MercyMe lead singer Bart Millard almost quit the band, but instead reinvented the group’s style.

If you grew up listening to Christian rock music, chances are a few songs from the band MercyMe have a spot on your most-played list. The Texas-born group features lead singer/songwriter Bart Millard and band members James Bryson, Robby Shaffer, Nathan Cochran, Michael Scheuchzer and Barry Graul, who have been cranking out hits and collecting fans since they combined their talents back in 1994. Twenty years, eight studio albums, eight Dove Awards and numerous Grammy nominations later, the band is still making music and continues to dominate the charts.

Their latest album is all the more significant thanks to its tumultous beginnings. Before production began, Millard made the difficult decision to step away from the band, which could have been the end of the road for fans of their music. Instead, walking away led to the creation of a new album, Welcome to the New, which has garnered two Grammy nominations, debuted No. 1 on the Billboard Christian Album charts and helped reinvent the veteran group’s sound.

Millard spoke with Guideposts.org about how close he came to leaving the band, the message behind this new album and why he’s having more fun than ever praising God through song.

Why did you want to make this album?

After [the album] The Hurt & The Healer, we kind of hit a wall. I grew up in a somewhat legalistic church and it taught me that faith is enough, but here’s three more things left just in case. There’s always things left to do to be closer to God. You start a band and do all this stuff to try to please Him and I just hit a point where I thought “Man, I don’t think I can keep up.” It felt like my family life was hanging by a thread. There had to be more to it.

While writing The Hurt & The Healer, a friend of mine came back into my life. We hadn’t seen him in a long time and one of the things he said to me that really stopped me in my tracks, he said “Hey, you guys work really hard but in case you’ve forgotten, there’s nothing you can do to make Christ love you any more than He already does, so maybe you just need to stop and just rest in the finished work of the cross.” No one’s ever told me to stop before, they’ve always said to try harder. It took a couple of years to understand what that meant and I really thought, at that time, that MercyMe was coming to an end. I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. Literally stop and just take it all in.

At that point, my wife and I had kind of jokingly said we stopped caring what people thought, what radios thought, what labels thought, and we just decided not to keep up with this image and focus on our fellowship with Christ. The second that MercyMe stopped being my identity, instead of quitting, I started falling back in love with it. About that time we had gone back in the studio and started making this new record and that’s the message, from beginning to end. Hence the name Welcome to the New. We wanted the message and everything to be different. We said, what’s the [album] we’d love to make, whether it ever gets played on the radio or not? So we just started making that and luckily people are okay with it.

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Download a free chord chart, lyrics, lead sheet, vocal demo and instrumental track for Hillsong’s “O Praise The Name (Anástasis.)”

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Matthew Starner suggests a balanced approach to worship planning:

Hymns have played a role in worship since the earliest days of the church, and especially since the Reformation. Martin Luther helped to bring hymns to greater prominence when he encouraged the congregation to actually participate. In the time before the Reformation, people would attend the service and the choir or priest would sing – often in Latin, which no one understood. But when hymns were translated into the language of the people and they were encouraged to sing, everything changed.

Hymns are characterized by their simple form, their [general] singability, and theological depth. In terms of form, the vast majority of all hymns are “strophic,” meaning every verse has the same melody. This makes them easy to learn and remember. They also are usually singable by the average person. There certainly are hymns that are challenging to sing, but for the most part, the rhythm and melody are kept simple. The biggest thing that hymns have is their depth of theological content. Hymns have captured in beautiful and poetic language the truths of Scripture. There’s a reason that so many of them have lasted for hundreds of years: they help us understand the faith in timeless ways.

Those hymns are a gift given to us by our spiritual forefathers. Yes, there are weak hymns that get replaced by stronger ones. Yes, there are some that are better suited to your theological or denominational position than others. But to simply throw out all hymns is to say that these gifts from those who have gone before us are worthless.

So no, you’re not too cool for traditional. You need the depth of content that hymns bring to your worship experience.

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Josh Ferris wonders what we communicate by putting a comparatively large amount of resources into a single day:

It’s the stuff of church staffer dreams. The parking lot is jammed, teams of coffee-amped volunteers are bustling, the band is running through that great new song, and very soon, crowds of regulars, guests, and returners will begin pouring through the doors. It’s Easter Sunday, a full house, and the energy is intoxicating.

In almost every church across the country, Easter brings more of what we all want most – people. That’s not a bad thing. After all, our God-given mission is to make disciples. And by it’s nature, disciple making requires people. So on a day of big numbers, we unleash the full weight of our creativity, preparation, and resources to leverage a once a year experience that wows the masses.

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He is risen! He is risen indeed! Easter is coming. It’s one of the most popular times in the year for guests to attend your church. It’s also the biggest celebration in the church calendar. So how will your church welcome visitors and celebrate Christ’s resurrection? We’ve got plenty of church Easter ideas to help you out.

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