Interview with David Crowder
by Alicia Carson
One of my favorite Bible passages is found in Isaiah 61. “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor…to bind up the brokenhearted… to proclaim freedom for captives … to comfort all who mourn … and to provide for those who grieve in Zion – to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair” (Isaiah 61:1-3).
Not only is God in the business of ministering to broken people, but He commissions us to do the same. Some who are called seem to have natural dispositions for understanding and meeting the needs of hurting people, while most of us must experience tragedies of our own before our compassion grows and before effective ministry comes from our hearts. Maybe this is because we learn the most unforgettable lessons about God’s grace while we are in the midst of tragedy. This is when we learn first-hand that beauty can come from the ugliest things. And when we discover this miracle, we can hardly keep the discovery to ourselves; we are driven to pay it forward. This, I believe, is how ministry often begins.
In this week’s High Notes, Christian recording artist, David Crowder talks about two experiences that redefined his walk with God and shaped his understanding about compassion and ministry. He begins our interview by discussing an 18th-century song that inspires him:
David Crowder: There’s a hymn that means a lot me, Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing. One verse says Prone to wander, Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love, and I remember specifically a moment in college when I felt like I was exactly in that spot.
I had a call from my mom, and it was just a really devastating phone call. A family member was right in the thick of something that was pretty significant, and it was a family member who had been really instrumental in the formation of my faith. The whole thing just caused me to question everything I believed about God and the way this thing was supposed to function and work, and it sent me down a path of a lot of questions. Everything I believed about my faith was sort of turned on-end, and I was left to sort things out. That song created a really significant moment that pulled me back into the brightness of things.
A. Carson: What was it about the song that inspired you so?
David Crowder: I guess it was a combination of music being able to pull you from where your reality is, you know, and making you see things beyond where your present circumstances have you. Music has always done that for me. And also, it was one of those moments when I thought to myself, This hymn has stuck around for a good bit of time within our faith, and it seems like we don’t have enough lyrical moments that express dyer situations, especially in such a poetic way like that hymn is able to.
So I think the hymn and the moment musically and the environment I was a part of just really pulled me from a pretty selfish space and let me see that wow, communally, we’ve all felt exactly what I’m feeling right now. That’s why I think that hymn caught me so readily: it expressed exactly where I was and what I felt, and it felt like it gave me permission to feel those things.
Then the last verse says Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, and I think that’s exactly what my hope was, and I felt that happen. In turn, I’ve tried to use music to provoke similar moments in other peoples’ lives.
A. Carson: How was your walk with God before the bad news came?
David Crowder: I would consider it pretty good. I think maybe I had not had a lot of difficult moments in my life yet. But when difficult stuff erupts, that’s when we’re really able to sort through things. And I don’t think you can ever arrive at conclusions that are concrete in any way unless you have experiences that make you sort back through all the stuff you’ve called belief or doctrine. Belief has to be experienced to be real in your life. That’s what turns it from something theoretical into something tangible…
A. Carson: Would you say that experiences like the one you had in college shapes who you are as a minister?
David Crowder: Most definitely. And I think that’s what I was inspired by in that hymn as well. We need that space available to us as people struggling. We need space to discover what it means to be human in a relationship with the Divine.
And for us as leaders in the Church or people who are somewhat elevated on a platform, I think it’s our role and responsibility to provide space for people to express and articulate all of the difficult moments in life as well as the beautiful moments in life that are common to all of us.
On October 30, 2005, David Crowder collided with another tragedy. His close friend and pastor, Kyle Lake, was electrocuted while performing a baptism at University Baptist Church. Before the accident, Kyle and the David Crowder* Band worked closely together to develop the concept of the A Collision CD.
A. Carson: A lot of people might have become angry with God after the sudden death of a friend, but your relationship with God somehow blossomed after Kyle passed away…
David Crowder: You know, music took on a different depth for us as a band and as a church community. But that’s a thing we haven’t talked about a lot just because of the nature of things, and I guess now, since there’s a little more distance, it’s a little easier to discuss.
The A Collision record was really a record about death and our response to our mortality, and it was after we had the record back in our hands that we experienced it as a community. We had all of these songs to sing together that Kyle had had a lot to do with on the theological side of things. I think it was almost spooky in a sense, to know that God had given us these expressions for a moment we didn’t even know was coming, and then, when it was here, we had what we needed as a community, and that was something that really just blew our minds. Those songs lifted people from places that you couldn’t believe would be reachable or retrievable. Music is just a strange thing, and I’m really glad we have it available to us to say things within our faith.
A. Carson: What song or lyric from that CD best expressed your feelings after Kyle passed away?
David Crowder: Probably the Come Awake song. There’s a line in there that says You are not the only one who feels like the only one. I think that’s what we learned through that whole thing. And again, I think most of the time when difficulty sets in, we feel like we’re isolated and that this is an experience that is only our own, and what we realized through Kyle’s passing – and it seems like one of those things you learn again and again – is that other people feel exactly the same struggles, the same fears, the same insecurities, the same doubt. And there’s a victory that happens when that’s expressed in a community of people. So I feel like that’s just one of those lines that, to say it in a room full of people singing it together, you’re kind of looking around going Absolutely! We can make it through this! We’ve made it through before; there are better things ahead!
Before we went through this together, hope was just a nice flowery word within our faith; it didn’t have much depth. But now, on the other side of our experience, it has become something that is necessary. Hope has taken on a life we hadn’t experienced before, and what has erupted from it all is just this desperate desire to pull other people into this real hope, this tangible thing that moves from something theoretical to something that was felt and can be experienced. Our faith has all of a sudden taken on a new depth, and we can’t help but want to make the world a better place because of it (laugh). It’s a bizarre result but I’ve seen it happen to so many people.
The David Crowder* Band has won 4 Dove Awards since 2006. Their latest CD is Remedy. To learn more about David Crowder, visit www.davidcrowderband.com or www.myspace.com/davidcrowderband.
