The sheep take time to speak ...

Crowder sends worshippers on 'Collision' course with God

By Buzz Trexler
for The (Maryville, TN) Daily Times, Spring  2006

It’s Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten season on the Christian calendar, and David Crowder is calling from his hometown of Waco, Texas.

Well, it’s Crowder’s hometown now, but the 33-year-old is really from Texarkana, Texas, and moved to Waco in the 1990s to attend Baylor University.

"That’s kind of a similar story for the rest of the guys in the band," Crowder said. "Nobody’s from there, but from different parts of Texas."

On Thursday, the band will make its way to the Knoxville Coliseum, where it will perform with Third Day on the "Wherever You Are Tour." The show starts at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $31 for VIP, $26.50 for general admission.

It was while he was a student at Baylor that Crowder and a group of friends collided with a spiritual reality: More than half of the college’s 14,000 students were not attending church. The result was the founding of University Baptist Church in 1996 and Crowder’s vocation as worship leader.

Out of that worship environment came the David Crowder Band’s first independent recording, "All I Can Say," in 2002, and a journey that has included being a part of the "Passion" worship projects and the top 10 hit "O Praise Him (All This for a King)" from "Illuminate," the group’s sophomore release in 2003.

Now comes "A Collision," a mixture of bluegrass and worship that was recorded in places such as the late Johnny Cash’s cabin outside of Hendersonville — joined by country legend Marty Stuart — and a barn outside of Crowder’s house in Waco.

The title seems appropriate in that the songs on "Collision" almost collide with one another, almost in rock-opera fashion. The project itself was almost experimental, though not intentionally so.

"We really had the whole piece laid out in like a Word file, just from beginning to end," Crowder explains. "It was kind of more like your creative-writing class in school. You know, you have the outline and then you just kind of plug the stuff in the little map you’ve made."

Crowder says the artwork on the cover of "Collision" is taken from a book entitled, "The Story of Atomic Energy," which featured a depiction of an atom with its "nucleus and some number of electrons swirling about."

In a press release on the project, Crowder maintains that the depiction is in error.

"We know, in fact, that electrons do not circle in elliptical paths around a nucleus. And this is the difficulty with symbols. They are never quite proper. They are always a bit broken," the songwriter says. Looking at the drawing, he thought: "This is the essence of art. We are creating broken containers."

Lent is a time when a great deal of introspection occurs in Christians, and they sometimes go through a sense of brokenness while remembering Jesus Christ’s journey to the cross. It culminates in the celebration of his resurrection at Easter.

In a sense, Crowder said during the Ash Wednesday interview, worship leaders use music and their own brokenness to join others in worship of the divine creator.

"These things are coming from broken people," he said. "And there’s a lot of talk in the worship community about our disappearing. You know, ‘I just want to get out of the way and let people see God.’ And I think that’s a beautiful thought, but an impossibility."

"Language is in the way. Music’s in the way. Songs are in the way. Stuff’s in the way. That’s just our state here," Crowder said. "And to acknowledge that we’re broken and to even ... create tradition that helps us embrace that, and to understand that, I think is a very healthy, good thing."

Even so, while directing others toward God through word and song, worship is more than the corporate experience, he said.

"I think ... there’s a danger to this turn of the idea of worship into this ethereal of having little to do with the nuts and bolts of life," he said. "The way you live is a very decisive thing. And that’s a greater indicator of where your affections lie, I think, than these moments that are purely experiential, or emotionally based with music."

Crowder said he loves music, but "I just don’t trust it all that much."

"I love it, but I don’t trust it to be a true indicator of what’s going on of inside me that’s real," he said. "I love it as a vehicle and a tool, but I think it can be a danger if what we do in a musical setting doesn’t translate to how we’re living our lives, or if our lives aren’t affecting our musical setting."

The Rev. Frank "Buzz" Trexler is managing editor at The Daily Times and pastor of Green Meadow United Methodist Church, www.themeadow.org. You can e-mail him at PastorBuzz@nxs.net.

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