus that reset a lot of my foundations. Not back to what they were before. More like, “I know that I don’t know as much as I thought I knew.” And there was a strange comfort in that, because I was no longer pretending.

The phrase I’ve been sitting with recently is “the wild way of Christ.” I have a song that will hopefully be on the album I’m working on – the first line is, “We’re building cities in the narrow road instead of walking where you go.” The idea being that so much of my anxiety came from a particular picture of what following Jesus was supposed to look like — a tradition that had built a whole city at one spot on the narrow road. The charismatic stream gave me the power of the Holy Spirit, which is beautiful and true and good. But if that’s the only place you stand, you miss the pilgrimage. He wants to show you other things.

I spent time in South America — that’s where I met my wife — and her dad introduced me to the Celtic Daily Book of Prayer. If someone pressed me about where I feel I belong denominationally, I’d say Celtic Christianity: that tradition from these islands in the 400s, with its deep connection to God in all of creation, to the Holy Spirit moving in a wild and wonderful way, but also this deep sense of poetry and liturgy. That, married to my charismatic roots, is where I live now.

You mentioned mystery as something you found on the other side of deconstruction. Can you unpack that? What do you mean by mystery, and why is it something people tend to fear?

It’s hard to define mystery. In the mystic tradition there’s a phrase that gets passed around: “I’m a lot less certain, but a lot more free.” The way I’m trying to understand it is that there’s a humility at the center of it. To enter into mystery is to recognize your place within the whole. And for me specifically, it’s a humility about language. None of the words we have could possibly contain all that we think they can contain when we’re talking about God. It’s not saying you can’t say anything, it’s not saying there’s nothing that’s true — it’s recognizing that when I’m trying to live in the presence of the divine, I have to engage in a humility that says: I’m never going to fully know. And there’s a falling into that, a trusting that comes over time, that leads you into places of silence, into holding positions more lightly, into recognizing that sometimes things we think are opposing positions are actually held together somehow.

There’s a term — apophatic theology — theology without words. That’s a big thing for me. When I come to this millennia-old, ancient text full of symbolism and poetry and divine inspiration, I don’t want to be too quick to say I get it. I want to hold space for my own limitations as a reader.

A prayer I’ve come back to, especially before leading worship — particularly as someone with a charismatic background is, “Lord, let me be humble enough to let you be free enough to not show up.” Am I able to allow God to surprise me? Even sometimes by doing things I thought he said he’d never do? What if he doesn’t want to show up in the way I think he should? What if he’s leading me into silence? What if he’s using my disappointment or my distraction to communicate something?

And then particularly around suffering and grief — for me, mystery is also allowing reality to be what reality is and trying to find God in the midst of the world as it is, rather than as we wish it would be.

Did you watch Conclave? There’s that moment where the cardinal is preaching against the sin of certainty. That gave me language for things I’d been trying to articulate. Like — take the song, “Goodness of God.” There will come a moment in someone’s life when that song just will not ring true. Last year we went through some things and I just could not sing that song. Not because God isn’t good, but something about it was grating against my soul. Mystery helped me hold that. It doesn’t mean I’ll never sing it again. It means: right now I need to bring this reality to God, not bash myself over the head with the lyric until something shifts.

Mystery is also the necessary friction that keeps a model from becoming the message itself. If you hold mystery, you’re forced to ask, “what’s actually important here?” And that opens the door to more creativity, more beauty, more expanded vocabulary — because you stop pigeonholing how God shows up. I’ve experienced the presence of God in the middle of a John Mayer guitar solo. Something wider and deeper is going on.

So how does that play into your work as a worship leader — how do you lead people into mystery, into an encounter with the living God?

A couple of things. I’m not particularly bothered about people’s preferences anymore. Not to the point of being disrespectful — but sometimes I feel like I need to be. There are moments leading worship where I know that if I just played “What a Beautiful Name,” the whole room would change. But I’m not convinced that’s the Holy Spirit. That’s a Christian banger everyone knows. Sometimes that’s the pastoral choice, and fair enough. But I’m in a place now where I think: that’s a little too easy. I’d much rather sit in an uncomfortable moment of silence and bring the whole congregation into it with me.

And ironically, I’ve found that actually being more intentional in preparation — not less — creates more space for mystery. In charismatic culture, the more spontaneous you are, the more spiritual it seems. I love that, and I have friends who are exceptional at it. But for me, the spontaneity is happening in the prep now. I’m asking: what’s the story God is trying to tell through this set? What’s the narrative arc, the prophetic theme? Where do we want to go?

I don’t see worship songs as getting from A to B. It’s not a commute. Each song is a space you inhabit for a time. From that space, a thread might emerge — something unexpected that changes the whole journey. Or you stay in it until you’ve really dug through its depths. The problem is that takes time. I lead at an event called David’s Tent — 72 hours of continuous worship in a field in the UK every August, and this will be my eleventh year. You get hour-and-a-half sets there, and you can really go on those journeys.

But even with 18 minutes on a Sunday, the goal isn’t to get through all four songs. The goal is to try to behold something of the beauty of Jesus and invite the congregation to behold it with you. And to not let them get away with being lazy about it. I’ll give them vocabulary, an image, something to get them there — and then I’ll expect them to respond.

Last year at David’s Tent, I felt called to bring the congregation into lament. Lament is missing from the worship diet. We live in a world full of things we need to acknowledge. I was thinking about Amos 5 — “Away with the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river.” I wanted to draw attention not to victory, not to overcoming, but to solidarity with the suffering and the broken — not just our individual pain but the world’s. We sang “Dry Bones” by Gungor. And then I knew we’d eventually move into joy — but it would be a rooted joy, deepened by the descent into lament. Three songs in an hour and a half, because of everything in between.

I feel like I’m in a season of real experimentation — actively pushing past forms and models I’ve known for years, asking: how do we actually do lament in 18 minutes on a Sunday? How do we talk about justice and structural evil in worship? How do we speak about hope in the midst of grief? These are real life. And if we’re not careful, worship becomes escapist — an escape from reality rather than a movement toward transfiguration.

You mentioned your morning worship sessions on YouTube. Tell me about those.

Honestly, sometimes I feel like that’s a bit disappointing when people ask, because I think they’re expecting a deep spiritual origin story. But, what happened was that I’d released this little iPhone EP — my wife and I in our living room, unmastered, all over the place sonically (Listen, here). Just honest. A friend of mine — he’s a small group leader, but he also does influencer work around cycling, so he understands algorithms — said, “You should do this on YouTube.” I said absolutely not. I don’t want to sing worship songs every week on YouTube. Sounds terrible. He pushed back. Eventually he framed it as: this is the top of your funnel. I felt a bit more comfortable when I thought of it as the mountain spring that leads down to the deeper ocean. He said, same thing, we’re just different people. Give it a year.

I said I’d do two a month. He said more. I settled on three. And as I started praying about how I’d do it, a few things fell into place. I got a new guitar I’d been waiting on — the sound works much better for what I’m doing. My whole setup is a little Zoom H2 field recording mic, runs on double-A batteries, picks up both vocals and guitar, completely portable. Found one online for 50 quid.

I tried the first one. Hated it. I was ready to scrap the whole thing. The next day I was praying with a friend who had no idea I was starting this. He said, “Sam, I feel like you’re about to start a new adventure — but you’re worried the equipment you have isn’t good enough for what you’re trying to do.” And he said, “David went with his sling, and it was exactly what he needed.” Interesting. Then separately my cycling friend said, “My worry for you, Sam, is that you’re trying to do too much. You need a singular focus.” Two different conversations pointing the same direction. I felt like God was asking me to do this, and I had to trust him with my fear of being pigeonholed as a CCM worship act — because I know I’m more than that.

What it’s become is a creative outlet I genuinely love. I get out into nature, I worship, it’s simple. And it’s leading people to the original music and poetry and longer writing, which is where I feel the deep call. I wasn’t expecting it to go well. I thought maybe by the end of the year it’d feel worth continuing. I got there within about two months. I’ve gone from 60 subscribers to around 40,000 and I genuinely don’t fully understand how that happened.

But I think part of what it’s modeling is: we can worship in the mess. There are videos where a helicopter is flying over the house, really loud. A siren goes past. It’s just in there. We worship anyway. We encounter anyway. We don’t need a hermetically sealed, distraction-free environment to connect with God. Fill it with ordinary distractions — but also fill it with beauty. The birdsong has become really important to me, almost like singing alongside creation. Everything becomes texture to the environment of worship. And that seems to be serving people who are a bit burnt out on the current worship aesthetic, who are looking for something quieter and more contemplative. I’m chuffed — pleased. I feel genuinely pleased that it seems to be creating that space.

You mentioned a song you released back in March — “The Hush.” Is the story behind that similar to what you’re talking about — embracing distraction, finding God in ordinary moments?

To some degree, yes. The song came out of a writing session with Brett Miller (of Jesus Culture). We met at David’s Tent and started collaborating. We wrote it in January of this year.

In my family, the time between Christmas and New Year is called the hush. Everything slows down, no one knows what time it is, there’s cheese and board games and long walks and a kind of time-out-of-time. It’s something I genuinely crave — the silence of winter that feels comforting rather than distressing. We were talking about that, and also reflecting on some hard years that both of us and our families had been through. My wife’s family had been dealing with a serious medical situation that ended in terrible grief.

So the song has two layers. One is God speaking to me — slow down, it’s okay, don’t be afraid of this silence, of this seeming inactivity. I’m right here in the middle of it. The other is a song I wanted to sing over my wife and her family: husband over wife, father over child, friend over friend. Just love, and a desire for healing.

There’s also something woven through it called an anchor plan — a trauma-response framework my wife uses in her work with refugees and asylum seekers. The idea is that life is a river. Run too fast and it runs thin — that’s anxiety. Go too wide and too slow and it’s depressing. You need different activities depending on where you are. There’s a line in the second verse: “The river ran too fast this year.” It’s an acknowledgment — this has been a lot, can we just take a moment.

Underneath all of that is a deep conviction I have about finding Christ in the ordinary. I’ve been praying this sentence: “This is the life I have been given. May I be glad in it and dwell well.” The album I released last year — The Floor — is connected to this. If I can find beauty somewhere ordinary, I don’t need a big mountaintop experience when things get chaotic. I can walk out into my garden, smell the Mexican orange blossom, and think: okay. The kingdom is unfolding. There’s that Andy Squyres lyric — “the street cherry blossoms pouring their gladness into all my soul” — it’s that.

There’s also a line specifically for people who’ve grown disillusioned: “the candle seems to burn too low / there’s absence in the afterglow.” That’s for people — and for me — who’ve gone through all the charismatic motions and reached what’s supposed to be the Holy Spirit afterglow, only to find silence. I want to say: maybe that silence is an invitation. Maybe you’re being called into something quieter, something that can sustain you for longer.

When can we expect new music from you?

I’m heading into the studio in July to start working on an album. I’ve been fundraising this year and have almost doubled my target, which means I can do a lot more than I was planning. The album has a title — I just can’t share it yet because I’m prone to early disclosure and then not following through.

I’ve had these songs sitting with me for a while, not quite sure how they fit together. Then I wrote two more with friends and suddenly they all landed. The hush will be on the album. And the arc of the record is essentially the journey I’ve been describing tonight — from the silence of God that feels initially negative and frightening, the “where are you?” kind of silence — through the question of what if silence is actually being held — into finding God in the breaths between the words rather than the words themselves — and then, eventually, into hope.

Hope is a big theme for me right now. Not the victorious, “we’re overcomers” kind of hope. More like — hope is the more bitter draft to drink. Despair is a sweet, slow poison. It’s easier to drink because it just confirms what you already feared. Hope is harder because it asks you to trust that things are being made new, that the kingdom is coming, and to live as if that’s true — even if it costs you. The apostles got killed, after all. So the album is moving toward hope, but through despair and lament rather than trying to vault over them.

In the short term, I just wrote a new song called “My Joy, My Delight” that’s going up on my latest session on YouTube. I’m going to head out to the nature reserve and record a version on the same mic, then get it on Spotify. Hopefully something out this summer. And I’m thinking about a Christmas release too — I’ve always wanted to make Christmas music, and I have a song that could work for that. So some things along the way, and then the album is the big thing I’m building toward.

Samuel is a singer-songwriter and poet residing in Nottingham, UK. His musing shed light on the beauty found on the valley floor, in the ordinary and mundane. You can subscribe to his ‘Morning Worship’ sessions, here.

* title photo via Andrew Ely

The last time we were in a room together was when you played at our house — nearly a decade ago. What has the journey been like since then?

It might have been 2015, right around when I released my first solo record as Embleton. That show was amazing — one in a long line of house shows that stick out in my mind. You eventually play hundreds of shows and forget most of them, but certain ones stay with you because of the generosity of the host or the environment they created. That was one of those.

It was right at the onset of starting Embleton. I’d come from a more melodic indie rock and indie folk band, and then went straight into Americana and alt-country — a whole new version of me that nobody from my hometown really understood. There was interest in what I was doing outside my hometown, which I was grateful for. And if I remember right, Michigander was just starting out and he played that show as well. He’s obviously gone on to do amazing things.

My journey’s been a little different. My wife and I moved to San Francisco shortly after that. We were involved in a couple of ministries out there — I was leading worship and doing a lot of work in that space. In 2018, I started a studio in the Tenderloin District, and by studio I mean a very tiny room where I started producing my own stuff more seriously, which bled into helping others begin to produce as well. Around 2019 we moved back to Ohio. I worked a couple of jobs before going self-employed in 2021 — right through the pandemic — and I’ve been doing music full time ever since. About two and a half years ago we moved to Nashville, where I deepened my pursuit musically. And now, just about a month ago, we moved back to Ohio. It was a bit of a surprise, but that’s the journey. A lot of moving around.

What was it like recording in the Tenderloin?

I worked at a coffee shop called George and Lenny — named after the Steinbeck novel — right across the street from an art space. The guy I worked with there, Brett Walker, and his wife started this art collective across the street. On one end, you might walk out the door and witness things you can’t unsee — and I mean that literally. But within all of that craziness, there was this little ecosystem: the coffee shop on one side, and across the street this art hub with a bunch of different practices happening — carpentry, photography, sewing, leathermaking. I was able to find a room there and finish it out with help from my dad. He’s a common theme when it comes to me finishing studios. He flew out to San Francisco and helped me build out this room — two layers of drywall, all kinds of soundproofing, trying to get as much isolation as possible. The room was probably eight by ten feet. I packed all my gear in and started making records. I was working at a church at the same time that was really supportive of all of it — leading worship, being part of the church family, but also being out in the community among artists and building relationships that way. If I could have kept that job forever, that was close to a dream job. I liked San Francisco; it was just impossible to afford.

So the dream was doing life in the church, leading worship, and also producing on the side. Did you know producing was going to become a thing when you moved out there?

