Here’s an example: We were doing a trio tour of mostly colleges. It was the introduction of Mockingbird. One night in a little church, we played some tunes, and I played “A King and a Kingdom,” which is a song about allegiance. It’s not saying not to have national pride; it’s saying that there’s an allegiance that trumps all of that. At the end of the song, three rows of people got up and just evacuated—a mass exodus. I had been having a really hard week, and then this happened. In that moment, I turned and looked at Sandra. She said that I had a look in my eye that I hadn’t had for a few years, where I was like “They’re listening, and they’re reacting.” That’s the point: Even if they don’t agree with me, people are listening and they’re physically reacting. They’re getting up and leaving.

The bottom line is that I want to engage people. So I felt like I was doing my job. Incidentally, at the end of the night we got a standing ovation from the people who stayed. I was like, “This is good, because these issues can be polarizing. And that’s OK.”

This is going to be a hard discussion to get going, and a lot of the time I don’t feel that anyone is really listening. But I knew that those people were listening even if it stirred them to leave. I knew they engaged with the lyrics. Maybe they disagreed, and that’s OK. There are a lot of well-meaning people with biblical foundations for wanting to love and take care of people who come to completely different conclusions on how to do so. That is OK. It’s OK that I’ll reach one conclusion on my record or in my personal feelings on social or political issues, and people with just as earnest a pursuit of Jesus can reach totally different conclusions. It’s OK that those people left, and I respect them for doing that.
But it’s me wanting to connect with the few more deeply to build that community. And how do you do that? It requires of you that you really invest in those people.


RM: Do you feel that you connect with one demographic or that you have a message that spans various groups?

DW: I think this record [Mockingbird] is much more broad than anything that I’ve ever done before. I think there’s a lot of unity that can happen over these types of issues. There are many in-roads to seeing the beauty and the priority of Jesus when you’re talking about how theology becomes ethics. Theological pursuit is a good thing. I studied theology for a few years on my own. But if your knowledge of your theology never becomes ethics—if it never informs that you live with and love people—then you’re essentially nothing more than a ringing cymbal or a clanging gong. That’s what scripture says.

It’s totally useless to you if it doesn’t inform the ways you love people. My years of theological pursuit were my driest years of loving people. As I’m looking at what are the fruits of real faith, it’s been a tremendous learning experience for me. It’s been really, really good for me to try to figure out exactly what that looks like.

This is broader subject matter—how do we love neighbor and enemy? One thing to point to on that is Jim Wallis’ appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He got on and talked about wanting to have a more nuanced discussion, how he feels like the more conservative party has co-opted the moral value conversation. He said that we need to follow the spirit and not a law.

The American Church has tried to make a law out of politics. They’ve said, “This is the law. This is what you do, what you do and how you think. And if you don’t, you’re not being Christian.” I think that takes all of the will out of the Spirit. I have to be willing to say, “I’m willing to change at any moment in order to follow the Spirit, no matter what party I follow.”

Anyhow, Jim gets on there and is talking about how Jesus loves the poor. He talking about the evidence of a changed heart is how you respond to people. When those people [the audience] heard Jesus putting the qualifiers of faith on action toward the poor—those difficult to love in our culture—they were applauding. They were applauding Matthew 25. There were people in that room who found a connection point with Jesus. They saw something true and right and beautiful about His priority to the lost that they spontaneously applauded. Why can we not communicate this any better than we are? Why is it so crazy to see him on there speaking that way and see a pretty liberal audience applauding?

That is a huge connection point. There are a lot of people who feel in their heart that it’s right to do right by the poor, to help people who are less fortunate and to help make right injustices in our world. To me, that’s called kingdom building. That’s how you put your hands to it. That’s a huge point of connection. The Episcopals, the Catholic Church, the Mennonites, the Methodists—there are a lot of folks who have done a pretty fair job of saying, “These are the priorities of Jesus. So if we’re going to communicate to use who He is and what He’s about, then coming with that is a heart for issues of justice.” That’s a huge point.


