Out Of The Dust: The music ministry couple talk about the realities of marriage

Friday 25th October 2019

Tony Cummings spoke to the Tennessee-based duo who've gone through marriage and remarriage, OUT OF THE DUST



Continued from page 1

Steph: "Yes."

Tony: Presumably you have to tell that story every single time you do a concert. I've got a dramatic testimony, one of those 'used to do a lot of drugs then I became a Christian', and after a while of telling it, I know this is an odd word to use, but I got a bit bored with it, saying the same kind of thing every time. The details of it don't change and people want to know the details. Are you at a stage yet where you're thinking tonight I'd like not to talk about how God healed our marriage or are you still happy to do it every single time you do a concert?

Steph: "That's a good question because we have told it, gosh, hundreds of times probably at this point. But honestly, especially with our tours, we do a big summer tour each year, leading into the fall as well, we feel like God's given us direction each year of a new corner to explore in our story or a focus. Somehow it has still become fresh and new each year. And even places that we go back and play a couple of years in a row, we always pray that some new part of the story will jump out for people who have heard it before."

Chris: "I'll just be candid, it is refreshing to hear you say that because that has been a struggle, not a huge struggle, but it has been a fight. After telling a story so many times it can become a fight to not get jaded. To continue to try really hard, when it is our livelihood, we have to mind those steps and remain vulnerable and not let it harden over and become a performance of telling that story."

Tony: Of course, in your particular story, there are plenty of people who've got a relationship which has gone bad. Maybe it is not a marriage. Maybe it's a father/son/daughter or just a friendship. And your songs resonate with the fact that God can bring a change of heart and bring things back, even though our hearts can be hard and the situation seems hopeless. That continues to be a central theme of a lot of your songs, doesn't it?

Steph: "It does. And that is always our hope and our prayer that even though our story is specific to a marriage, our marriage falling apart and God redeeming that, we always want it to be something much broader than that. Like you said, so that people who are hurting, who are broken can find purpose in their pain and trials and still see redemption, whether it's redemption they had hoped for. We all know we have redemption through Jesus. It does continue to be a theme of our music and we can explore a few different corners, some new corners. There's one song on there that is very 'lasered' in to my experience after Chris left, a song called 'Take This', and there's one on there called 'I Still Believe In You' that Chris released about his faith journey after coming back to the Lord."

Tony: You wrote 'I Still Believe In You', didn't you, Chris? Tell me a bit more about that particular song.

Chris: "We have a pretty unique process of how we write songs. But anytime we write songs I just want to be sure that it's drawing deep from personal experience but not so deep and so insular and personal that it becomes self-serving, or self-gratifying. It's personal and very true but it also uses a wide enough lens so that people can relate to it. That's just song writing 101 but with a story like ours, with a journey like mine has been with faith and with doubt, agnosticism, atheism, whatever you want to call it, and coming back to faith, that song was really hard to write but for me it became something so much bigger. It's probably one of my favourite songs I've ever written or recorded. It feels like it was a gift to be able to be a part of that song. Often we write with others in mind, making that wide angle but this is really a very special song for me."

Tony: Some of your songs reflect levels of faith and levels of unbelief. Isn't that true?

Chris: "I've never been able to be dishonest with myself. I'm really good at performing for other people, but it's always been really hard to be dishonest with myself. In that line I wanted to give voice to the people who maybe just have a hard time seeing it and realising it's actually okay, you don't have to hide your doubts, or your unbelief. God welcomes you in with that and wants to hold that part of it too, not just the parts that get it, the parts that understand him. I heard a quote that said faith isn't equal to the amount of certainty we have; it's equal to the amount of commitment. That's what the song became for me. It was a song of commitment. Whatever doubts may come, I'm committed to this story, to this journey, to this walk with you."

Tony: Tell me about some more of the songs on 'Now More Than Ever'. For instance, what's the title about?

Out Of The Dust:  The music ministry couple talk about the
realities of marriage

Steph: "We wrote 'Now More Than Ever' before we had decided what we wanted the record to be called. We had that song and we knew we wanted a song that was a summary of what we had learnt, what God had taught us about marriage after our marriage was redeemed. This kingdom perspective of marriage that God uses as a picture of his love for us. Christian marriages should be used to show the world the Christ-like love where you lay yourself down for somebody else. Somebody who worked on our last album had a picture on Instagram of his wedding ring and on the inside was inscribed 'now more than ever'. We thought that was so beautiful. This permanent ring that you can look at any day from the moment you got married to 20 years down the road, that commitment means more now than ever. You pursue each other now more than ever in the heart, in the good. So that's where that song came from. As we were writing the rest of the record these themes kept coming up of just ways that we're addressing culture and where our world seems to be going and how it seems like the world needs Jesus now more than ever. It felt right to encompass the whole album with that title 'Now More Than Ever'."

Tony: I read a very worrying statistic a few years ago, which revealed that the divorce rate among American evangelical Christians was the same as among the non-Christian community. Maybe you're finding this as you go about on your tours. Is your overall message about marriage don't give up on it if there's any possibility, however slight, that it could be restored?

Chris: "In a sense, yes. That statistic is very alarming. We hear all the time that God is full of grace for the divorcee. God is full of grace for people whose marriages are hurting and in trouble. But a lot of Christians have lost the idea of the purpose of marriage. It's covenantal, not contractual, as some of our friends so eloquently say. In a contract, if you hire someone to do contracting work at your house and they don't keep up their end of the deal, well you can sever that contract. But a covenant is so much higher than that. If you don't keep up your end of the deal I'm still here, I'm still in, I'm still for you. That covenantal picture is to show the world what God's love is like for us. Coming back to your question, there is so much grace, so much mercy in God that yes, it can seem like all hope is lost and God showed this most beautiful picture of his redemptive love in our story because I was so far from God, I was so far from Steph. No one saw it coming, that I would come back, including me.

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