Not at all. I’m probably the world’s most reluctant producer. I started making records in college — actually before that — because I’d watch my friends make records in GarageBand and thought that’s just what you did. So I started fooling around in GarageBand, eventually got a computer and a mic, and made my own record. I remember someone coming to me wanting me to produce them when I only had one mic. I didn’t understand it — I kept thinking, why are you coming to me? But people would hear music I’d recorded and seek me out, and that kept happening throughout my career. Honestly, I didn’t really feel like I knew what I was doing until I had enough gear to actually record other people well. Even then, I was just slowly picking things up from much smarter producer friends, emulating their techniques, and realizing that within the gear I had there was a certain freedom to develop a sound that worked for me — and then other people wanted that sound replicated. I still don’t think I’ll ever say ‘I’m a producer’ without a voice in the back of my head saying, no you’re not.

Maybe a little imposter syndrome?

For sure.

So reluctantly, you find yourself producing. You move back to Ohio, then eventually to Nashville for this next phase. What’s it been like helping other artists bring their music to life?

It’s humbling. I’m not a competitive person by nature, or if I am it doesn’t register that way. When you’re in a room where everyone does the thing you do, and everyone has put in their ten thousand hours, there’s just nothing like it. You all reach a flow state together in the middle of writing a song. You know you’re going to reach the finish line, and everyone is completely invested — being pushed and pulled by people who are just as good or better than you. It’s only exciting. You also get to see different styles. For example, you guys know Ivan Theva. He and I are more ‘build the ship while it’s in the water’ — we want the song to find us, we don’t need to know where we’re going before we start. Other writers I work with come in knowing exactly what they want: here’s the title, here’s what I want it to convey, just help me get there. The scaffolding is already in place and you build from there. That’s an equally enjoyable process, even though it’s not how I write for myself. When someone has a vision, it becomes about helping them find it.

What have been some of your favorite collaborations?

One that stands out, since we were talking about Ivan, is my friend Ryan Hall. He signed with Jesus Culture and writes with just about everybody. He showed me a level of generosity in Nashville that I wasn’t expecting. Sometimes to get into certain writing rooms you need clout or label support; you can’t just walk in and write with your heroes. But Ryan’s written some significant songs and could easily guard his writing space. He doesn’t. He just says come. He started grafting me into his world, introduced me to Ivan, introduced me to our friend Jason Bennett — who’s worked with Ivan, Taylor Armstrong, Abe Parker, Tim Foreman’s band, all kinds of people in and beyond the indie Christian space. Ryan had this vision to get all of us in a room together, and we finally made the schedules work. We wrote a song called ‘Maybe’ that Ryan released and Ivan features on it (listen, here). It was one of those sessions where everyone finds their place. Ivan was immediately deeply invested lyrically, so he and Ryan were driving that side of things while Jason and I drove the harmonic and melodic parts. By the end of the session we had the bones recorded. It’s one of the coolest writes I’ve been a part of.

Something I’ve always appreciated about you is your vulnerability. You’ve been open about this season of transition: moving again, this time from Nashville back to your hometown in Ohio. What are you learning?

It was a big surprise, moving back. My faith plays a tremendous role in everything I’m writing, and I knew God was leading us through this — there were specific answers to prayer that weren’t the answers I wanted, but they were answers to prayers I had actually prayed, and they led us here.

In the spirit of vulnerability: what I’ve realized in the last few months is something that clicked while I was listening to a Tim Keller podcast, probably hanging drywall in my new studio. He was talking about prayer and God’s will, and I suddenly realized that in Nashville I had been praying really good prayers for my family and our future — but I had stopped praying ‘your will be done.’ I was asking for good things: flourishing for my children and my wife, impact in an industry often marked by shallowness. I wanted to have depth in what can sometimes be a cotton-candy Christian music world. And God said, I have different plans for you right now. When I came to that realization — that I had a bit of a death grip on our house, our street, this idea of making it in Nashville — it really stung. I’ve been working through it. Asking for forgiveness, but also still being a little upset. Why then? Why all of that in the first place? Why do we have to leave our friends? Why do my kids have to start over? How could I pray something so good and beautiful and have it not be in God’s will? That probably sounds like a tantrum, but I guess even as adults we have them sometimes.

That tension is something I think we all feel to some degree. What keeps you trusting God in the middle of all this?

I always come back to Peter’s words: where else am I going to go? You have the words of life. At a deep heart level, I really believe that. Experiences like this shake and shape my faith — it would be wrong to say I just carry on without missing a beat. But it shakes it in a different way than walking away.

When we landed back in Ohio, everyone immediately started asking what church we were going to. And I’ve just needed some space — some time on Sunday mornings to do church as my family. Everything in my upbringing, and even my deeply held beliefs about the body of Christ and the importance of gathering, starts throwing condemnation at me for that. You’re going to ruin your kids. You’re going to be that dad who called himself a Christian but didn’t go to church. All of it. But then I think: I just need some time to process.

There’s something beautiful in gathering as a family on Sunday mornings with my kids, and leaning on the small community we have here — friends who are in many ways church to us during this confusing time. And I’m realizing that these feelings of condemnation are learned behaviors from growing up. I’m still getting free of them. Of course it’s okay to take a beat, to lean into the Lord in a different way in a season of transition. That’s an example of how my faith is still being shaped. I’m shaking off old habits and beliefs while clinging to what I’d call rooted, historical ones.

It sounds like a season of coming back to the foundation. You also released an EP during all of this — Old Man, Young Man, out at the end of April. Tell me about it.

I came to Nashville with one of those songs already written — ‘Something Real’ is the only one I wrote by myself. The others I wrote with dear friends who are part of a collective called Messenger Music. Messenger Fellowship is this beautiful organization — pastors, businesspeople, really anyone who wants to be among other Christians who share their values. Out of that fellowship, internationally, came Messenger Music (Listen, here). I write with these folks several times a year at retreats, and because of our friendships we also just write for the love of it. Ryan Hall wrote on almost all the other tracks, either just the two of us or with one other person.

As I started looking at the through lines between the songs and what was moving me, I chose these five to tell a story. It ended up being a story about longing, waiting, hopes, and dreams. I’m pretty old soul, and I felt like these five songs had an arc — they start hopeful, descend into real pain, and come out the other side into a more hopeful place, with something learned. That’s every great story ever told. So that’s what came out as I assembled these five to record.

One of those songs, ‘Longing Fulfilled’ — formerly called ‘Barrenness Song’ — is one of the most meaningful songs on the record. How does that song fit into what you just described?

Ryan and I were writing that one together. He initially called it ‘Barrenness.’ One of the things Ryan and I share is that it took both of us a long time to have children. After our first, it was about three and a half years before we were able to have our next child. So there was this common thread of waiting and waiting for something really good and beautiful to happen, feeling like it would come, but having that hope deferred over and over again. And then beyond that, we both carry these deeper longings.

For me, a lot of it has been around music — doing the thing I feel made to do. I know that sounds very Western and entitled, but just as an example: in the last five years, I’ve tried to leave music three times. I thought my career was over, that I couldn’t sustain it, that I needed to take care of my family some other way. Every time I tried to get out, I couldn’t. About two years ago I spent six months pulling every relational string I had trying to get a job in tech sales. I couldn’t get a single interview. Closed door after closed door. God essentially said, I’m not going to let you leave. And I thought — fine, but then you have to make this thing work, because I have mouths to feed. So over and over, the prayer has been: Lord, when do I get a break? When is there green pasture here?

‘Longing Fulfilled’ pokes at all of those places where I’m waiting for something good, holding onto the promise that one day it will come. It’s the most meaningful song on the record for me because the list of things I’m still waiting on is still real. There’s a moment in the song where I sing, ‘I’ve been looking for answers when I could have been looking for you.’ As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to believe that the meaning is in the waiting. There is no arriving. There’s just depth of relationship while you wait. I’m trying to lean into that in my late thirties — hoping my life becomes less about arriving and more about relationship.

A lot of people lose hope in that transition — coming to terms with the fact that arrival isn’t happening the way they imagined, and maybe that idea of arrival is more of an American fantasy than how life actually works. Your music captures that honestly. One thing you also write about is our tendency toward destructive things when we find ourselves waiting. Can you unpack that?

Yeah. It’s anything to assuage the pain. Sometimes when you’re waiting, you’re just bored — and boredom breeds a kind of resignation. In those places I might find myself just watching TV every night after the kids go down, and there are moments where I realize I’m not actually watching the show, I’m just waiting for the season to end. There’s nothing wrong with a good show. But when behaviors become compulsive — and that could be anything, from fantasizing obsessively about the future to drugs and alcohol, which I’ve had experience with, more in my youth — the older you get, the more it costs to reach for those things. My body hurts when I do. But I have experience across all of it, whether it’s substances or just numbing myself while I wait, or while I decide I don’t want to deal with pain. And usually that pain traces back to needing something people can’t give me — affirmation, affection, belonging.

I’ve learned that there is a wellspring where those things actually come from. People can stand in the gap and offer some of it, but the real depth of fulfillment, for all of our aching longings — we believe as Christians that God has those answers, that he can fulfill the deepest ones. And when I’m disappointed, whether in people or circumstances, I reach. ‘Something Real’ is about not wanting to look back over ten years and find that most of the time I was reaching for things I already knew wouldn’t fulfill. There are years I want to make up by going after the right things. And because I tend toward self-condemnation, I have to hold onto the balance — when I’ve had one of those moments of reaching, I just ask for forgiveness and remember that God hasn’t skipped a beat. He’s ready to be in relationship wherever he finds me. That’s the hope I have, and the struggle.

It’s not a linear thing. What are you reaching for these days?

There is a book called “Heartbreaker” by Mike Campbell — the guitarist from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I love reading biographies of my musical heroes, and the story of what it took for them to become one of the most iconic bands in the world has just captured me lately. But the other thing I keep coming back to is “Every Moment Holy.”1 Are you familiar?

Yeah, we have each volume in our house.

I just got them all for my birthday. It started because a friend in Nashville connected to the Rabbit Room gave me Volume 3, and in it there’s a liturgy for leaving a home. I read it and just wept — it captured all the prayers I didn’t know how to pray. I grew up in the non-denominational world where repeating a prayer felt like vain repetition, where everything had to be spontaneous and original. I’ve thankfully come out of a lot of that over the last ten years. But finding resources that feel alive, that help me pray what I actually want to pray — that is a real art and practice that needs to be tended to. Doug McKelvey and the Rabbit Room have given me prayers that have held me in this season of pain and transition. I can’t recommend them enough. Oh, and the new Mumford album. I’ve been reaching for that quite a bit too.

You mention you’re in thirties, processing this journey with an old soul. What would you tell a younger version of yourself — 2015 Kevin, or wherever your mind goes?

Probably the same thing I’d tell 2005 Kevin: lighten up, dude. I wake up every morning ready to feel things, ready to search the depths of my heart and my longings — and that’s all genuinely good. But there’s a lightening up that comes with it, a kind of trust that it’s all going to be all right, even if it doesn’t go the way I’d prefer. I don’t know how you get there without actually living it. But I’d say: lighten up, and recognize that there are things that were never in your control to begin with. It’s better to sit and listen and wait than to try to engineer an outcome. However esoteric that sounds — that’s what I’d say.

“Old Man, Young Man” was released on April 24th across all streaming platforms. Find it and the rest of Kevin’s music, here.

It’s 2026.

I’m more disillusioned than ever.

I’m also more hopeful than ever.

We find ourselves, in this current western context, melting in the fallout of all the technological and societal divination that’s been swelling up the past several decades. We’ve quietly moved into what has been coined techno-feudalism.1 Our spending habits (both financial and temporal), our social order, even our worldview, are increasingly discipled by the pastors of the church of Silicon Valley. And it is not even those enigmatic billionaires directly shaping us; it is the algorithms they built. The mirror they have held up to our worst impulses has created a feedback loop with the gravitational pull of a dying star.

For those of us in the millennial and gen z camp, we find ourselves the first generation in modern memory to be materially worse off than our parents. Home ownership and a nuclear family feel untenable from a financial standpoint. The promises of prosperity are dying on the vine, even as wealth for some climbs to heights never before seen.

Societal structures and norms are rotting before our eyes. Corruption in seemingly every institution has become an expectation. And this is all the more devastating for citizens in the Kingdom of God.

As someone who has grown up in the Church and continues to love her fiercely, the heartbreak I’ve experienced over the last 12 years has been immeasurable. Moral failing upon moral failing of high profile church leaders. An idolization of power, that has drawn with it allegiance to a political approach that is antichrist to its core, parasitizing the Gospel. And more often than not, the ones publicly critiquing this infestation are those who do not really adhere to biblical orthodoxy.

As a creative, I see the elevation of so much “art” in the faith space that fails to capture both what it means to be human and the wonder and majesty of our God.

And yet…

I find myself in awe of how good I see life in Jesus rippling out in the midst of His people. I find myself in conversations, both face to face and with people across the world, who are fiercely committed to the way of Jesus in fullness, and willing to walk the Narrow Road, in all its holy tension.

I find myself in the midst of humans committed to building a better world, both at a communal level, but also their inner lives. To do the hard work that leads to healing in generations, deeper kindness, and a ravenous pursuit of the Fruit of the Spirit. People who understand that good theology does not exist as an ethereal notion; it is creedal belief incarnate, not merely in espoused in word, but spoken through deed and posture.

I find myself in a throng of humans who are learning, as rap artist and modern prophet Propaganda says, to tell better stories.

Tell better stories.

Story is intrinsic to our nature. A naked fact is illusion—and not because there is no such thing as objective reality—there is. No, it is because we do not comprehend data divorced from meaning. And thus, story shapes us at every level. Fact can be less than truth. Truth is so much more. Jesus himself states that he is truth, and knowing it through him sets us free.2

And in the same way that sin entered the world by twisting that which was good, there are endless actors who would use the goodness of story to ill end. To build fear and create subjugation. To sell us things unto their own profit. To build worlds that lie to us about who God is and who were are in him, or apart from him. And even those who recognize these malicious stories, stop short of doing anything more than that. They point to the danger, with no hope beyond. It turns out this is exactly what the almighty Algorithm feeds on most.

This is precisely why we must tell better stories. To do so is not merely a noble notion…it is to follow in kind with the King of All. Everyone demanded things of Jesus. His opinions. His wisdom. His miracles. His political shattering of an occupying empire. More often than not, the bread he offered in return was stories. Stories that participated with minds and hearts, examining them, and cultivating wisdom.

In the musical, artisan, and literary spaces, I am seeing a flourishing of storytellers providing the diet of goodness we need to be drawn back into hope, to imagination. People reckoning with what it means to worship from a place of being fully human. That is, to respond to who God is and what he has done with full honesty, without betraying reverence or hope. People making space for the good, the beautiful, and the true, even as weeds of the world seek to come up and choke out that space, both from outside the Church and even, sadly, within it.

There is a growing recognition of how deeply formational art can be. It is always discipling us, whether it be consecrated to Jesus or not. The question is, what is it discipling us to?