RM: Have you traveled to Africa yet?

DW: We haven’t been able to get to Africa yet. We’ve really wanted to. We work with a few organizations that work with Africa and different African causes, and we haven’t been able to yet.

There was an opportunity. There’s an organization called HopeAloud in Nashville that’s a collection of songwriters. We saw Nashville record labels saying that they’re going to do these things for Africa and give lots of money to organizations who need it. They make benefit records, and they say that they’re giving portions of it to Africa. But they only give like two cents after everything’s recouped and everyone gets paid. We [HOPEaLOUD] said that we can do better; Christian artists can do better. We’re independent. (I live like I’m independent, but I’m on INO. I’m the only signed artist on HOPEaLOUD as far as I know.)

We can make records for hardly any money. We can write songs and make a record, and every penny of it should go toward doing work in Africa or wherever people need it. We’re capable of it. So that’s what we started to do. A lot of us said that we should take a trip to Africa. We started to raise money for us to go on this trip. We were going to come back with stories, write songs about them and make the record. We gave a benefit concert to raise money to send us to Africa to make a record to make money for Africa. We realized that this is how it happens. This is how it ends up costing so much money that only two cents of it can go to the people who need it.

We raised a lot of money for the trip, and we knew that the money would be better used if we just gave it to the people in Africa. Let’s cut out the middleman; screw the record! We didn’t hope to make as much on the record as we were raising for the flight. We realized that we’re going about this all wrong. We aren’t journalists; we don’t need to see this firsthand. We’re artists; we make stuff up! We can write songs about Africa without going there. That’s what we do! So we said no trip. Let’s stay and be creative. Let’s do it for no money. I can’t justify the money for the flights; it would be better served if given straight to people in Africa. I’d love to go, but we haven’t been able to make sense of it yet.


RM: How does the “making disciples” part of the Great Commission factor into work in Africa?

DW: You have to take that in conjunction with everything else that Jesus told us and all of the other priorities that He gave us. That is at the top of the list, but it’s not the only thing He said. He also said that the two greatest commandments were to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.

I don’t think that the best way to make disciples is typical American evangelism. I think we’re making converts (on the whole), but we’re not making disciples. We’re not training people who then have what they need in order to go and make more disciples. A lot of it happens relationally.

When you look at scripture, that’s how it’s happening. They were living in cultures and loving them in such a way that disciples were being made, coming into the fold as a family of believers. It was encompassing all of these priorities. It wouldn’t help us just to go over and make a few converts in Africa but to go over and live with and love. It’s not just about the American Church doing it either. There are tremendous churches and church communities that are happening in Africa. That’s what I love about Blood:Water (Mission); it all goes by way of African pastors. African construction companies are digging the wells. The local pastors are getting to know those men.

It’s such a tremendous analogy. What they need, the water, is right underneath their feet, but they can’t get to it. The church is helping to dig that well and starting to pump out the water they need. The church is able to say, “Everybody who needs it, come. There’s clean water for everybody. And while you’re here, I’ve got a story you’re just not going to believe.” The analogy is rich. At very least, it’s tremendous pre-evangelism. It’s sets up the cultural language to be able to put the Gospel into words that they can understand. They can say, “Here’s water that’s going to make you well. It isn’t the diseased water that you’re used to. It can give you life. In the same way, here’s this tremendous story of this One who’s come to keep the law for you, who can cleanse you and make you well.”

I really believe it is evangelism, because it’s the Church putting our hands to it. We’re saying it’s not acceptable that any human beings who are our neighbors with dignity that we are charged to defend would die for lack of clean water when we could afford TiVo. That is us not thinking globally about the kingdom and not thinking about our brothers and sisters all over the world who are more intimately connected than maybe any of the people who live on our street. (Not saying that those people aren’t also.) Putting our hands to being the right of all things can be tremendous evangelism because it says to them that there’s a kingdom coming where this will not be so. There’s a kingdom coming where you will not thirst. And we’re going to pray that day into today. We’re going to work for that day to come today.


