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Seminar Report: Delirious?
Q & A with the fab five of worship.
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With the amount of time you spend together as a touring band, how do you deal with tensions or arguments among yourselves? How do you work through the problems? Tim: I think one of the great strengths about what we do is that we're part of a team. We've met many people over the years that travel around as a team, and sometimes it can be a difficult and vulnerable position to be in. I think one of our strengths is that we have so many different personalities. We are rubbing against each other all the time and trying to sharpen each other. Also, we're very different, so that means sometimes we don't necessarily see eye to eye. It's a bit like being married, isn't it? Because you're with each other so much, I guess communication and honesty is the key. We want our music to be prophetic and reflect God's heart, but it doesn't stack up unless the whole thing reflects God's heart. That is so important in our relationships as a team. Because worship is not about music, it's about a lifestyle and bringing glory to God in all that we do. How do you, as a band, prepare spiritually before you take the stage, knowing that a lot of what you do is a vertical experience? Martin: First, I want to make this clear—just doing a quick-fix prayer before we go on doesn't really solve anything. The reason it works on stage is because we're hopefully living it out twenty-four hours a day. But we do pray and ask God to show up, because if He doesn't, then it's just music. So we do ask every time for that to happen. When we're on the road and touring, we'll often have times together at the end of the day when we'll sit and one of us (including the crew) will do a little devotion time or something. It's very simple, but we build it into what we do. Since this is the "Deeper Tour," what was the inspiration for the song "Deeper," and do you approach all your songs as worship or are there different styles to your songs? Martin: "Deeper" was written in about 1996-97. At the time, we just wanted to say to God, "We want this to be our lives, we want this to be forever." So "Deeper" really summed it up for us at that time; we really wanted to go in deep. Also, during the meetings that we were leading, that was what we would talk about: "Come on, we're going all the way, this is not just on Sundays, this is for life." So that was the inspiration for the song. Stewart: As far as all the other songs go, when we're writing, it all comes from the same place. It comes from our gut feelings or whatever we're experiencing inside. Not every song that we write is a combination of worship songs, as you've noticed from our records, but we feel that God has called us to be worshipers as individuals. We do write worship songs, but also a big part of what we think God's called us to do is to take what we've got outside, to take our songs to the highways and byways, to get out there and do the gigs with Bon Jovi, et cetera. So there's a different style of writing at times because you want to communicate with people that don't know anything about the language that we use in church. If we talk about the "wondrous cross," for instance, people might not know what it means unless we can explain it in a different way. So we're trying to be creative and communicate things about our faith with people that haven't stepped inside a church. That's why we sing songs about relationships and about things we've observed. But it all comes from that same place: basically, life with God. |             |
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