Now in my thirties, I recognize that much of the money thrown towards the arts, whether in faith spaces or not, will skew towards work that is by nature more spiritually anemic. When finances are at stake, investors tend toward more clearly defined and controllable outcomes.

But what if the promise of the Kingdom is far wilder and uncaged? What if it actually offers windows into the uncontainable magnitude and goodness of the Living God, revealed through his word spoken and incarnate?

Despite all the pits our current tech landscape has dragged us into, it has opened pathways for creators unto Jesus to truly loose their imaginations upon the world. It is not centralized; it is pockets of faithfulness and goodness blooming in cities and living rooms, global kitchens and sanctuaries. And it is forming both up and down the generations.

It’s 2026.

I’m more disillusioned than ever.

I’m also more hopeful than ever.

Joshua Leventhal is an American-born, Canadian-raised recording artist who currently resides in Vancouver, BC. He is married to a fellow creative, the love of his life—Kaitlyn Rose, who is a full-time abstract painter. His album “All Ye Lepers” (2022), won the Canadian GMA Covenant Awards for Song of the Year (The Gallows) and Album of the year. Josh is passionate about the possibilities that exist within storytelling and the holy tension that is played out in every human story. His next project “Tapiseri” is a three volume work that focuses on the grand story of the Bible. Expect Vol. I in the coming months. Outside of music, Josh is an avid fan of classic movies, their dog Luna, and Jiu-Jitsu.

You were born in the United States but have lived in Canada your whole life. Where were you born and what was it like growing up in Canada?

I was born in Texas — the Dallas–Fort Worth area — but neither of my parents are originally from there. They met in school, and my dad was doing his graduate studies in Texas when they had me. We then moved from Texas to Saskatchewan, right in the middle of Canada. It’s basically the Iowa of Canada — very prairie. We moved there when I was little when my dad accepted a senior pastor role at a small church plant. My dad is a professional illusionist in addition to being in ministry, so we spent a lot of summers touring in the US. The thing I love about the prairies is that people have zero pretense — they’re very personable and humble. And I think boredom breeds creativity unlike anything else. I actually didn’t discover that in myself until later, but I think what triggered my imagination was simply that there’s not a ton to do in the flatlands. That brought out a pretty rich inner world.

Before music, what did you find yourself filling your time with?

I was a huge literature and film nerd — those two things were my go-to’s. I loved science too; I was a massive dinosaur kid. But really I was deeply into books and fantasy. I loved movies, and not just age-appropriate stuff. When I was around twelve I watched Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey because I knew it was important. I was getting VHS tapes from the library — Bridge on the River Kwai, films like that — things I knew meant something. I still watched James Bond and all the fun ‘80s and ‘90s action films, but I really enjoyed more cerebral material as well.

Your dad was an illusionist. What was it like watching him balance ministry and something that might seem very different from it?

He actually became an illusionist before he became a Christian. Once he did, he started incorporating the gospel into his show and making it a part of ministry. As a kid I didn’t realize how good he was at presenting the gospel — how clear and un-cheesy he was about it — until I started seeing gospel presentations that really weren’t very good. He would include his testimony as well. He did a lot of corporate work, but we were also heavily involved in the conference scene in the US — early Passion events, a big one called Youth Evangelism Conference in Texas and various parts of the South. His illusion work and his ministry were really one and the same. When he became a pastor he had to raise his own salary, so everything was interconnected. It gave me a very unromantic picture of what touring is, long before I ever got into the music world.

How has being a citizen of two places shaped the way you see the world?

I’ve always felt it’s important to keep my feet in both places. My wife Kaitlyn and I are both that way — we need to qualify things with nuance. Over time, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve really started to love the Canadian identity and feel very fortunate to be a child of both. When I was younger I thought I’d want to live in the States; as I’ve gotten older I’ve loved living in Canada more and more. But my wife is American — she’s from Michigan — so we go every year regardless. I think part of this is just my personality. I always struggle to be just one thing, and that comes down even to my national identity.

You mentioned moving to Calgary and discovering music there. Tell me that story.

Not only was I not musical as a kid — I didn’t even really care about music. I hadn’t found anything I truly loved yet. As a kid we took piano lessons, and I hated it. It felt completely divorced from anything meaningful, and there was nothing incentivizing me to suffer through the muscle memory. So as soon as I could quit, I did.

When we moved to Alberta, the youth group I joined had some really good friends who introduced me to music I’d never heard before. They were all learning guitar, bass, and drums. I started taking guitar lessons from a woman who taught me a few chords and how to strum. She also taught me how to play a worship song with those chords — one that moved me pretty quickly. That motivated me to keep learning and get better. And because of my personality, even though I hadn’t thought of myself as particularly creative before, I immediately felt this need to write.

I’d always enjoyed writing prose and poetry in school, so I just started songwriting — I assumed that’s what every musician did. As I got older and started honing both sides of the craft, I began to realize that not everyone does the writing part, and I thought, okay, maybe this is something I really want to press into.

At what point did you realize, ‘Okay, I have something here. I should actually pursue this vocationally?’

David Crowder was a huge influence on me at the time. What was specific about him was that he was very experimental with form and approach while still writing music squarely unto Jesus — he was breaking a lot of rules but still using them. And he was doing it while working in a local church context and simultaneously writing for the global church and touring. That felt like the dream. As I got later into high school, I started feeling a very specific call to ministry — that’s how I wanted to do it. Over time that’s evolved.

After about a decade of doing both local ministry and my own music, my stuff started to grow and gain momentum. It was taking more energy, and at some point I had to make a decision to press into it fully. I still consider it ministry. I’m just not a worship director anymore. But the core of it has been the same: I want to write music that helps people encounter Jesus. It’s not just a time thing — it’s a capacity thing.

What do you find compelling about the path you’re on now that maybe you couldn’t fully embrace through congregational music?

One of the things that’s really changed — and I don’t know if this is true across all church contexts, but in what I was experiencing — is that there are far more established genre conventions for what worship music is now than there were when I first started. The parameters have tightened considerably. What I feel like I’m doing now is capturing not just a human experience in the abstract, but the experience of humanity as it encounters the divine. That’s the space I want to live in, and it doesn’t always fit neatly into a congregational format.

How does your art allow you to speak to our encounter with the Divine?

I think I’ve discovered over time that I’m also a teacher at heart, which has shaped how I approach storytelling in music. Sound is uniquely suited to reach people at a level that bypasses the defenses they put up when they feel like they’re being lectured or preached at. A song can sit with someone in grief or joy or confusion and say, ‘Me too,’ without demanding anything from them. That ‘me too’ quality is, I think, how a lot of spiritual encounters begin — through recognition rather than proposition.

Is that why storytelling is so central to your music?

Yeah, absolutely. Stories are at the core of what it means to be human. We’ve always made sense of existence through narrative. And I think today in particular, people are starved for honest stories — not tidy resolutions, but real ones that hold tension. Scripture is full of that kind of honesty, and I find it endlessly generative.

Why do you think stories are especially important right now?

I think we’ve entered an era where people are more resistant than ever to being told what to think, and rightly so in a lot of ways. But they’re still desperate to feel understood. Story is one of the few vehicles that can do that without triggering resistance. A good story doesn’t argue with you — it just opens a door and invites you in. And if the story is honest, if it doesn’t flinch from darkness or complexity, then the moments of light inside it carry enormous weight.

When we first connected back in February, you shared something that resonated deeply with me — this idea that the church has fallen short of meaningfully engaging with culture, including “an anemic understanding of art.” Tell me more about what you mean by that.

I think there’s been something in the blood of Protestants, because Protestantism was born out of a rejection of tradition that wasn’t leading unto life. Some of that rejection has resulted in a tremendous ignorance of church history, of Christian thought, and of Christian art — despite the fact that Christian art was at the forefront of culture for literally millennia.

What I mean by an anemic understanding of art is that most of it in the modern evangelical tradition is purely utilitarian. We’re making movies that present gospel narratives, but oftentimes they’re stilted; the characters don’t breathe, there’s no richness to their interior lives. We often don’t let beauty exist for its own sake. There’s a saying — [CS] Lewis has paraphrased it — that the way to honor the genius of God isn’t necessarily to put a cross on every shoe if you’re a shoemaker; it’s to make the most excellent shoes. When we treat art as purely utilitarian — when we insist the vehicle doesn’t matter, only what it’s carrying — we actually damage what we’re trying to carry, because we’re trying to bypass people’s humanity when we actually need to meet it.

I want to be able to represent opposing views accurately and fairly — not try to diminish or distort them. I find it funny that many believers are proclaim to have the truth while simultaneously being terrified of it being tested. The truth isn’t breakable. You shouldn’t be afraid of being confronted with challenging art or different views.

For example, I released a song a couple years ago called ‘Nosferatu’ (Listen, here). It mixes communion imagery with vampire imagery and explores the idea of what Dallas Willard called ‘vampire Christians.’ That is, people who just want a little bit of the blood without any of the cost of life in Christ. It uses strong imagery. I never got pushback on the song itself, but when I shared about the Christian origins of Halloween, I got a Facebook comment from someone upset that I had called it a Christian holiday. And I just thought: you don’t have to celebrate it, but you can’t deny what its origins are.

Christmas and Halloween are both places where secular and pagan understanding has deeply mingled with Christian thought, and wisdom means actually learning those things. Not to just spout them off, but to ask, ‘How do we reckon with this? What does it mean to know where one thing ends and the other begins?’

Art invites us into imagination and space. I think a good question to regularly ask yourself is: When was the last time I changed my mind about anything? If you haven’t, it’s probably not because you have everything figured out. Something’s missing. I get genuinely excited when I realize I might have been wrong about something, because that means there’s more to learn. And I think art is one of the most powerful invitations into that posture.

Your wife is also an artist. What’s it been like being married to a fellow creative whose medium is different from yours?

It’s been remarkable. I never expected marriage to a fellow creative to be a need. But now I struggle to imagine what it could possibly be like without it. What’s really rich is that we share so many bedrock things about creativity oriented toward Jesus — principles that work for storytellers regardless of medium — while at the same time our mediums are completely different. I work with sound; she works with visual. She’s helped enormously on the visual side of my work since we’ve been married, and just recently, with her most recent exhibition, my music became a companion to her work — which has been a gift. I love being in the wings cheering her on and contributing to what she’s doing.

That exhibit is Echoes of the Garden?

Yes. The concept draws from a Victorian-era practice called floriography — a language built around the inherent meaning of specific flowers. Her idea was to create a painting for each month of the year, assembling flowers according to their meanings and exploring what they collectively expressed. Each month is almost like a place in a garden. She started out as a hyper-realistic, representational painter and has moved into abstraction over time, and this collection blends the two.

A gallery space inside a church in Vancouver approached her about showing the collection. The show has been up for almost two months now and runs through June. On opening night I played live music, and we also created a companion playlist of my music to accompany the works.

I’ve also noticed that your journey to becoming parents is something you’ve both been vulnerable about publicly. Kaitlyn captured some of that in this collection, didn’t she?

We were trying to have a child basically the entire time she was working on the collection. At the same time, we were in a church context where we felt people weren’t always comfortable with hard things being shared openly, and we were feeling a bit isolated in that. Kaitlyn was experiencing it so deeply that she wanted people to know what we were walking through. Last Mother’s Day she shared publicly that we’d been trying for a while with no results. She poured that into the paintings and the companion writing she does for each piece. She was very tender in how she used language to hold both grief and hope in the same breath.

And just before she finished the collection, we found out we were expecting our first child. She actually completed the final pieces while in her first trimester, sick as can be, scrambling to finish everything. This past Mother’s Day looked very different for us — beautifully different — but we’re deeply aware of everyone for whom that day is complicated, because it has been for us. Part of our ministry isn’t just through the work we create but through the words we share alongside it.

Do you have a favorite piece in the collection?

I adore January. I adore March. And December. Those three are probably my favorites, but I love them all. I’ve always been bad with favorites. January, though — there’s something about it that has lovingly haunted me from the beginning. It was the first one she completed, and it’s always been close to me.

You have the first volume of “Tapiseri” coming out soon. Tell me about it.

Tapiseri is a Greek transliteration of the word ‘tapestry.’ The project is essentially the entirety of Scripture told through first-person, point-of-view narrative songs. It’s going to be three volumes total. I’m trying to trace the narrative movements, the thematic arcs, of God’s entire story. Sometimes we zoom in close on a specific moment; other times we zoom way out and entire books, whole centuries, are covered in a single song.

My hope is that this would help people engage with Scripture’s contours in ways they maybe haven’t before — not just an awareness of a moment, but sitting with what it actually means, what its layers are, and what it’s saying within the greater story.

The visual component is something Kaitlyn and I landed on together. She had this idea of creating a piece made up of individual mosaic tiles that all work independently but together form one complete image. So each single we’ve released so far has its own tile, and she’s working on assembling the full piece. The complete image won’t be revealed until all three volumes are out.

I’m also working on a companion devotional experience that will al

low people to sit with the art, the lyrics, and the music all together — kind of taking the vinyl experience to another level. I’ve been ideating on this for a very long time, and I’m deeply excited about where it’s going.

Find Josh’s new single, “Union” featuring Tenielle Neda streaming on all platforms (on Spotify, here). “Tapiseri Volume I” will be released in the coming months!

I rubbed my eyes raw until the phosphenes appeared. Blinding as the sun trapped behind eyelids, a halo spoke softly that I was okay. Marked. Claimed. Secure. When the floor of my anxiety finally gave way, my dreams would tell me otherwise. An empty house. A dead phone line. An apocalyptic blood orange haze peering through the blinds. I had been left behind…and they were coming.

The first scary movies I saw were apocalyptic. Gary Busey’s Tribulation. The Omega Code1. Kirk Cameron’s Left Behind. All of these films had one thing in common: a terror-induced cortisol shot that served as a warning. Be in right standing with God or else. No. It wasn’t the greatest parenting move to allow a nine year old to watch biblically inspired, judgement day horror. But, when it came to preparing for the end of the world, exceptions had to be made.

My parents were caught up in the charismatic renewal in the 70’s and 80’s. During those years, charismatic theology moved like wildfire across the States. It claimed acreage in both Protestant and Catholic circles. Alongside this was an increased interest in eschatology — that is, a fancy seminary word for “the last things” or “end times.” The world seemed to be on fire. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear weapons. The failure of American exceptionalism in Vietnam. Gas Prices. Unrest in the Middle East. The list goes on. Everything it seemed was speeding toward a tipping point.

No book was more consequential during these years than Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. Hal claimed that the Bible had all the answers as to why everything was happening. Hidden in the biblical text were prophecies concerning this generation. The world was moving at break-neck speed toward Judgement Day and the second coming of Christ. All the players were set: Egypt, Russia, China, and Israel. Get ready.