RM: So what’s next for you?

DW: I’m heading out for the Jars (of Clay) tour. It’s my first time in front of someone else’s audience. I’ve only ever headlined shows. I don’t say that as a good thing. There’s no opportunity for some new people to come in, because you’re just playing to the same very faithful people all the time. It’s just not made sense for me to open for anybody.

There hasn’t been anybody in the Christian market who I could go and get in front of except for Jars. They’re good friends. They definitely have a heart for the social implications for faith. Those guys played on my first record. They played on “Take to the World.” I can’t believe they’re bringing me along. I’ve got no money for tour support. There’s nothing I can really bring to them other than just showing up and trying to play good songs every night if I can. The crowd has picked up over the years. I just think it’s going to be a tremendous opportunity.

That’s going to be a month, mostly on the West Coast, a little of the Midwest. I have a tour a couple weeks in March with a really cool band called Judd and Maggie. They were indie and just signed their first deal. I met them playing at Jammin’ Java up in Virginia. They opened for me a few times there, and we really connected. They are just amazing. Their indie record is tremendous. I haven’t listened as much to their label record they just did, but it’s on iTunes. They are on RCA. They’re not doing a Christian deal, but they are believers.


RM: How did you decide to leave Caedmon’s Call?

DW: In my years with Caedmon’s Call, I was always the guy who couldn’t wait to get out from under the whole Christian thing. But [with She Must and Shall Go Free] I wound up with a record’s worth of songs that were all about the Church, and I knew that the audience for that record was the Church. It didn’t make any sense to go outside of the church industry to try to market back into it a record it was the audience for.

I really thought that once I got free of Caedmon’s I just go play clubs and get in a neutral venue and get out of that whole deal. I never thought I would get out of Caedmon’s. I never thought I would do anything solo, ever would probably. I started to write these songs that I really felt Caedmon’s pulling back a little bit from. I don’t blame them, because their instincts were right to defend the calling that the band had. What I was doing was a different calling, and we weren’t all called into it. We started to feel the separation happening.

I always played a solo set during Caedmon’s shows where I would play four or five songs by myself. I started to want to play some of the new songs. “Wedding Dress” was the first song I wrote, and I could feel them wanting me to not play it. I don’t blame them. They were trying to defend something, and it was right for them to do so. Caedmon’s wasn’t the home for the new songs, but I didn’t really want to do anything solo. I realized if I was going to, I couldn’t do Caedmon’s and do that and do both well. There is something important about these songs. I don’t know what it is. I feel like it is important for me to do this record. In order to do it I had to get free of Caedmon’s. It was like a choice that I don’t really feel like I made.

I told that story (story about kids getting up and leaving during show) to this guy Kevin Twit who is a real good friend of mind, a mentor. Here is what his comment was; that I could play a song like “Wedding Dress” that is a song about idolatry and that people will sit and bear through it, and then I play a song like “A King and a Kingdom,” which is the exact same thing, that is about the more specific idolatry of political allegiance that trumps kingdom allegiance, and people get up and walk out. Kevin thought that was fascinating that politics was too specific an idol for some people. They don’t mind when I talk about them being a whore because that is kind of abstract. But when I start to talk more specifically about what it looks like in the issue of social action politics to be a whore, people get up and walk out. He thought it was fascinating that they wouldn’t walk out of “Wedding Dress,” but they would walk out of a song attacking a political idea. He thought that was completely upside down.


RM: Do you feel like you’re called to challenge the Church and the way to do that is to stay within that realm?

DW: I think it is just an interesting bit of providence that I ended up staying with Christian music because of the first record, which I think was the right thing to do.


RM: What does it mean on your new album when it says don’t label my music?