Lindsey’s book was wildly successful at influencing major parts of American culture. It inspired the cult horror classic The Omen. A documentary was released narrated by the legendary Orson Welles (watch the trailer, here). Historian Crawford Gribben notes that its impact may have been even more significant outside of Hollywood. He writes that Linsdey’s book, “set a pattern for the shape of the political re-engagement of American evangelicals” and even “exercised enormous influence” in the Reagan administration. Which, isn’t too surprising when you consider the enemies Hal wrote about were the same ones threatening the United States.

Hal’s predictions never quite materialized in the way he envisioned in his bestseller. Jesus didn’t come back in the eighties. The antichrist didn’t reveal himself. No one was raptured away. Lindsey did start a television show though. And, he published a magazine. Both found their way into our living room in the 90’s. And so, terrified I rubbed my eyes raw until the phosphene appeared.

What if I was out of favor with God? What if I was left behind? What if I had this whole thing wrong?

I find myself thinking more and more about the end of the world these days. I do because the world feels dark. Apocalyptic. That blood orange haze creeps in from the recesses of my haunted imagination. The same voices that were around in the eighties are finding new audiences to tell about the end. Like then, it’s understandable. Historians have noted the similarities between these years and the unrest decades before. Unfathomable loss in the middle east. Ukraine and Russia. The lingering effects of the pandemic. Gas prices. Strong partisan division. The supposed promise and inevitable threat of artificial intelligence. It makes sense that human beings would find themselves looking for answers. There is something I think Hal Lindsey, and others like him, got wrong about the end though.

It is a tender heart that is found at the end of the world. The book of Revelation, in Greek known as the “Apokalypsis of John”, isn’t actually a book. It’s a letter. A word of encouragement to early Christians experiencing significant suffering in the face of the Roman empire. The word, Apokalypsis (ἀποκάλυψις), doesn’t mean ‘judgement day’ or ‘the end of the world,’ it means “to unveil” or “reveal something that was hidden.” This letter was written to encourage Christians to hold on in the face of great harm. What is most encouraging to their injustice, is God’s justice. That in the end, all things would be made right.

I find this encouraging because, if I’m honest, I do not know how to metabolize current events in our world today. I cannot reconcile the things I see in my newsfeed with how I believe people should be treated, or the opportunities that I believe should be there for all image-bearers. But, what I do see threaded throughout the bible is that God’s justice walks with the brokenhearted, the disenfranchised, and the hurting. I take comfort that the story ends with the author saying, “He [God] will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed.”2

And so, I hold hope.

Kevin Schlereth is a touring folk-nomad hailing from the Midwest. After an unexpected religious encounter when he was 17 – something he enjoys talking about with hospitable caution – he sensed that he should make music for God. However, he didn’t know anything about God…and he had never played music. Since then, life has been a journey of figuring it out. He has been on tour permanently, or ‘perma-tour’ since 2011. We chatted recently about his experience with the divine, raising a family on the road, and creating safe spaces for people across all spectrums of faith.

You’ve been playing for a while, but at what point were you like, “Music is something I want to pursue”?

I enjoy talking about this, but I kind of hesitate every time because it sounds a little weird and it’s definitely very religious. I had a very unexpected encounter with God when I was 17. I wasn’t looking — I was kind of indifferent towards the idea of religion in general. Anyway, I had this experience, and I got home that night with this sense that I should make music for God. And I was like, I don’t even know anything about God… and I’ve never played music. But that’s sort of been my life’s journey since then — figuring out what that meant and what it looks like to do that.

The fact that it wasn’t my dream helps, honestly — navigating the day in and day out, the ups and downs of touring. If it were my dream, I think I would have become really disenchanted really quickly.

You describe your lifestyle as being on tour permanently, or “on Perma-tour.” How did you determine that full-time touring was for you?

It’s sort of an extension of what we were just talking about. I didn’t know what it meant or what I should be trying to do to make music in this way. I understood that bands went on tour and started to do that. Pretty quickly I figured out two things:

One, I didn’t want to just try to play in bigger and bigger rooms. There was something special that happened in a small room with a number of people whose names you might actually learn. And doing it frequently feels like part of the puzzle.

Second, is logistical. [As an independent artist] If you want to tour at all, your options are to tour a couple weeks a year — save up vacation time and do a little tour — or tour so much that you can’t have another job and don’t have a place to live. Maybe that’s a false dichotomy, but for me those felt like the choices. That’s partly what led us down this path.

So much of the purpose behind playing music for me feels tied up in ongoing relationships — traveling frequently enough that you can see people once or twice a year. We’ve been going to some places for close to 20 years now, growing with people over time, seeing how they’re changing, seeing how we’re changing, seeing what God is up to in their lives and in the world. It’s really special.

I never set out to be on “perma-tour” exactly, but I really love what it affords in terms of those relationships. We last paid to live somewhere in 2011. That summer we left for a tour — the Google spreadsheet name was “the never-ending tour” — and we’ve sort of been doing that since then. There were some hiccups with COVID, and we had two more kids in that time, but even with the kids, we only took a total of a four-month break each time. It really has felt like we’re on that never-ending tour still.

How have you balanced the lifestyle of traveling and playing music while raising a family?

It’s been such a great way to have a family. My wife and I both liked the idea of one of us staying home with the kids, not sending them to daycare. We both wanted that job — to be the one staying with the kids. This life of traveling really afforded me a chance to be with my kids more than if I were working a 9-to-5.

For homeschooling, I love that we tour because homeschool kids can sometimes get into really insular bubbles, not seeing anyone else and not hearing any other perspectives. For our kids, seeing and hearing all these different perspectives every night — different artists, different people from different walks of life, different regional experiences, different cultural and ethnic backgrounds — they’ve grown up with a really well-rounded experience of what the world is like.

My daughter starts college in the fall and ended up with a full-ride scholarship, in part because of her excellent academics and SAT score, but I think they really loved her essay. Her essay basically detailed why she would be an asset to that college campus — because of this unique experience she’s had and the perspective it brings.

I should say, you could do touring in a way that was really hard for families. We do it in a way that’s really easy for families. A normal day looks like a three-to-six hour drive where we’re doing school in the van, and then we show up to the host house around dinnertime. We have dinner with them, set up for the show, the show starts at seven, and it’s over at 8:30. When the kids were little, they could go to bed before the show ended if they wanted to, because we were just sleeping at that house. Everything about the way we travel is really friendly to families.

I have friends who do longer drives, playing venues where load-in is early afternoon, sound check is mid-afternoon, the show isn’t over until midnight, and then they have to wait around to get paid out. You couldn’t do that with kids.

So part of it is just the way we’re doing it makes it work. Ten out of ten, would recommend.

How do you balance being a dad and a husband while still having those responsibilities?

There’s definitely a lot to learn. I mentioned wanting to be with my kids. There’s a real difference between being physically present with someone and being emotionally and mentally present with someone. That’s something we really had to work through — yeah, “dad’s always around, but he’s not really ever around,” because he’s doing other things, thinking about work, handling booking, all that invisible work. Just learning how to be intentional with time with my family.

Was there a moment where that became a reality for you — where you realized the need to shift from being physically present to being actually present?

I don’t know if I could pinpoint a specific time. Pretty early on I started realizing it — having conversations with my older kids and them just saying, “You haven’t hung out with us.” And I’m like, I’m here. But they were right.

Honestly, it’s still an ongoing thing. The last few years I’ve taken on a leadership role at Audiofeed Festival, and that’s created a whole new set of challenges — fighting for time where I’m just present, just being dad.

Presence is something you value—with your family and with those who experience your music. In a typical year you’re in hundreds of homes across the country. What do you notice being in that many living rooms?

The thing that jumps to the front of my mind is just how lonely our world is. I feel like everyone is starting to see this — how we’re so connected and simultaneously so disconnected. You see people who are really attention-starved, and affection-starved, in the most positive sense of those words.

Life feels really hard for a lot of people, and these little windows of intentionality — just getting quiet for a second, thinking about the music, then engaging with one another in conversation — it feels like it’s meeting this really big need, or sometimes illuminating the need. Maybe you don’t even understand what you’re missing, and then you’re like, oh. When was the last time I sat in a room full of people and met someone, or had a real conversation?

I tend to talk about this at shows a lot recently. The act of showing up to a house concert is a kind of bold thing in our current reality. Everything is telling you to guard your time, not give it to anyone, not risk it on something you don’t know will give you the dopamine hit. And showing up to hear some random guy sing songs — risking having to talk to someone — I think the people that come to the shows are doing something kind of revolutionary. It’s really been on my mind lately, just how important it is, and also how everything is nudging you gently downstream away from it. Like, nah, just go home and doom scroll. You’ll like that more. It’s easier.

It sounds like the house show is almost the antidote to our isolated, anxious society.

Yeah, I really think so. It’s almost like exposure therapy. This might be a relatively modern concept, but I think the idea that being with people is draining is something we’ve learned. There’s a little bit of unlearning that happens at a house show. It’s like, oh, actually — this wasn’t scary or bad. That’s my hope.

I get the tension of it. As someone who, especially growing up, really desired to not be seen— that “don’t see me” mentality — I understand the challenge it could be for some folks to make it to a house show and feel comfortable. But I really do think that when you push through that initial discomfort, what you find on the other end is something enriching and healing

What has that experience of traveling and being in so many different spaces taught you broadly — about people, about our country, our cultural moment?

The thing I take the most encouragement from is this: if you based your perception of reality on what you read online, the world feels so dark and so angry. But I find it really encouraging that you can get in a room with someone — even someone you maybe saw say some crazy stuff online — and it’s just so humanizing to be in a space together. It gives me real hope that people aren’t really being themselves when they’re falling into the internet’s engine of rage. People still do like to get to know one another, and you can have nuanced conversations in real life that are totally inaccessible on the internet.

And then there’s just the regional texture across the country — the different vibes, what people are about in the Pacific Northwest versus elsewhere, their specific set of challenges. In a faith context, what’s going on in their faith expression here, and being able to come around with some knowledge of that from being there before — I hope to have something specific to speak into their situation.

We find that beauty tends to be an entry point into meaningful encounters — not just with each other, but with the good and the true. What do you hope someone takes away from an encounter with your music?

My biggest hope is that my music would give someone an entry point to consider God in a way they haven’t before. I have the privilege of playing in front of both devout Christians and people who are hostile or anti-Christian. Wherever people are coming from, everyone is bringing some kind of baggage, some lens through which they’re viewing scripture and God. I really hope to just kind of disarm that and present something that makes a person want to look into it themselves, or think, I never thought about it that way.

For instance, I was once playing an album about grief and the experience of walking with a loved one toward an imminent death (You can listen to “Lenten Songs,” here). Most of the album is through the lens of the disciples of Christ — knowing at some point that he was going to die, and the way that foreknowledge shaped how they spent time together. If you’ve ever spent time with a terminal patient, you know those times are bittersweet, influenced and informed by the diagnosis. The number of people who have come up to me and said, “Hey, I hate everything about God, but I never thought about the disciples as people — never thought about them having emotions, this real human side to this very spiritual and divine story” — that’s just an example of things I get to do every day, which is really awesome.

Sometimes well-meaning, devout Christians will tell me I shouldn’t apologize when I’m playing — because I do. I’ll kind of acknowledge that some of what I’m about to share is stuff people didn’t necessarily sign up to hear. And I’ll say something like, “I’m about to unload a lot of spiritual content on you, and I hope it’s happening in a way that’s not harmful, that isn’t asking anything of you. I just want to tell the story, and you can do whatever you will with it.”

I don’t apologize because I’m ashamed. I’m acknowledging that you might not have opted into this, or might not have understood you were opting into this. And honestly, anyone who’s willing to really listen and really think about what you have to say is doing you an incredible kindness. Acknowledging that — no one owed me anything tonight — feels right to me. I hope people get a chance to be a little disarmed and think about this God stuff in a way they maybe haven’t before.

What I hear you saying is that by naming that tension, you’re giving somebody an opportunity to interact with something outside of our partisan moment — outside the tension of their story, whatever it might be. There’s something beautiful to that.

Yeah. Just a couple weeks ago, a guy came up to me after a show and said, “You’re the first person I’ve heard say something good about Christianity in years.” And I was like, whoa. I’m sure there are people in his sphere who are pro-Christianity, but they must be saying it in a way he can’t hear. Something about the way it was presented allowed him to put his guard down and just listen. That meant a lot.

That’s awesome. I know you also get to see that play out in a much larger setting through your role at Audiofeed Festival. How do you see it work there?

Audiofeed is a trip! I started out as a fan, then as a performer, then as a volunteer, and now I run it. That whole journey was crazy. The previous leadership team had really developed a community of people who had landed in all these different places around who Jesus is and what you do with him — but with this mutual respect and willingness to engage the questions. They had created this real third-space feeling. A very Christian context, but with this genuine openness. When the opportunity came to take on a major leadership role, I had to do it, even though I felt like I had no time to commit to it.

It’s so in line with what I hope my house concerts are like, and so antithetical to the way the world is pushing us. It feels like this last bastion of hope — that people can get together when they don’t agree, not by shoving all their thoughts and opinions down and not talking about it, but actually sharing. People coming from places of deconstruction, deconversion, all of it. It’s not all roses — it can be hard, it doesn’t always work. There are people who don’t strongly feel the value of it. But by and large, I really do think it’s something special, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it going away.

I actually just played in Oregon a couple days ago, and had a good friend there who is an ex-believer. The other performers were getting up there as if everyone in the room was, not only a Christian, but a pretty conservative Christian. And I was just like — do you really assume that? I never go into a space assuming everyone agrees on everything.

That happens more often than you’d think. If you’re surrounded by like-minded friends, you just assume everyone is on the same side. The amount of public conversation that’s just dunking on the other side — especially when you genuinely don’t know what the people around you believe — is really something.

Audiofeed feels like we’ve got something really important going on there.

What would you tell somebody who wanted to cultivate that kind of space?

I think one of the biggest things is to be gentle, and say the quiet part out loud. Those two things don’t go together very often — we’re either gentle and avoidant, or loud and combative. Say things gently. That’s how you help people feel like they can be themselves and also engage with the important stuff.

So you’re about to embark on a self-booked world tour. Audiofeed is the launching pad. Chris Bernstorff is going to be joining you. Tell me about it.

Chris and Amanda will be joining us — they’re dear friends. Amanda, Chris’s wife, has a project called Visitor Pass. We’re excited to be planning to spend a year with them going to all these different places, starting in Europe.

I’m really excited for Europe. It’s particularly interesting to me for the reasons we’ve been talking about. I’m curious whether my approach — trying to get people to put fresh eyes on the Bible — works there. It’s such a post-Christian world. Are they post-Christian enough that it’s totally forgotten? I really don’t know, but I’m excited to go find out. And just getting to spend all that time with Chris and Amanda is going to be really special.

How can people support you through this?

So many ways. If you’re a praying person, that is probably the most valuable thing. My touring philosophy is steeped in the idea of gifts and givenness. We generally don’t charge for the shows and we don’t charge for merch. We want the money we receive to be from people genuinely want to give. We believe God is our provision.

While we’re traveling in the US, we have very low overhead and we’ve gotten very comfortable trusting that process. The Europe trip — not gonna lie, if anyone has a truckload of money and wants to back us up, we wouldn’t say no. We just believe it’s going to work.

But beyond that, just spreading the word, coming to see us if we’re coming where you are. And I’ll say this — I know people hear me say it at shows and think, yeah right, the real gift is a financial gift. But I genuinely mean it: the gift of someone’s time and intention is incredible. It’s so kind. I hope people would consider coming to see us, or booking a show if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind inviting 20 people into your living room.

In the Minnesota winter, as the temperatures enter negative digits, you somewhat stop seeing your neighbors. Of course, you dig them out when their car gets stuck, and you take turns shoveling each other’s sidewalks. But mostly it’s just hibernation, like a self-imposed quarantine.

What happens, I find, is that in the springtime there is a great relational thaw. As the snow melts and the lightweight jackets come out of the closet, you start bumping into your neighbors again, on a walk or in the alley. You reconnect and see them, see their faces. It’s in that moment of seeing my neighbor’s face again, that we share a rush of excitement and earnestly ask, “How have you been?”

Beauty writer Valerie Monroe incisively asks, “What’s a face for?” She says, “The face is so important to our social fabric that there’s an area of the brain—called the fusiform face area—devoted exclusively to decoding it. It is our face that identifies us as a person alive and with presence.”1

An Icy Winter

We need to see and be seen by each other. Not only to contribute to a mutually beneficial society (although there is that), but also to give and receive care and belonging.

Without that we spiral into depression and brutal individualism, and into an affliction of being without the other. This need scales from neighborhood to state, national, and international communities, too. However, many of the loudest voices in our world try to convince us that it is in our best interest to do the opposite. They say we should retreat from one another, or worse, label and exile an “other.”

Mother Teresa once said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” It is self evident to me that the chaos in our world stems from this lack of being-with the other, or a lack of true neighboring.

In Minneapolis, where I live, we experienced a very different and disruptive winter as many of our neighbors were accosted, detained, and brutalized by ICE agents. They were stopped in their schools, grocery stores, homes, and places of worship. It has been destabilizing to our whole community with wide-ranging ripple effects.

The Parable of the Good Neighbor

In Luke 10, we read that Jesus was sought out by a religious expert about how to obtain eternal life. The man does not easily accept Jesus’s answer: love God and love your neighbor. Instead, he asks, “And who is my neighbor?” We are told that he asks this question “wanting to vindicate himself.” Perhaps if Jesus could more clearly define neighbor as the people he liked, or the people he already wanted to love (or be loved by), he could walk away feeling a little bit more at ease.

Jesus’s response, of course, is not intended to putting the man at ease. He turns the question back to the man with a story—a story involving a cultural other at the center. It is the Samaritan who does the good work of neighboring as he looks after a victim of mistreatment and abuse.

It is significant that neighboring is an active idea here. For Jesus, being a neighbor is not a matter of proximity, but a matter of doing and moving. Whether the priest or the Levite lived in the same community as the beaten man is not important. What matters is neither of them acted in a neighboring sort of way.

Jesus transforms the original question of “Who is my neighbor?” into “Who is the good neighbor?” The implication is personal: Am I being a good neighbor?

As my city was descended upon by masked agents armed with military-grade weapons, I experienced the same question being asked of me. Who is my neighbor? Not in theory, but in practice. What are their names? Their stories? Where are they from? What are they feeling and experiencing? What do they need?

Do I know them?

As I watched many people, churches and neighborhoods begin to organize care for families in crisis, this question rose to the surface for me. Who is my neighbor? And, as I reached out to people who I knew were vulnerable, I also recognized the limits of my personal connections. I needed to discover and participate in the networks and systems around me.

For example, there is a woman in my church that is well connected to a lot of families in our refugee and immigrant communities. She knows their specific needs and was able to pass that information on to others. Through her network, I was able to meet the owners of a local Hispanic grocery store whose business had taken a huge loss because of the chaos. They needed extra volunteers to bring food deliveries to families sheltering in place. Volunteers were able to both to provide groceries for people who were afraid to leave home, and also to sustain their hurting business. Only when we know our neighbors can we participate in the work of neighboring.

The Burden that Lifts Us

Our American culture is not shaped around neighborhoods or communities. It is largely built around the individual. We are often drawn away from the people we should be in community with, and into ourselves and our own concerns. As a father and husband, it’s easy to even let good concerns like family distract me from my role as a neighbor. But I want my kids to grow up knowing that true flourishing happens when we give ourselves away.

Gabrielle Clowdus, the CEO of Settled, said, “At the end of the day, who is looking our neighbors in the eye and saying, ‘You’re of great value’? Looking at them with awe, and delight, and wonder, and saying ‘I’m so glad to be with you’?”2

I want to bear the burden of being a good neighbor, because I know it is part of the easy burden that Christ extends to us. And because I know I need it too. It is the kind of burden that can lift us up.

Tyler Stitt is a Michigan native currently residing just outside of Minneapolis, MN. As a resident of the Davis House through most of our show years, he now occasionally hosts music in his own living room and writes music under the name Iconium. Life is mostly filled with time spent with loved ones, his wife and two boys. You can find him somewhere between chasing tickets to Thrice or The Beths, and a thrilling D&D campaign. He currently leads worship at Church of the Cross.

Tell me about yourself. You’ve been recording and playing music for a number of years now. You’re from Tulsa. How’d you discover your passion for music?

What really got me into playing music was my dad. My mom and dad owned a shoe store growing up called Felt Shoes. His saying was, “Where your new shoes never felt so good,” which is hilarious. But back in the day stores would have window displays for a couple months of the year. Doc Martens sent stuff for a window display, and one of the things they sent was this white Fender Stratocaster—just to sit in the window.

Normally you’d have it up for the agreed upon time, then put everything back in the box and mail it back. But the rep for Doc Martens was like, “Hey, if you guys want to keep the guitar, just feel free to keep it.” It was a cheap little Mexican strat, but it was honestly awesome.

So my dad brought it home and gave it to me. I was like 11 or 12. I’d kind of been wanting to learn. I had taken piano lessons as a kid and was decent at it, but I just hated practicing—I was the classic kid annoyed about it.

But I had a friend, Josh, that started teaching me guitar, then I got some lessons from another friend named Patrick Triple, and it was just history after that. I’ve been playing ever since. I think I started lessons when I was 12 or 13. Now I’m 33.

I started writing songs later—I didn’t always write. I grew up playing on my worship team at church, played bass for a while, and then I started actually writing music about 10 years ago. I’ve only really been recording and releasing for about 4 years now.

What was that turn that made you think, “I’m going to move from just writing to actually recording and releasing my own music”?

I had been trying to write for a while. I’d written some stuff with different friends and I’d always wanted to release my own stuff—I think I was just kind of scared to. I was a worship pastor for a long time, so I didn’t really have the ability to do it because I was just super busy working at the church. After I left, from around 2020 to 2022, I was writing a bunch of music because I had this new kind of freedom. I think I was finally allowing myself to believe that I actually could do it.

Releasing music is kind of scary—it’s such a personal thing when you write a song and then you’re putting it out into the void of the internet. But now I kind of love it. It took me a while to get there.

I have a friend named Jonathan Fiery who’s like a brother to me, kind of a mentor. Years ago he helped me record some songs in his house. He’d always been a big encourager of me having a career in music. After I left the church, I reconnected with Jonathan and his wife Alison, and he was just super supportive—”You should be writing music, you’re a great writer.” Honestly, I’m really thankful for people like him who encouraged me to put music out.

And my wife Holly has always been really supportive. She knew it was something I wanted to do. Having that support from friends and my wife was just a huge help.

Do you remember what that experience was like when your first song went live on streaming platforms?

It was kind of terrifying. The first day I released it, I’d never done that before, so it was this weird feeling to be like, “This is out now.” I had a great community around me that was super supportive. That’s one great thing about releasing music nowadays—it’s so easy for people to share.

But release days are always kind of funny, because sometimes we just build things up in our heads—we have expectations even if we don’t voice them. Those first few releases, I was probably in a kind of bummed mood the day after, because you’re like, “Oh, I’m not being discovered,” or whatever dumb idea you have in your head. That’s not how it works.

But what’s been amazing about releasing music—the first song I ever released was called “Madness.” I’ve had so many people, from literally around the world, connect with me over that song, even with the small amount of streams I had. I still get messages about it every now and then. That song was about my journey with my faith in God. It came out in 2023, right after COVID, and I feel like everyone—especially in the Christian world—was on their own journey in their faith. It’s been cool to see how that song has spoken to people.

I don’t even play it live that much anymore, but I do love the song. It’s my daughter’s favorite song, which is kind of great. She’s about to turn 6, and for the past couple years, when we put her to bed, we always sing a song. She’d ask for “Madness” and I was like, I feel so ridiculous singing my own song to my daughter—like some egotistical loser. But honestly, that means the world. I did a show once at this local studio called the Church Studio here in Tulsa. She came, and that was one of the songs we did. I looked out and just saw her singing every word. I was just kind of crying. That means more to me than anything.

I remember listening to “Madness”—I can totally see how it’s connected with people. The lyrics, “I’m not really sad but I ain’t happy, somewhere in between, like a homesick traveler in a hotel bar”—I know so many people for whom that’s been a felt experience.

Thanks so much, man. That lyric—I really wasn’t sure about it. So much of my songwriting journey involves me thinking, “Is this stupid?” Even the day we recorded it, I remember asking my friend Sam Westhoff and Jesse Purdue—Sam produced it, Jesse helped produce it—I was asking them, “Is this just a stupid lyric?” And they basically said, “Who cares? It’s what you wrote, just record it.” And so I went with it. But it was how I felt when I wrote the song. That’s just part of being a new writer—you’re trying to figure out what you’re trying to say.

It’s funny—how often we try to find the most artistic, poetic way to say something, but its the simple way that is often enough.

Absolutely. I’m a big fan of John Moreland—he’s one of my favorite writers. He’s like a poet, but sometimes he’ll say something that cuts straight to the heart and it’s just so moving. At that time, I was really trying to emulate writers like him and my friend Andy Squyres—people who can just write really powerfully. Now I’m kind of moving away from that in a way, because I’m not sure that’s exactly what my strengths are, but I am so inspired by that kind of writing.

You mentioned Andy Squyres and John Moreland—who inspires you these days?

Honestly, a lot of my friends. Obviously there are artists I look up to—I love Tom Petty and John Prine, all the classic folk inspirations. I’m a big Randy Newman fan. But I have so many talented friends even just in Tulsa. There’s a buddy of mine named Ramsay Thornton who’s an incredible writer. There’s another friend, Kyle Ross—he has a band called Keeland that’s amazing. Ken Pomeroy is an insane songwriter. And my friend Sam Westhoff has a project called Halfway that’s incredible.

I kind of love any music. I was actually just at a songwriter festival in Stillwater, Oklahoma—there were four amazing songwriters doing a songwriter’s round, and I was just blown away. When someone plays a song they wrote, it’s so personal. You get to hear a piece of a person’s soul when they play a song, as corny as that sounds. I’ve been getting out and hearing live music here in Tulsa and it really does inspire me. Anyone who sits down on a stage and performs something they wrote is brave and creative and I love it.

And honestly, I’ve been watching The West Wing right now.

Such a good show.

It inspires me so much. The writing is incredible. And just reading, taking walks—that’s probably a basic answer, but that’s the truth.

It sounds like Tulsa is really known for folk music and there’s something special going on in Tulsa’s music scene.

Yeah, I really love being here. We have the Woody Guthrie Center and the Bob Dylan Center here in town. There’s a lot of music history here. The Church Studio I mentioned was originally owned by Leon Russell, who’s an incredible musician. I’m kind of new to playing in the Tulsa scene, and I don’t play a ton, but I do love what’s going on here. There are some unbelievable, talented musicians all around. Almost every weekend there’s somewhere you can go hear incredible music.

Tulsa gets overlooked a lot because people just think of Oklahoma as a flyover state, but it’s really incredible. It’s very diverse and there’s just so much going on—a lot of art and music. It’s beautiful. I really don’t ever want to leave, to be honest. Which is funny, because when I was growing up I always wanted to get out of here like crazy. Now I’m like, why did I ever want to leave?

That’s actually why I was at that festival yesterday in Stillwater. There’s a really cool thing in Oklahoma called the Red Dirt Relief Fund—it’s a nonprofit set up to help the music scene in Oklahoma. They host a contest called the Jimmy LaFave Songwriting Contest. Jimmy LaFave was an incredible Oklahoma artist and songwriter. He passed some years ago and they started this songwriting contest to honor his legacy.

I was fortunate enough to win both the contest and the people’s choice award. They gave me a thousand dollars and a free day of recording at the Church Studio. The song I won with is called “I Don’t Know How to Write a Song.”

I’ve entered a couple song contests before just because it’s an interesting thing to try, and the worst thing that can happen is you don’t win. I kind of forgot I had even entered. I was really honored by it. More than anything, it was just fun. I got to go out and hear some incredible artists.

What has it meant, seeing people connect with and resonate with your music—especially having started your music career kind of later, in your late twenties?

It means the world. Anytime someone feels a connection to something I’ve written, it’s a crazy feeling, because my goal with songwriting is always to be as truthful and honest as I can about what I’m really feeling in the moment. I just believe that whatever is most personal is most relatable. And when I’m writing a song, I don’t want to be preachy about what I think about life—I just want to share my own experience. So it’s always kind of a wild thing when people are moved by something I’ve written.

It’s really shown me that we’re all exactly the same. We’re all going through the same stuff. That’s what’s so cool about music—it’s this weird, mystical, spiritual thing that connects people. There’s nothing else that connects people the way music does. If you’re at a concert, or at church, singing together with a group of people—it’s a spiritual thing. So when it’s something you wrote and people connect with it, it’s another level. It’s a privilege and an honor.

One of those songs is “Worry Can’t Buy You Love,” which you wrote with Callen Brown. That’s about your brother, right?

Yeah. It’s kind of funny how that song came into the world. Callen and I are buddies—we’ve actually never met in person, only ever Zoomed or FaceTimed, but I love Callen. He’s an unbelievable voice, unbelievable songwriter, incredible guitar player, and he can produce music too.

We had written another song together probably a year or two before, and then I was like, “We need to write again, let’s get it on the calendar.” I had been keeping a note in my phone where I write down phrases I hear. The hardest thing about songwriting is coming up with lyrics that don’t cringe you out, so I started doing this—if I think of something or hear something interesting, I write it down. I’ll steal lines from The West Wing all the time while watching it.

That line, “worry can’t buy you love,” I actually got from Cormac McCarthy. I was reading All the Pretty Horses, and there’s a line where a character says something like, “Scared money can’t win, and worry won’t buy you love.” I was thinking about that for so long. It has this philosophical bend to it that’s really interesting.