DW: It’s more of a personal liberty type comment, more than put a label on my music that I listen to so that I can discern between what is safe and right and what is dangerous and wrong. The whole secular/Christian thing, which is a total fiction, rather than just teaching me to listen to the Spirit and have the Spirit guide me into the truth and learn how to discern truth and beauty and find it in all kinds of places, which is more of the Francis Schaeffer model. Discern truth and beauty and don’t put your faith in categories.

Don’t let your local Christian bookstore do your thinking for you and believe that everything they have there for sale is good and spiritually beneficial to you. If anything, we have proven that the Church unfortunately is identified with really poor art. The Church certainly does not have the market cornered on beauty. A lot of what we do is not very beautiful. The art we make is not very good. A lot of the songs I have heard on Christian radio are just outright misrepresentations of the character of God.

I think you have to learn to discern and look elsewhere and say, “I need to learn how to engage with a God everywhere I can find truth and beauty, regardless of the intention of the maker of that art.” I really believe that is a more biblical worldview. It also keeps us from being people who live in fear. There is no room for living in fear. There is no reason to be afraid. There is no reason to be fearful of secular music. We should learn how to chew on the meat, spit out the bones, to discern the truth and beauty, to commend that rather than to be just completely fearful and put all our security in these categories that don’t mean anything. It’s a dangerous way to live.

The Christian industry, ridiculous as its existence I believe is, is an industry that literally markets records based on the worldview of the artists, which no other industry does. The one thing they do really well is get resources to Christians. I thought this is something I want in the hands of fellow believers. I think that is the audience that this content would be relevant to and so that is the avenue that I took. Providentially, I landed with a label that I had no idea was really given the freedom to go beyond that. That is what I’m trying to do now. I’m not making records specifically and exclusively for the Church anymore.

Like I said, Mockingbird, I believe, deals with much broader issues. There are many more points of connection with even our neighbors that don’t believe what we believe about Jesus but do believe it is right to care for the poor. Maybe that is our connection point. Regardless, the label allows me the freedom to do that. That is a great provision for me, but I do think it is strange that I am in Christian music.


RM: Why did you end up in Christian music?

DW: The first record was really about the Church, and I figured that was the best way to get it to them. I thought I would do that forever. I thought maybe this is what I’m going to do always. I’m going to write songs for the Church because that’s how I get. I’ll get really jazzed about one. That’s the reason we stopped marketing my records as theme records, because the way I think, the way I process, I’m always going to have a record all about one thing. That’s how I think. I get really into one thing. I really study and get all into it.

Likely, I’ll write a whole bunch of songs about that one thing and maybe that one record has one theme. I don’t know if I’ll ever make anything but a theme record, but I never do it intentionally, and on the whole theme records don’t sell well. We decided to just start calling these the records I make, because that’s what they are. I make records that deal with particular topics.

RM: Some people have said that there are parts of your album that sound like you are saying, “listen, you need to do this in order to be true to Christ.”

DW: “Rich Young Ruler” is not about wealth, but it is a paraphrase of the story where a man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to get to heaven, and He tells him to follow the commands. He says that he already has, which of course he hadn’t, but rather than dwell on that, Jesus says, “OK, well if you have kept all the law, then all you have to do now is sell everything you’ve got, give it all to the poor and follow Me.”

That song is not about wealth. It is about idolatry. It could have been anything that that man was unwilling to give up that Jesus was attacking. That song is not about wealth. It is a paraphrase of the story. I think when you apply the analogy of the rich young man to the Western Church, the analogy works. I think we as a group are people who have shown a lot of signs of being unwilling to give up our wealth in order to follow Jesus. I think one key symptom of that is the situation in Africa. It is the greatest concentration of the world’s poorest people, and in light of the second greatest commandment to love our neighbor these people are right before our faces. They are intimately linked to our economy. We can set up Coca-Cola over there, but we can’t send life-saving drugs?