So I brought that idea when Callen and I sat down to write. I was talking to him about losing my brother, because it was the start of spring. Winter was about to be over—those days in Oklahoma where it’s kind of cold in the morning and starting to warm up. My brother—we lost him when he was 13 years old. He died by suicide in spring. I believe it was April 6th.

Spring is such a wonderful time. I love when things start to change, the trees start to bloom again, the grass is growing. But for me, every year, there’s this reminder of what that day was when we lost Noah—all the imagery, the pain, the grief that it brings. So it was interesting: I was basically telling Callen about that, and the first line came out of me saying, “I’m sad winter’s gone.” We were kind of laughing, making these lyrics that were like, hearing bluebirds singing and getting mad, being kind of annoyed by it. But then we started talking about my brother, and it started turning into something—subconsciously, I was writing about hating winter’s leaving because it’s a reminder of losing my brother at the start of spring every year.

And I didn’t even have that idea consciously when we were writing. We had maybe a verse or two, and then Callen just kind of mentioned it over a voice note—he was like, “I wonder if you could spin it this way,” because that was what I was trying to say without quite saying it. That’s what’s so cool about co-writing: if you’re writing with a really good writer like Callen, he can take what I’m saying and with his intuition just be like, “I think this is what he’s trying to say.”

That’s what’s fascinating about songwriting—the melody and lyrics together make something feel the way they do. Put them together and it becomes something really special that you couldn’t manufacture.

That’s why I’m not afraid of AI music. I’m annoyed by it—I’m tired of hearing about Suno and all that—but I don’t think it can do what a human spirit can do. There are things that happen in songwriting that you can’t explain. It’s not all just ones and zeros.

It also sounds like this song captures the complexity of grief—it’s not a linear thing, not a step-by-step process. It’s complicated, and it shows itself in the weirdest ways.

Absolutely. My brother has been gone for about 16 years now. Most of the time you don’t think about it, and then something—a memory from childhood—will just spark it, and I’ll just be in tears. It’s kind of always with you. Music is a way to explore that—writing songs for me is a way to dive into those feelings and what’s happening in my subconscious. In a lot of ways, I’m just writing the same song over and over again, different iterations of it.

A lot of my songs are about death, about my personal experiences. But I think the modern world is very focused on what’s immediate, what’s at our fingertips. Groceries delivered in two hours, everything ordered online—and that’s sold to us as what we need, what’s good for humanity. But I look at it and think, I’m trying to invite myself to slow down a little bit, to focus on what’s happening in my heart, to open my eyes to what’s happening in the world and in my spirit.

When I’m actually writing, I’m trying to be more in touch with myself as a human and what it means to be human. Everything is very me-focused right now. So when I’m trying to write songs, I’m looking into my own heart and soul, trying to pull from that—trying to tap into something deeper than just the kind of vain existence we sometimes live.

And that’s what’s interesting about music. It’s such a spiritual thing to play and hear and write music. When I do write, I’m tapping into something deeper than what’s right in front of me. And it can allow other people to have that similar experience, because everyone can enjoy music. In a world that’s vain and self-centered, music is just antithetical to that. It’s love. I believe music comes from God. If God is love, then music is this unique, special expression of love. As corny as that sounds, that’s the truth.

It sounds like music writing for you is a spiritual discipline—whether you’d use that phrase or not. It’s a discipline that’s forming you against the things in our culture that you see as harmful. And I know you’ve mentioned online that you have a goal to write 100 songs this year. Tell me about that goal.

I love it. I mean, I’m a Christian, so for me, these songs are conversations with God—whether I’m specifically writing what you’d categorize as a Christian song or a worship song or not. I feel like it is a conversation with God in a lot of ways. And I do feel very close to God through writing music.

As for the 100 songs—I kind of put that on the internet and then was like, “Why did I do that? That’s huge.” But I do write a lot. I would love to have a publishing deal someday, and part of setting that goal was just pushing myself to keep writing. I may or may not reach it. Last year I wrote close to 60, and not all of those are great songs—that’s the thing about songwriting. You can write 10 songs and maybe one of them is interesting and good.

I’m doing a lot of co-writing right now. I have a deal with a company that represents me for sync music—music for film and TV—and I have a great opportunity to do co-writes with people on that roster. I’ve been trying to do that as often as I can, plus writing locally with friends and artist friends online.

I kind of set that goal because I realized: if I want to have a publishing deal someday and write professionally in that capacity, I should probably start acting like I already have one. The first thing that happens when you get a publishing deal, I’d assume, is you’re just writing a lot more. So it’s been a fun challenge.

I’m learning that every co-write doesn’t always land a finished song, but I’m realizing how valuable it is to spend three or four hours with another artist and hear their worldview, their beliefs, what they think about life. If that ends up with a song, that’s incredible. But if it just ends up as a wonderful conversation with someone also pursuing this, that’s a win to me.

I’ve gotten to connect with so many amazing people virtually. My friend Tom Rhodes in San Francisco—the first time we met, we wrote a song in about an hour and a half that I released called “Master of None.” And then through this company I was connected with another friend, Michael Flynn—he has a project called Slow Runner. We had never met before, we both talked about being dads, I have a daughter, he has a daughter, and we ended up writing this really moving song called “Waitlist” in about an hour and a half. It was birthed out of a conversation versus us trying to drum something up. We were just sharing about our lives.

I’ve also written with Anna Zolpe, Tyler Fortier in Portland, Luke Healy in Hawaii—all across the country, virtually. We get to know each other and then all of a sudden we just write a song. It’s an amazing thing to experience.

You’re planning to release an EP this year. Could you share a little bit about it?

Yeah, absolutely. The EP will be called “I Don’t Know How to Write a Song”—the song that won me that contest is actually the title track. I recorded these songs back in 2024. My friend and I went to Nashville and recorded with Sam Westhoff. Then I just sat on them for a long time. Eventually we got them mixed, and then Jesse and I added two songs here in Tulsa. One of them was my single “Rivers,” which I recently released. My next single comes out on May 8th—it’s called “Smaller Mountains.” Jesse produced that one here in Tulsa.

I didn’t really know what I was going to do with the songs I’d recorded in Nashville alongside the ones in Tulsa, but they just felt like they worked together. There are six songs that just all felt right to put together.

I’m a small enough artist that it doesn’t really matter if it’s an album or an EP—what matters most is releasing singles. But I still love making a project that’s meant to be listened to as one thing. I think someone will have a great listening experience going through all six songs in order, and I’m really excited to put it out.

Keep an eye out for “I Don’t Know How to Write a Song” and check out more of Micah’s music, here.

My first encounter with deconstruction happened when I was young. I was just entering middle school when my dad started questioning his beliefs. The oldest son of a world war II vet, he kept details about his earlier years to himself. It was quite rare for him to share memories of life before he converted away from Catholicism. The few memories he did share were on late night drives across the Mitten state and in quiet talks at the side of a hospital bed.

What I know is that he was “born again” as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. There he got involved with the Word of Faith movement. He began watching television preachers on the Total Christian Television (TCT) network. Kenneth Copeland. Benny Hinn. Ken Hagin. While studying at Rhema Bible College in Tulsa, he met my mom. Together they dreamed of going overseas to be missionaries. Soon they married, but two months in everything changed.

As the Oklahoman asphalt cooled on a hot summer night, my parents were hit by a man driving drunk in a pick-up truck.

There are pictures of the accident buried in the hope chest at the foot of my parents bed. The four-door sedan looks like a child’s interrupted game of crushing a pop-can under their shoe. The back end is missing. It is a miracle they survived. A miracle that ushered in a complicated and painful story. The injuries from that accident removed any hope my parents had of the mission field. It forced them from Tulsa and back to the Midwest.

I doubt my dad dreamed of moving to Michigan. Or raising three kids alone for seven years. I don’t believe he anticipated having to share a room with his boys until they approached puberty. What I am confident in is the severe disappointment he felt. Was this his miracle? His prosperity? The weekly liturgy of a lotto ticket purchase on the way to church. It didn’t save him from his job at the Lifesavers factory or custodial work at our elementary school.

Realizing you are deconstructing is like returning to the scene of a car accident you vaguely remember. You were driving the car, but you don’t quite remember when the windows shattered or how the back end disappeared. Ian Harber notes that deconstruction is a crisis. It is an experience that happens to you. You only realize you’re deconstructing after it has already begun.1

I remember my dad’s love of learning with warmth. He wanted to know truth. And so, he studied. But, I’m curious, did his journey start years before? Were his late night studies an attempt to rationalize and avoid his grief? When he threw out large parts of the New Testament was he continuing to live out of the trauma that life had dealt?

Pain is not something we metabolize well. In our culture it is often repackaged and sold before it is felt. It is platformed before we can understand and heal from it. Or, it is dismissed for its inconvenience. We do this with the many forms of doubt too. Harber notes that deconstruction is a journey of loss that mirrors the stages of grief.

My dad didn’t deconstruct in the direction most do. In fact, when he stopped believing in the Christian faith he became more religious. More political. He never metabolized and processed his journey.

Yes, this is a simplification of something far more complex. That’s how it is concerning matters of the heart. Still, I think it’s an entry point to something important.

There is a lot in our world that should grieve our hearts.

For many, the world that we thought we knew is gone. There is no way to return to the way it was before. We owe it to ourselves to cultivate space for one another to move through the sorrow of this moment. To feel loss. To feel the disappointment that progress is not the apparent trajectory of our world. To face the hard truth that there is an increasing significant gap between our leaders and values.

In this space, we can notice that it is the Man of Sorrows who says, “fear not, I have overcome the world.” He acquainted himself with grief. He was found in the places of shattered glass and burnt rubber that many of us linger today.

He doesn’t offer prosperity.

And, miracles? Well. Not every miracle we seek is a hallmark movie.

But, he does offer his presence.

I think hope grows there.

Upstate New York

Tell me about yourself — my understanding is that you grew up on the east side of the country, spent some time in Nashville, ended up in Alaska, and now you’re back here. Tell me about that journey.

I grew up in upstate New York. I didn’t really grow up around music — didn’t know that many people doing music. It’s such a different world over here. I grew up in a family of immigrants, faith-filled people, but their culture is definitely more rational. There’s not necessarily a big emphasis on the arts. And so I went to school for accounting and economics.

I’d always had this love for music. Anytime I was playing piano or guitar I would find myself getting lost in melody. But I didn’t write, didn’t sing until I got to college. There a friend overheard me singing in my room and said, “Man, I really like the way you sing.” He kind of pushed me to start leading a little Bible study group we had. I started doing that and slowly just really grew to love it.

There was something about singing where it kind of draws me into the present. I could feel God in the moment, could feel God in the song, and that just made me come alive. It made my faith come alive in a lot of ways.

And then I graduated, moved to New York City, started working, and very quickly became disillusioned with that corporate way of life. I had done an internship at a pretty big company. My manager, before I left, said, “Come back here after you graduate and I’ll make sure you do well here.” It was really encouraging. I went back for my senior year — and then I got a call from HR a week later. They told me she died in a freak accident.

Oh my goodness.

It was kind of an eye-opening moment — this realization that you can’t take anything for granted and that life is never as certain as you think it is. And so that kind of haunted me.

So I realize, this work isn’t making me come alive. I remember what I feel when I sing, and something in me wants to sing — even though I don’t know how to get into it. So after a year I quit. Some friends and I went to New Orleans, rented a little cabin, bought some gear, tried to record an album, and failed miserably. But it was a kind of beautiful experience and the beginning of my journey in music.

A big part of my journey has also been the prayer: God, give me the character to be able to do what I sense you’re calling me to do. And give me a heart that truly longs after you and isn’t just in this for my own selfishness. I could feel at the time that I wasn’t there. I knew that. I remember journaling it. And I knew I had a long way to go.

Staying Put

I go back home after that and start serving at a church. I would write by myself, but I had no musical community and no outlet outside of church. And my church was tiny. But when I would pray, I felt God say: just stay here and serve. Don’t try to chase music. And so I was there for three, four years.

I was working accounting contracts — four months of the year — and it would give me enough money to survive for the rest of the year. And in 2019, I feel God say: Don’t go back to work. I hadn’t heard that before. So I was like — you know what, I’m going to do it.

The month I would have gone back to work, this guy from L.A. shows up at my church. Again, my church is tiny. He starts showing up, we have a conversation, and he says, “Man, I really like your voice. I want to help you record.” I was kind of blown away. So we start going to studios for the first time at the beginning of 2020. And then COVID hits, he goes back to L.A., and I’m just writing — because I wasn’t working — writing like two songs a day. I grew so much in that period. Truly grateful for that period and for him.

He then gets introduced to Will Reagan from United Pursuit. Will had just built a studio. He hears my stuff, likes it, and says, “Come down and let’s see what happens.” That was my first time hearing myself in a way that felt like it represented me. So we went to work and finished the record a couple months later.

Gardens

It’s the beginning of 2021, and the guy from L.A. and I start to have a little tension. He wants me to sign a long-term deal. I don’t feel peace. And I’m praying, and I feel the Lord say: just walk away. Now, someone might say, “Wow, that must have been really hard to walk away from.” And it was in theory. But I remember the moment — it’s like I didn’t have a choice. I knew I had keyed in on what peace felt like in that season — through COVID, a breakup, some church things. I was really starting to learn to just follow the voice of peace.

And so that’s what I do. I let it all go. And I keep hearing God say: I’ll fight for you. You have only to be still — what he tells Moses at the Red Sea.

I kept hearing: something’s going to happen in March. March comes around. And then I get a text — it’s the middle of March — and the guy from L.A. says, “You can just have the music. You don’t have to give me anything.” A complete 180. He just gives me the whole thing for free. It was completely unexpected generosity.

Is this Gardens?

This is Gardens, yeah. I was blown away. And up until that point, I had never thought I would ever leave New York. But when that happened, something shifted in me — this realization that I am on this journey and that God is leading me, and I don’t have to take matters into my own hands.

Nashville

It’s now May of 2022, and I feel the Lord say: it’s time to go. So I just pack up my stuff, put whatever I can’t fit in my car into storage, and leave. Give up my apartment. I didn’t really know where I was going. I checked out Greenville, South Carolina. Then I came here to Knoxville. Both times I just didn’t have peace to move.

And then there was an open door to move to Nashville — somebody I barely knew had a spot in his house. So I go. And I’m at a coffee shop one day when I feel God very strongly say: don’t initiate anything and don’t follow up with anybody. Those were my two rules in Nashville when it came to music.

Very contrary to Nashville.

Totally the complete opposite advice that anybody anywhere would give you! But within a month and a half of moving there — nobody knew who I was, I didn’t have anything out, I didn’t know anybody — I met with a few different labels, and all of them were very intrigued. But nothing happened, because I don’t follow up, I don’t manage, and I don’t do due diligence. And then all of it dies and I’m wondering if I’m crazy. Who gets these opportunities and doesn’t facilitate them?

But I keep hearing the Lord say: something’s going to happen when you run out of money.

There have been a couple of prayers on my heart for a long time. One is: Lord, don’t give me more than my character can handle. The other is: God, give me such deep trust in you that whatever you give me, I can give it back to you — that I’m not afraid of not having. And I have known that the only way you really learn that is by not having. You only get to walk on the water when you step out in obedience. If you’ve got your hand on the side of the boat, you’re not in the water.

I remember I got an interview at a company that was going to pay me 30% more than I’d ever earned. And all I could hear again was: something’s going to happen when you run out of money. So I told them, “I can’t do the job. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

It’s now January of 2023 and I’m out of money. Starting to rack up credit card debt.

I would go to the library every day and just read — I was diving into a lot of Christian mysticism, the Desert Fathers. Go home, make a sandwich, repeat.

And then at the end of January, out of the blue, this label starts following me on Instagram — and I hadn’t been posting anything. They bring me in for an interview: “We like your music, we want you to do a showcase.”

So I go in to do the showcase — I feel like a dead man walking. I’ve never been a performer. I go in and I’m praying, “God, you’re going to have to show up because I don’t know what I’m doing.” It was shocking to everyone, especially me, how well that showcase went. Immediately after we start negotiating a deal, and I connect deeply with many people there. We’re all excited. It gave me hope.

Long story short, I end up releasing Gardens through them. And then it was kind of underwhelming. And I was feeling tension at the label too — there was confusion as to what to do with me. They loved my music and were so supportive. But, it was a struggle to facilitate it in a way that felt congruent to me. The push was to try to just get my music to go viral in some way. To me, that runs against what my music stands for. I’m not looking for it to go viral. I’m looking for it to resonate with people’s spirits.

But I’m praying, and I feel the Lord say: this isn’t going to happen the way anybody else thinks. If you made it because you joined the label, everybody gives glory to the label. I’m bringing you on a journey. Do you trust me to let me finish the story?

And I said yeah. And he says: okay. Now you’re going to start saying no.

Going into 2024, I get offered to open for a fairly large artist - especially in the space I wanted to be in. I wake up the morning after getting the offer and I could feel in my gut I needed to say no. I didn’t know why. There wasn’t an explanation. My friend at the label said, “You have to say yes. You can’t say no.”

At the time I’m in L.A., going in for a meeting with the big Sony licensing department — not a Christian label. It was supposed to be a chill meeting. But I get in there and there’s a classic boardroom, people sitting around the whole table, and they seat me at the front. And I pray, “God, you’re going to have to show up because I’m frazzled.” I share a little of my story. And then they start playing Gardens.

As soon as the song’s done, the guy in the corner says, “Man, I’ve been in meetings all day. I came into this one heavy, didn’t really want to be here. As soon as that song started to play, I felt something lift off of me.” And when he said that, you could feel the entire atmosphere in the room shift.

And I just feel the clarity and peace of God. And I say, “I don’t know why this matters, but I feel with such certainty that God is saying I need to not take this tour.” I walk out and tell my A&R guy. He’s upset, understandably. And I say, “I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t expect you to believe that God told me I can’t take it. I just know that I’m only here because I was obedient, and I can’t stop being obedient now.”

Alaska

Around the same time, my church was going to Alaska and asked if I wanted to come play bass. Usually I say no to those kind of events, but for some reason this time I said yes.

As soon as I got out there, I felt something move me so deeply — from the stillness, from the beauty of Alaska, but even more powerfully from going out to the villages. God felt very close. In the strangest way my faith made more sense. I could feel this deep hunger that the people there had for God. And it made me hungry.

We’re in an interesting era because worship has become such a commodity. There’s so much clout in hosting these things and doing these things. But I go out into this village and there’s no grid for any of that. It was just people singing in a room. And it blew me away. There was something so real, raw, and authentic.

And then I came back to Nashville, and the dissonance between what I’d felt there and what I felt in Nashville was so loud. And I just knew — I don’t know if I’m supposed to move to Alaska, but I need to leave Nashville right now.

So I just leave. Drive up to my parents’ house. Spend Christmas with them. Hop on a plane to Alaska with a duffel bag. I’ll spend a couple weeks there and then see where the Lord leads.

I get out there and again I’m so moved. But I didn’t have money for a car, didn’t have money for a place to stay. And I’m like, all right God — if you want me to stay, give me housing, give me a ride. Say yes first. So I tell the ministry I’m connected with, “I feel like I’m supposed to stay.” And they say they’ll pray alongside me. Within four days, somebody gave me a car. Somebody gave me a place to stay.

Then it’s March of 2025. I wake up one morning and I just knew. I could feel this voice in me saying, this technology is getting in the way of you hearing the frequency of heaven. I knew I had to delete my social media. And I felt like I needed to delete it permanently.

Yeah, I noticed that. You kind of cleared house online.

I deleted everything. Even deleted my LinkedIn! It was freaky. But I was like, I’m not going to hold back, because I need the real thing.

Music and art are in a strange place right now. It doesn’t move you the way it did before. We have little silence and space in our lives. We are running out of bandwidth. It leads us to imitate in our creation — which is also what social media generally pushes and rewards. Trends. And what we create is going to be a derivative of something that’s real.

So I gave it all up. And it was a struggle. For months after deleting it, I would feel this kind of existential dread. Every fear I’d ever had would come in rotation and just haunt me. I wanted so badly to run away. But I knew the Lord was taking me through this for a reason. The only thing I could do was just surrender.

Then around July of 2025 I finally feel this kind of peace — and I start to feel almost childish with my creativity. Being okay singing simple, silly songs that weren’t cool and weren’t trying too hard. I started recording them in the cabin I was staying in. And that whole experience was healing.

Then some things started to go sideways with the ministry I was with. And I also started to feel this deep dissonance around the weird relationship between Christianity and politics — where you don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

Ivan then began to share how things started to unravel with the ministry he was serving with. He shared about the dissonance he feels with our culture’s relationship between Christianity and politics - one where the lines are often blurred.

When I read scripture and reflect on my journey with the Lord it’s bigger than politics. I’m under the kingdom of heaven. I’m longing for heaven to come to earth. That’s not something I dictate through law. That’s something I dictate by laying my life down. And the very people I don’t agree with — I’m supposed to lay my life down for them.

So, I leave the ministry. And then I feel like it’s time to come back. And that’s sort of the place I’ve been at since then. Every time I pray lately, all I hear is: wait.

I really sense that we’re in the middle of a transition. I feel like I came out of the desert and now I’m back in society and I don’t know how I’m supposed to be. My values have shifted even more than they had before. And society’s in a weird place — with AI, with technology in general, with the disconnection between people.

I also have this strange sense that something’s going to happen. I have noticed that God has kept people waiting — pulled certain people out of the stream — and I believe it’s a season of waiting so that we can start to make intentional, deliberate moves toward healing the disconnection and the divide. That’s not something we can do in our own strength. But it is absolutely necessary. And I think there’s going to be a lot of grace for it.

The Sound and Silence Tour

You’re leaving soon for a week of shows with Young Oceans. Tell me about the tour.

Our hope and desire with these nights is for it to just be a refreshing for the soul. We’re not going to be rocking out necessarily. We’re going to be singing from our hearts. And I think what songs of the spirit do best is bring everybody into the spirit. When the room can feel like one, and when we can all be in the song — those are the best moments of music.

What are you excited about?

Eric (Young Oceans) is a friend I deeply value. He’s been really gracious with his time and has been such a refreshing voice in my life the last couple of years. His art and the way he goes about crafting it inspires me. He genuinely seeks for beauty in word, melody, and production. You feel it in the sound. Getting to go on tour and share the stage with him — it excites me. I sense we’re both longing for similar things. And there is such a beautiful experience we partake in when we sing together - especially when led out of that unity and spirit.

The moment itself is alive and we experience God together in the room. When we get to share that same heart going into a night, and then step on stage together — it just makes it more special, no matter how many people come.

My long-term desire is to see community built up in the different places we’re going. To engage both in community and with art differently. In an ideal world, it’s completely separate from the screen. You could host a show, and there’s a community built that trusts you and loves art — they’ll come for whoever. To experience the spirit in the room - to take a collective breath. I think it’s really needed, because there’s something spiritual about that way of engaging. To be able to gather in rooms with strangers and learn to share and experience God together through sound — I feel really passionate about that. I think it’s an important part of culture.

You’ve got an EP coming out in April, and a single — “Ain’t It Beautiful” — just dropped. (listen, here).

The premise of the whole album is to draw us back to a particular moment. One of the meditations I’ve had in the last year is on the seventh day — God looked out at the world and called it very good. He looks at everything he has created — even the serpent in the garden, right? — and he still calls it very good.

I don’t think it’s an accident that what happens at the fall is that we divide creation between good and evil. We want to render judgment. And Jesus says: don’t judge. Because when you judge, you’re judged. And that’s what we see from the fall onward — our judgment leads to us being judged.

God is drawing us back into the moment. If we can just be with him and trust him — even what I perceive as negative toward me is working for my good. And that allows me to just be here. I have no idea what the future holds. I can’t explain the past. But I can be here in this moment with him. And when I can lose the lens of judgment, I can appreciate beauty — no matter where I am.

When our eyes have been awakened to Christ, we begin to see Christ in all things. There’s not Jew or Gentile, not slave or free. All I see is Christ. And when we love someone — because Christ is in them — they will eventually begin to see Christ in themselves.

One of my favorite lines in Ain’t It Beautiful is, “Lord, come and heal the wounds of my enemy.” It’s a really simple line. But I don’t want this divide. I don’t want judgment upon them. I want healing. I want our relationship to be healed. My judgment is not necessary. My love is necessary.

The entire album is rooted in that. Being drawn into the present. Being moved by love and beauty. And this deep knowing that God doesn’t separate himself from me — I separate myself from him. And the experience of separation when I sin is because I’ve removed myself from communion with him. But he’s always there. It always requires me to turn my head again. That’s why it says: draw near to me and I will draw near to you.

Find tickets for the Songs and Silence tour here.

Tell me about yourself. It’s my understanding you’re from New York. Young Oceans formed in Brooklyn. What’s that journey been like for you?

I think I can say I’m from New York because that’s where I’ve spent the most time. I moved around a lot growing up, but New York was where I’ve lived the longest up until now. I live in Nashville now — I’ve been here for several years, but New York was really where we came to life, so to speak. My wife and I, that’s where we had our kids.

I’ve been chasing a way to express myself since I was a kid, and stumbled into music. Looking back now, I realize that I was kind of late to the game. I was about 17 or 18 when I started playing music.

When I went away to college, I spent most of my time finding people to make music with and starting bands, and bands breaking up, and starting new bands. Eventually I figured out that I’m going to have to sing my own songs if I want the band to stop breaking up. So that kind of launched me into the world of thinking I’m a singer-songwriter and whatever that entailed moving forward.

When I was about 24, I signed a production deal with a small label out of New York — just like an indie rock, general market thing that had me flying around the country for about 3 years. I was writing with a lot of people that were hit makers at the time and found myself very frustrated with this mixed up sense of who I was and whether I had anything of meaning to say. I was also newly married. On one hand it was the dream. On the other hand, it was really challenging because I never felt like I was really getting at the thing that I wanted to say with songs. And I couldn’t figure that out.

Eventually, when we found ourselves in New York, I was asked by a close friend of mine if I’d ever considered writing worship music. It was something I’d never considered. More than anything, I didn’t feel I was worthy enough to attempt something like that.

The process of working on and finishing some of the early corporate prayer songs that I wrote — now going back 20 years — really unlocked something for me. I began to realize that prayer music is the medium I had been looking for, in terms of how to say what I really want to say in my gut. And that was a great surprise to me. That’s kind of how Young Oceans began. I let my two music worlds collide — rock music and church music. One day I just let them crash into each other and realized that it’s all music. It’s all either true or not.

We started with our church there in New York — it was called Trinity Grace Church, a small little thing. We worked for several years and built up a batch of songs and made recordings. It was very sweet. But I always felt like it was very limited in terms of the sounds that we were producing and the aesthetic — not just of the songs, but the production and the feel.

We would get done with these records and I’d think, that’s great, and that maybe gives a sense of what it would feel like to be there on a Sunday morning, but I don’t necessarily want to go put this music on and listen to it. So that was really the beginning of Young Oceans — I set out to make something that I wanted to listen to. Not just a tool, or a representation of an artifact that could be done at your church. So that’s really the origins of this project: recordings that are just art for art’s sake.

You mentioned that your music is prayer music. What does that mean?

It’s kind of simple in that it’s broad.

I have no problem with the term worship music, but that is a modern term. For years I would get frustrated, even with friends or my kids, when someone would say something like, “Yeah, we went to church and the worship was awesome,” or “Really had an experience during the worship.” I knew what they were saying — they were talking about the music. But just to challenge them a little, I would often say, “What part of the worship are you referring to? The liturgy? Communion? What about the time of giving?” These are all acts of worship. What everybody we know is referring to is the music. I’ve always had a kind of a problem with that, because worship is so much bigger than just music.

The term worship music has been co-opted, and worship music now means — when I hear that term — the thing that comes to my mind is the marketplace. Probably a very large band on a big stage playing essentially stadium rock. That’s kind of what worship music means to people now. And I’m not even saying that’s bad. But when I look at what I’m trying to do with Young Oceans, I think it’s something other than that.

I’m simply trying to make artifacts of my own prayer. I’m trying to make sounds out of the things that I pray personally. Thus the term prayer music — because prayer can run the whole gamut of the human experience. When we look at the Psalms, it’s everything from praise and exaltation and joy to miserable complaining, even lament, sorrow, supplication, and all the human experiences in between. So all of that is prayer.

There is a real sense that the music you create is immersive. I get the sense that it’s something you’ve been doing on purpose. I’m curious how your journey with the Lord and with faith has played into why you desire to create that atmosphere.

That’s a good question. I can’t really know exactly why I do this other than the kind of mystical clues that we get along the way in scripture — the main one being that we’re created in the image of this unfathomably vast creator. I think we all yearn to create.

The arts get way too much attention — I think I’m so privileged to do art because it’s easy to tap into beauty with song. Songs are kind of low-hanging fruit in terms of beauty. It’s very there for us as humans.

But I marvel at the material world. Sometimes I sit around in my studio and look at all the things that I have — my tools that I get to make music with, like this beautiful upright piano and my guitars — and I marvel at the fact that someone created that thing. I don’t know how the heck they figured out how to make an acoustic guitar the way they made it. To me that is an incredible act of worship at its core — someone creating because they were created.

I think we all do it. I would also say that every artist would probably confess at some point that their art is just their therapy. If there was a time in my life where I couldn’t give any time to this, I would have to have a lot of therapy sessions. There would have to be some way to let out this energy that I have inside of me. In that sense it can be very personal — not going to say self-serving, but I do this first and foremost for my own health.