These people are a part of our way of life, these people in developing countries. They are part of our future as well. For the Church, the only institution on the planet with a moral imperative, to go and to love and to care, we have been commanded to do it. We make it the government’s job because we aren’t doing anything. The government should have to go and get in line behind the Church to go and to care for the people in Africa. It is the greatest concentration of the world’s poorest people. We claim to follow a Savior that had a special place in His heart for the poor.

There is kingdom building to be done now in Africa, and there is so much need. We have the resources to meet that need. That is the very definition of who your neighbor is. That is the whole story of the Good Samaritan. It is whoever has need that you have resources to meet. Even if you hate that person and that person hates you. Jesus and the Samaritans were not friends. They didn’t even live in proximity necessarily. They weren’t just buddies across the fence. These were enemies. Here’s a situation where Jesus is communicating to us about an enemy laying his life down for another. Go and do likewise. That’s your neighbor.

The Africans are not our enemies at this point, but I’m afraid. Here’s a motivation. It would be terrible if we stand by with the resources to prevent or soften the emergency that’s happening in Africa right now. If we don’t do it, we are going to find ourselves in the West at odds with orphans of those whose aid we did not come to. It would be less expensive to care for them, to love them, to provide for their needs now than it will be in 10 years from now to have made enemies of them and have to go to war with them. It is very clear what the Christian situation is on this. Yet the Church has been very slow to move.

I think that is a symptom of we as Western Christians not willing to part with our money in order to follow Jesus, even if it means following Him to Africa. That’s why I thought it was a relevant analogy to the content of the record to say that I really feel there are some parallels between that rich young man coming to Jesus saying we do everything we are supposed to do, we speak the language, we keep the rules, all that stuff, what else do you want us to do? He says to us, “I really believe a good word for us in the West is part with your wealth and follow Me.”

In a general sense it is a song about idolatry. The fact that we happen to make an idol of wealth in the West is just added significance. The general analogy still applies. It is about, I want what you won’t give me. He won’t let us get away with, “Just give your money and you’re off the hook.” That’s not the answer either. Three-and four-minute songs are not the best medium, but it’s all I’ve got. I went into this record ready to be misunderstood, and there is nothing wrong with that. The discussion is the point of it. This was not a record that I came into saying I want to win people to my way of thinking.

I want people to think differently about these things. Here’s what I want them to think, and I’m going to communicate that to them, and I’m going to give them compelling reasons to change their mind. That is not really what this record is about for me. I’m going to say things in a way that’s abstract enough that you will maybe even misunderstand me to where you will have to discuss that. You will find yourself having to justify yourself.


RM: What is the next step that we need to take?

DW: The record is about “so how should we live.” My first record was about being set free. It is about one who has shown up on the scene, kept the law on our behalf, and when we place our faith in Him we are literally out from underneath the law. We are justified without it. That is huge. That is what I believe to be half the message of the Gospel. This record is very intimately connected with my first. It feels very much like the first record to me, when I sing the songs, the way I feel about the record, when it came time to start to talk to people about it. I felt just like I felt when I put the first record out. This I believe is the other side of that coin. It’s not just you showing up but His kingdom coming also. The question becomes “how do we proclaim that kingdom?” That literally being half of our Gospel. How do we do it?

The way we do it is we put our hands to it. It has to be from our hearts down into our hands. It necessarily will, we’re told in scripture. We know what the fruits of the Spirit are, not what justifies us before God but having been justified, what are the fruits of a changed heart? Those fruits include things like being humble, caring for the poor. These things don’t save you or make God love you. You couldn’t give enough money to the poor. You couldn’t be humble enough to make God love you, but as a result of being a new person and having a new heart, there is fruit that comes from that. You proclaim that kingdom coming when there will be no sickness by when you encounter people who are sick, give them live-saving drugs, care for their lives. That’s how you proclaim that kingdom.

How do you proclaim a kingdom with no war? You say there are alternatives. We should be people of peace. We can fight for peace. We can be pre-emptive about peace as much as our nation is talking about our pre-emption about war. Africa is a perfect example of how you do that. How do you fight for peace? How do you represent the Prince of Peace in our culture? You think ahead. You plan ahead. You get creative.