There’s a word I keep hearing you say — artifact.

I think I use that word because our language really matters these days. I prefer to use that word sometimes instead of just “song” or “project” — I think maybe I do it to guard against any kind of marketing thing. When I think of artifact, there’s something ancient about it. Something not marketable. Something communal — like the way the church sculpted the creeds. A group of church fathers sculpted the exact wordings of these creeds, and poets and translators along the way brought them to our language. Those things are cultural artifacts and there’s a weight to that.

The opposite in my mind — the worst word that can be used these days — would be the word content. You hear the word content everywhere you go. Everybody is just churning out content and consuming content. It’s just nonsense. I don’t have a desire to wake up and make content. That is like death to me. Not to say that I don’t have to post on social media — it’s part of this weird world we live in. But social media posts will fade. Things like songs might last.

You’ve express a deep appreciation for the variety of tradition within the Christian faith. Where does that appreciation for that variety and nuance come from?

Well, I moved a lot growing up because of my dad’s work, and we grew up very much in a Christian context. Because we lived in different cities across the world, we experienced lots of different church expressions. In the States we’d be at a Presbyterian or Baptist or non-denominational charismatic church. Overseas — we lived in France when I was little — we went to an English-speaking church that was probably Anglican, so I saw some high church examples there.

When I became serious about my faith in college, I got thrown into some pretty charismatic circles. That was very formative for me. I learned a ton, experienced a ton, and also brushed up against some things that taught me how to be careful in that world.

Since then I’ve probably come back a little more to the way I grew up — a kind of low-key expression.

In New York, I served under a pastor who basically taught me to work with the church calendar and with a communion or Eucharist-focused worship service on Sundays. That was a really beautiful fulfillment of my experiences as a worship leader — learning how to implement charismatic worship or free worship with liturgical structures. That seemed impossible until I started trying it. That has a lot to do with the Young Oceans catalog and vibe as well — it’s those two things always working in tandem.

Your latest record came out in November of last year, ‘Love Like Raindrops Made of Light.’ Tell me about it.

The album itself is meant to live in tandem with the record that came out the year prior, called Somehow I Know It’s Love (Listen, here). They’re kind of like sister albums.

Somehow I Know It’s Love — the artwork is grayscale and black and white, because that’s kind of the feel of those songs. It’s very minor and modal, probably the most electronic record I’ve ever done. It’s really moody and kind of dark. Whereas Love Like Raindrops — I viewed those songs as these unexpected prayers of peace and joy (Listen, here). I didn’t really know where they were coming from, other than that they were just coming, and I just kind of enjoyed it. They’re meant to be like winter and summer, so to speak.

Did you know going in that these were going to be sister albums, or did it just end up fitting that framework?

I didn’t really set out to make two albums back to back. I had a feeling when Somehow I Know It’s Love was wrapping — I remember making the decision to grayscale everything during that season, even the videos, everything black and white and moody, and just thinking, this is how this needs to be right now, and in the next season we’ll let the color come in.

What excites you most about music recently, and about that record?

Oddly, what excites me right now about music is instrumental music. I actually have a long LP or long EP coming out — 7 songs — in April, of just instrumental music that I’ve been working on with some friends over the last couple months. That’s kind of where my head has been.

After doing those two records in such quick succession, I felt really tired at the end of last year. But for some reason I felt this real levity and freedom to do this instrumental project. It’s the first time Young Oceans has ever done a truly, strictly instrumental album. I’ve put out instrumental stuff before, but it’s just been the tracks without the vocals. This time all the songs were composed as standalone instrumentals. It’s been really fun. That’s what I’m excited about right now.

I get the sense that was a restful experience after a long season of writing.

Yeah, sometimes you just run dry.

Ivan Theva just released a variation of a song from your record called “It’s Your Love.” You are about to tour together. Is there a connection between that song and the two of you?

Yeah, we wrote it together. That’s kind of how the idea of doing this run came about. He’s become such a dear friend over the last couple of years. We met about two years ago, hung out, got coffee, and chatted in Nashville.

When two songwriters are introduced to each other, it’s usually like, “You guys should write together, go write songs, see what hits.” It gets really exhausting and kind of ridiculous — to think that you should write a song with every songwriter you meet. That goes back to some of my complaints about content creation.

So we just hung out and had long chats about life and theology and what we were experiencing in this modern world as Jesus followers — what we were lamenting, mourning, hopeful for. One day someone was like, “Should we get out an instrument?” And that was the first song we wrote together. There was no plan for it. I don’t even know if we were writing it for him or for me.

That’s usually how it works down here — you have a strict target you’re shooting for. In that case we didn’t. We just wrote a song. He did the demo here in my little studio, and a couple weeks later we led it at my church here in town. The song on the Young Oceans record, and even his version — it’s a pretty sleepy recording. But when we do that one at church, it’s explosive. There’s something about it live that I think hasn’t been captured in any of the recordings yet, and maybe can’t be. There’s something really special about the sort of childlikeness of it.

So yeah, that’s “It’s Your Love.” Because of that we were having such a nice time, we wrote six or seven others that are still kind of in hiding. I don’t know what will happen with them, but hopefully something.

Are you going to play it together live?

I suppose we will. We haven’t worked out exactly the flow of the night or the songs, but yeah, I think we probably will.

Tell me about the tour. We’re pumped to have you in Grand Rapids.

It’s really quite simple. We want this thing to just feel like someone’s living room. Ivan and I have been talking a lot about what we need to do to get away from the machine, especially when it comes to sacred or prayer music. There has to be a more human way to go and be with people rather than act impressive on a stage.

So the experiment we’re going to run is this thing with really low production. We’re not trying to impress. We’re purposely going to embrace some silence — that’s what it’s called: Songs and Silence. In between songs and moments we’re going to invite people into a very human and humble experience. We’re going to trust that there’ll be some kind of beautiful encounter, and perhaps even power, as we open our hearts and bring these honest songs to the Lord. That’s the hope. Something simple, something different, something refreshing.

That’s awesome. Needed. Especially with the amount of content we get bombarded with.

Yeah, hopefully this will be restful. And hopefully it’ll be unimpressive.

Find tickets for the Songs and Silence tour here.

Writing and playing music in your early twenties is like stargazing over Lake Michigan at the end of Riley street. The private drive to the lake awaits with only a few parking spots. A streetlamp stands at a distance with dim lighting unveiling a sandy path. The journey to the waters edge is a barefoot practice of avoiding roots in the dark. Dreams pool like stars along the fresh water coast. They’re close. And, terribly far away.

My experience playing and managing music burned like a shooting star. The years flashed bright and left quick. In all honesty, they take up more space in my mind now than they did in real life. Three years. Still, being a part of Carielle was a significant season. Core memories made.

There was the midnight debate over the band name at IHOP. The thrill of landing our first gig. Having a song that gets stuck in someone’s head (find it, here). There were packed rooms. Empty ones. We made a record. Survived the scorching heat of Cornerstone Festival. Played 7th St Entry in Minneapolis. Starry Night at Purdue. We weren’t anything special. Carielle. “Gabrielle”. The ‘Boxed Water’ band. We were just dedicated to our love of music and determined to have a good time playing for people.

My favorite part of it all were the merch table and the DIY venues. The Black Sheep in Springfield. Skeletones (Mixtape) in Grand Rapids. The Pool in South Bend. That coffee shop in Memphis. These were places where friendships started. Coffee, scheduled. Beauty expressed and explored. There is something sacred that happens in these spaces. Opportunities for holy moments. When someone’s craft mirrors the creativity of God and it resonates with the creative expression present in every human being. Beauty unveils a shared longing. We all cry out. A calloused heart is only deaf to the volume that we all bleed. A new friend recently observed that beauty is an entry point to understand the good and offers a glimpse of the true. In corn fields that surround festival grounds and the line that wraps around the corner before doors open, there is palpable possibility.

I find myself reminded of the words of the apostle John. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us. His love, made complete in us. We live in a culture where we don’t see one another. The possibility for true neighbor love is fenced and quartered by distraction. politic. disillusionment. our strong opinions. We like to think that this age is different. That we’ve progressed. But, we’re still Adam building a tower calling ourselves Nimrod. Love is an invitation to tear down the tower. An invitation that is often taken up in hole in the wall venues where unknown music reverberates off poorly insulated walls. There’s a caveat though. To pursue love it must first be experienced.

Carielle wrote most of its music in my hometown of Holland, Michigan. It’s a coastal city. Many nights in-between weekend runs around the Mid-West and band practice, we spent stargazing at Riley beach. Often, others would join. Sitting in the sand we laughed, dreamed and cried. With light hearts we walked the shoreline as we wrestled deep things. Riley street is where I felt God’s love. Looking up at the stars I felt infinitely small, and yet somehow still deeply significant.

It was healing.

I haven’t seen God, but I know his love.

During the Davis House years we had a weekly tradition. 5:30 am meet up at Sandy’s Donuts. Make or break. It was a brutal wake up, escalating in drowsy terror depending on the mileage you added to your vehicle. In the stillness before dawn, we dragged ourselves out of bed, slipped keys into the ignition, and made our pilgrimage down Leonard street.

We were committed to madness. A few of us from the Davis House. Others from the mission school on Bridge street. Neighbors. Some random friends along the way.

This was your classic donut shop. Glaze. Sprinkle. Long-John. Coffee — fresh, only in the morning. Crème brûlée. Pistachio. The only thing more dissonant than the variety of coffee were the haunted looks from vintage dolls on the neighboring shelf.

In the corner booth of the donut shop we were committed to madness. Sometimes one of us would bring a Bible. Many times we would sit there and try to wake up. Here we gave updates on family and breakups. Answered prayer and church hurt. Undergrad. Seminary. Flight mechanic school. Music. Hiking. We talked about the good, the beautiful and true.

If you’re following along, you can likely tell I want to move toward something. Nostalgia? It’s a vehicle. But in all transparency this wistful longing is for something more. Not just a place in our living room, but a seat at the corner booth. This is an invitation to madness.

We live in a world where it is increasingly difficult to talk about what is good, beautiful and true. The pluralism of our culture has given way to the polarization of our politics. Put another way. The space between the public and political has disappeared. No longer does space exist to engage with valuable things without falling victim to our cultural moment. Neighbor care? If it’s too equitable… progressive. Ethics? If it restricts the appetite… conservative. Worship? Don’t even go there.

The Luminary Project is a movement towards hope. A belief that there is a significant need for this space in our cultural moment. An invitation to our living room and the corner booth.

What does it mean to make space?

We want to elevate opportunities for people to encounter and engage with the things that matter most. The corner booth. The living room. The front porch. These are the spaces where life happens and honest reflection occurs. We want to cultivate a connection to these spaces by elevating those who are creating with intention. Writers. Artists. Musicians. Thinkers. Poets.

What is “the good, the beautiful and true?”

The Good

There is a real sense that our world is missing the mark. Justice stands in the street silent. Wholeness is a myth lost on a broken heart. Significance – an ache we all feel, fed to digital beasts in our pockets.

We choose to think deeply about the things that matter most.

The Beautiful

It is the pursuit of beauty that grows calluses on our hands. Wrinkles around our eyes. We long to marvel at the cosmos. To participate in creation. We are creatures creating creaturely things making sense of the world.

We hold space for music, literature, film, and art.

The True

There is a haunting in this world that has taken place. We sense this to our core. Veiled goodness causes our hearts to break. The ache of eternity, felt in an encounter with beauty. In a culture sifting between warring ideologies a humble pursuit of truth is scary.

We believe in providing space for an authentic pursuit.

An Invitation to Madness

Our years in the Davis House went by quick. We graduated college. Some of us got married. Most of us moved. Minneapolis. Germany. Northern Michigan. West Coast. Our meeting at Sandy’s has lived on in some ways. We sent a jelly filled donut in the mail to Minnesota. Some of us meet up during the holidays.

Not everyone who sat in the corner booth went in the same direction. Maintaining hope when grieved disillusionment is a notification waiting. That’s difficult. When that notification spills into your neighborhood. Impossible. Being a human being is hard.

But. We are not ghosts in skeletal clothes. We are human. Eternal and a breath. Full of cosmic wonder and potential terror. We are image bearers.

Bearing image of something by choice or influence.

We choose.

This is an invitation to madness.

When I was in college I moved into the house on Davis Avenue. I had finished a season playing bass in an indie rock band when a friend invited me to move in. It was everything I needed at the time. Cheap rent. A shared room with no space for a bed. There were five of us living in the house. All connected through church and the local Christian college in town. With wanderlust in our hearts and untested theological perspectives we soaked up the marrow of those years. We were young. We were earnest. Trying our best to follow Jesus with whole hearts.

During the day our door was always open. We built relationships with our neighbors and hosted youth group kids in our living room.

Wandering the streets at night we felt infinite. To the soundtrack of Helplessness Blues we filled our veins with the idyllic hope that creation could heal our wounds. Silent winter walks to the prayer house down the street. Jumping the fence to stargaze in the historic neighborhood baseball diamond. Midnight mass at St. Adalbert’s.

Before long some touring buddies from Kansas City reached out about playing in town. So, we started hosting live music in our living room. With the promise of a packed room and gas money, we saw the beginning of some pretty special music. (You can check out those bands, here). The Davis House Presents was born and, soon after we moved out of our living and into backyards and coffee shops.

At its best, The Davis House was a place where anyone could walk in and feel welcome.

If I’m honest I was ignorant to the current moving beneath our feet. Our world was changing. The cultural partisan divide that is now the air we breathe was building with a fervent pace and history could not keep up.

Within Christian culture the temperature was also rising. Rob Bell deconstructed Hell in our neighborhood. Michael Gungor lost his faith and started a podcast about it. Mark Driscoll imploded at Mars Hill in Seattle. Everywhere we turned, an influential person or pastor had a falling away or public failure. These weren’t just headlines to us — they were people we listened to, learned from, been shaped by. The familiar walls of our millennial Christian culture started to burn. The wallpaper in our house, as was the case with so many others, began to curl from the flame.

We found an oasis in our house. Between game nights and house shows we found a place to wrestle with some of life’s deepest questions.

What does it mean to live well? To follow Jesus in a secular age? What happens when our heroes fail us? What is justice in a world gone mad?

Tim Keller once noted that the world has lost its porches. These spaces between culture where safety exists for people to encounter mystery. Pockets of ‘subversive fulfillment.’

With The Luminary Project I cannot help but think of those years on Davis. Our hope is a continuation of the felt experience of our living room. Making space for the good, the beautiful and true. This is an invitation to a conversation and seat in our house. For hope greater than anguish. A reprieve from this age of outrage.

Here there is space for the doubting. For those who feel the tension of our partisan canyon. We are hoping for something better. We are musicians and pastors, poets and artists. We exist somewhere between dropouts and PhD’s, pumpkin spice sippers and caffeinated purists.

This is The Luminary Project.

Welcome to our table.