There are opportunities where we can go and care for and make friends and neighbors out of people who could potentially be our enemies for the war of the future. That is the job of the Christian. Where you see people are hungry, put food in their mouth. That’s how you proclaim a kingdom where there will be no hunger. I really believe that that is a major part of the Gospel.


RM: What does this look like on Sunday morning?

DW: All I can really tell you is what it looks like for me personally. It involved our move across town. It involved an intentional movement toward people of different races and different economic backgrounds to learn what their experience has been.

I have thought about this a lot because our neighborhood is racially diverse. There is a pretty substantial African-American population. I don’t know what it is like to grow up and have people look suspiciously at me, the way that a lot of my African-American friends have grown up and don’t even think about it anymore. I need to know what that is like for my brothers and my sisters if I’m really going to love and live with them. I need to know what that is all about. The only way I’m going to find out is an intentional move toward those people.

For us, it was being a part of a community that was intentionally ministering toward people in our city who were completely unlike all of us.


RM: When this comes to fruition, what happens to American Christianity?

DW: Christian artists don’t seem to be focused anymore on making great art. That’s our main problem, not what our message is, not what we are trying to communicate, not how we are breaking down these barriers, but the fact that we are failing to make good engaging art is our main problem. It doesn’t matter what we are talking about if our art is no good. It does not make any difference. We could be talking about all the cool stuff in the world, how to help everyone and their dogs, but if we are not making great art as artists, then we are really letting the Church down.

We are taking our eye off the ball. Our industry, the way it is set up, who the gatekeepers are, it doesn’t encourage making unique art, being who you are as an artist, being unique and not worrying about how it sells, letting the record companies do their job in order that you can do yours.

That’s not happening a lot in the Christian industry. We have a radio genre that is on the whole pretty uninteresting, and it’s pretty bland artistically. Either way, it’s kind of all one style. Christian is not a style of music. It is a worldview that represents a group of people, but it’s not a style—but it is becoming a style. That’s the problem. What happens is you have people that make really cool music, and they are encouraged by their record label to make it more like this homogenous style that is happening on the radio.

Radio is really the gatekeeper. If you can’t get through radio, you are not going to get your big audience that you want to hear your great message or whatever it is. So, you make very slow, gradual compromises to the sound and content of your music in order to get it through passage gatekeepers, and then you are done because what you give up to get there is all you had. The progress just isn’t worth it.

So, it is really hard for me and a lot of my friends who don’t fit at all into that niche, that Christian radio, whatever that is, that genre, that style. It doesn’t work for us. It is really hard. Here is what is good about it. It becomes more of a community effort. It does. You don’t feel like you have the ultimate power over. I know the compromises I can make to get my song on the radio, and I will sell a half a million records. Maybe I’m just not a good enough songwriter to write those kind of songs, but maybe I’m just not willing, but either way what it requires of me is that I get creative and start putting more energy into the place where it really should go, and that is the people who connect with this music. It’s finding fewer people who connect deeply with your music. Where you don’t have to spend the same money on every record to get them to buy it, because if you really connect with them, you are doing something that is really truly great, not going through the filters of how am I going to sell this.

I have to filter this a million times before it even gets to people because I have to make sure it is going to sell. I have to make sure it is going to be commercial enough for me to keep going. Isn’t that a worthy compromise? No it’s not. Maybe what the Lord requires of you is that you fail and suffer. Maybe that is the best thing in the world for you. I don’t know, but if it comes up, it brings up an interesting point that I wanted to mention before a lot of issues involving Christian culture and Christians in general.

How we are living these things out, how we are applying all this to how we are living—all the cerebral extract—it all has to be about faithfulness more than success. That’s one of the big problems in our market; it’s not more about faithfulness than success. I know what it takes to be successful in the Christian industry. I feel like I know what it takes. I feel like if I applied myself to it, I could probably make a record that could succeed in that market. It wouldn’t have any of my heart or soul in it, but I feel like I could do it. Why do I not do it? Because I really feel like it would be unfaithful. For whatever weird reason you, I, anybody and everybody has a particular set of gifts, a particular story, a particular set of circumstances that makes them exactly the individual person that they are.

You have to use those gifts in order to do the work that God has given you and not worry about success at it. Leave that to God. Let God exalt you if there is exaltation to be done.

It’s like a lot of things. It’s weird how this is linked to the nonviolence issue. That is another situation where we are afraid of letting God be the one who worries about how this is going to turn out. I don’t trust Him enough to say, “You know what? I’m not going to do the thing that I think would be easier that would solve this problem right now.” I’m not going to do that because I really believe God is working His plans out. I don’t believe the burden is on me to do something that I believe would be unfaithful in order to solve this problem.

My problem is not being able to sell a lot of records. I leave that to God, even though I know I don’t write songs or play music that you would ever see on Christian radio. I know that to be one of the big gatekeepers. I have to believe that God is powerful enough that if He wanted me to sell a million records, there is not a thing I could do to stop Him and neither could Christian radio. Nobody could stop Him. No one could hold His hand back if He wanted to make me a giant, multi-platinum-selling artist. I have to believe He’s capable of accomplishing that even if I don’t make the compromises that I feel like it would take for me to manipulate it to make it happen.

So my believing that He is capable of doing that, He will if He desires it, liberates me to say, “You know what? If that is the case, I’m going to be a fool and make this record that I don’t think anyone in the market is going to understand or want to buy or listen to, but I’m going to leave it to the Lord, and if He wants to make it successful, then He is going to do it. I just can’t make that my concern.”


RM: Couldn’t that same line of reasoning be applied to the Africa situation? Can’t we just say God could fix it if He wanted?

DW: It’s not a question of passivity. It’s a question of faithfulness, a question of calling. It’s not what’s the least I can do and still get by. It’s a question of what am I made to do and where does that take me.

It’d be one thing to say that I’m not going to use my gifts. I’m not going to do music or anything. I’m going to sit and just say, “God, make it happen. You just produce a record out of thin air. You’ve done it before. Make something out of nothing and then make me successful. I’m just not going to do a d--- thing. I’m not going to do anything about Africa.” God is good. He’s powerful. He’ll take care of those people.

The thing is, He does it by way of His Church in this world. He does it by way of the gifts and the calling, again the diverse members of one body building one kingdom, but in many different ways. I feel there are a lot of people, including the people involved in Blood:Water Mission, who are very much called and have gifts for and are compelled to the situation in Africa, just like I am compelled and believe that I’m made with and have the gifts to make this music. It would be unfaithful of me to do otherwise.


RM: When you were with Caedmon’s and you wrote a song, it was usually about love or the girl you couldn’t get, and now you are the voice in the wilderness triumphing a new cause. How did you get from there to here?

DW: Marriage. It’s unbelievable how totally central my marriage is to everything that has happened to me in the last six or seven years. Because I got married and all of a sudden it’s like you trade one set of complications for another. It’s not like suddenly you stop longing and you stop being lonely, and it doesn’t complete you or whatever, but it changes all the details. It changes the story.

There is something about having a flesh and blood representation of the language that I had heard for years and years about the bride and the bridegroom and how Christ loves His Church and gives Himself up for, and suddenly to have those emotions of my own toward my wife, that makes such sense to me that that’s what pulled all of the songs on my first record out. I couldn’t have possibly written those without my wife because she was the one who very literally, tangibly made that analogy come to life and walk around my house.

All of a sudden, I’m like wait, the Church. That’s been the missing picture for me. That community, that lifestyle had never made sense to me before. Suddenly I was like, “What is my role in that then?” I have never fit easily into church community or whatever. I don’t fit easily. A lot of us don’t. Where do I fit? How do I get into a local church community? What is my role? What are my gifts really for? I think they are for the concepts of that local body to encourage and build that up.

The bigger question is, what is the role of the Church in culture? I wanted to find these things out, so I started studying all this stuff. Next thing you know I have written a whole bunch of songs about it. That’s just what happens to me. Whatever I am thinking about, whatever I’m reading, whatever I’m interested in, that’s just what I write about. I was really interested in women for a lot of years, trying to sort out relationships with Caedmon’s. I wrote a ton about it. Theology and women was what I was very interested in for many years.

Reconciling the fact that God is sovereign and governs all things and the fact that I ruined every relationship that I was in was a fascinating topic for me for many, many years. So that’s what I wrote about. That wasn’t my intention. That’s just what I did. It’s no different today. So my wife had everything to do with it. She has made me brave. Something about having the love of a person that is unconditional, I feel like I can say things that I couldn’t say before. I didn’t have the support of someone who really loved me like that before. Now that I do, I feel fearless. I feel like I can really go after some of these things. My wife, she does that for me.


RM: What did you read and listen to for research?

DW: I have a lot of friends who are much smarter than me, and when I stumble onto some new topic, I go out and buy 20 books. I start to study. Edmund P. Clowney wrote a book called The Church (Contours of Christian Theology). I started to read that immediately. That was a tremendous book for me. A man named Brian Habig, who was our UF guy at the Presbyterian college ministry, he had written a book called The Enduring Community: Embracing the Priority of the Church. It is a book about exactly what at the moment I wanted to know. Who am I in terms of the Church, and who is the Church in terms of culture? That book was tremendously helpful for me. It made a distinction between what is church work and what is kingdom work.

What is the role of the Church? What is the job of the Church? What shouldn’t the Church get bogged down in because it’s not really the role of the Church it’s kingdom work? You think about these big churches that have oil change places in them. A lot of them are megachurches, but I think megachurches just help us to see it more clearly because they are just huge, blown-out-of-proportion representations of every church if we are honest.

Changing somebody’s oil can absolutely be kingdom work. There is no doubt about that. If you have gifts for that, you can do that. You can do that. Excellent! But it’s not the job of the Church. The Church has no business changing people’s oil.

Go to the church, be encouraged, be taught and then if those are your gifts, go do that—but that is kingdom work, not church work. There is a huge distinction, and it is imperative that the Church starts to learn how the semantics of those things play out. A book like The Enduring Community really helped me with that. There were other books. There is a book called Risking Church: Creating a Place Where Your Heart Feels at Home by Jim Kallam Jr. There were a handful of books that were tremendous for me that really helped me sort it out. Along with a lot of my friends in Nashville. That’s for the first record anyway.

After the second record, it was an election year, the way the Church has made an idol of her allegiance to one political party or the other became apparent. The ugliness of that started to come out during that election year to stir me up a little.

My eyes are always peeled to try to find the things that need addressing that no one is addressing. There are a few really big ones. I think politics is a long time coming. That’s why I am really excited about movements like what is happening with Jim Wallis and Sojourners. I will not sit here and endorse everything he says, by any means. I don’t see eye to eye on everything with a guy like Jim Wallis, but there is so much to commend about what he is bringing up.

The way that moral issues have been co-opted by a political party for nothing else but to develop a constituency whose votes they feel like they can depend on, I feel like that is really dangerous. I just want to get in that I feel like it is nearly impossible to walk a party line—especially in a two-party system—and follow Jesus. It’s just d--- near impossible. I’m not saying you can’t be a member of a political party, and I’m not saying you can’t be this or that. There has to be, at some level, allegiance that trumps that, where we have a say in this situation.

I cannot think like an American. I cannot think like whatever it is I am. I have to think about one who looks ahead to King Jesus on the throne and His kingdom and Him ruling righteously and perfectly, because that is the kingdom that is coming. That is the government that we long for.

Derek Webb lives in Nashville with his wife Sandra. He is an advocate for Blood:Water Mission, especially in his concerts and interviews.