I recently read an interview with Louie Giglio and I was astonished! He just walked through his life and how he came to start the Passion Movement, but it was awesome to read. I have revered Louie for sometime now, and this interview/article gave me even more respect for the dude. Below I have posted the article so you can check it out. It’s pretty lengthy, but worth the time!
"From his humble (and somewhat awkward) beginnings of working with college age students to his hosting 11,000 of them recently at a Passion event in Nashville… speaker, author and visionary of the Passion movement Louie Giglio has been trying to impact the college students life and culture. The contribution the Passion movement and the worship songs/artists it has birthed since has made quite an impact on modern church music as well. We thought we could all benefit from hearing Louie’s story and by getting a good look at what spurs him on today.
WM: Tell us where you started and how you got to this point.
Louie: My story is college students. I ended up at Baylor University kind of by accident in 1985. I mean, I actually knew I was driving there at the time, so not that much by
accident, I was enrolling in grad school there after seminary. My wife was there. But I didn’t know what God’s purposes were until I got there.
With a small band of students, we started a Bible study at Baylor University, a campus of 11,000 students, and in about five years, there were 1400 college students coming to this Bible study every Monday night. For ten years, that was my life. And the Bible study was simple: it was worship and music. Granted, it was ’88, ’89, ’92, we weren’t blowing anything out of the water; we weren’t cutting edge like now, but I remember getting an Integrity music tape in 1988, and let me tell you what happened. This guy had sequenced four worship songs together! The CD was called Glorify Thy Name; it had a star on the front. I got our group together, and I said, The songs are joined together! Wow! It was a huge revelation. We literally put the words on overhead transparencies and played the tape at our Bible study.
That’s where worship was in 1987. That’s where we were living. It was unbelievable. And midi keyboard and sequencing and programming—that was the world. It was flat-out cutting edge for our time there, but we did two things: We wanted students to encounter God in musical expressions of worship, where they could be free, uninhibited. And we taught the Word of God—no holds barred, no messing around, it was a call to follow Jesus Christ. Worship in music and strong teaching of the Word, that’s all we did. We didn’t serve free food, we didn’t have dramas, we didn’t do anything else. And I mean students just poured into this thing. For ten years, that was my life.
We transitioned in 1995 to Atlanta, because my dad was ill. My dad was disabled several years before, and finally my wife and I felt the release of God to go help my mom take care of my dad. So we left our ministries at Baylor to our staff and moved to Atlanta. I was going to work at Home Depot. I didn’t have a ministry; I was just going to help my mom take care of my dad. Our last Monday night Bible study in Waco, before we literally moved to Atlanta, was the day we buried my dad. He died in the process of us getting to Atlanta, and now here we were in no man’s land. We couldn’t go back to Waco. We were in Atlanta, and we didn’t know why.
And right in that window, God gave me a picture, a little snapshot in my mind. It was a generation of college students uniting together, on their faces in worship and prayer for awakening in this generation. (I didn’t put those words around it when I saw it; I’ve put them around it since.) But I was flying on a plane from Dallas to Atlanta, and I just
went, “Unbelievable!” And I knew right then that God was saying, “That’s going to happen. I’m going to do it, but I’m going to use you as a catalyst in it”. And right there, Passion was born.
It’s been a ten-year journey of wanting to change this collegiate generation, to change the way they think about life, moving them from a me-centered life to a God-centered
life, an all-about-me life to an all-about-God life. And Charlie Hall, Chris Tomlin and David Crowder were guys I’d known. I didn’t go out and recruit them, they were just kids I knew at the time. We all started down this road together. And ten years later, we still have a heartbeat for college students. The Passion movement is sort of gathering a lot of steam, and these guys, as songwriters and lead worshippers, are writing songs for the world. And all that stuff is a by-product of wanting to be faithful, to serve a collegiate generation, to see spiritual awakening come to sixteen million college students in this country, eighty percent of whom don’t have a clue today how much God cares about them.
WM: You touched on the “artist/lead worshipper.” Let’s talk about that. You call them “artist/worshippers.” Now you’ve got Chris Tomlin having phenomenal success—radio and tours—and David Crowder out touring. How did you go from doing ministry in one setting to taking it out to other cities?
Louie: The reason we started the label was because Passion was getting a lot of exposure, and I could see the handwriting on the wall. Passion was already signed to a
label as Passion; we were already making Passion records. But all of a sudden, I’m looking at Chris and David over here and Charlie, and I’m seeing the labels coming for them. And I know enough about this world to know that if David signs to this label and Chris signs to this label and Charlie signs to this label, we’re going to have schizophrenia in our family. And we are family; we’re journeying together. We had enough equity with our label partner, EMI, to say, we want to start our own label, and we want to sign all these guys to our own label. They were like, “Okay, so what are we going to call it?” The answer was Sixsteprecords, from the story of David carrying the
Ark, which means every six steps we want to remember that this is all about the mercy and grace of God. We want to build an altar every six steps and worship God.
A handful of us got together, me and my wife, David and Toni Crowder, Charlie and Kimber, Tomlin, and we sat down and said, “What do we want this label to be about?” One of the main things we talked about is that the world doesn’t need any more stars. As badly as Christians want Christian stars, we don’t need any more stars. There is already a Star in our story; we don’t need any more. So we wrestled with this “artist” word and had a lot of honest dialogue about it, because these guys are artists. I consider myself an artist. People ask, How do you talk about your communication style? And I say, Painting. I like to paint with words.
These guys are amazingly true artists, but “artist” has become a word with all these connotations: Someone carries your stuff for you. They treat you like a celebrity. They’re
at your beck and call. You’re at a higher level than every other average follower of Jesus out in the world. You don’t have to live in the real world and deal with real-world
issues. We did not want to propagate that, so we came up with this term, “artist/worshippers,” meaning we’re truly worshippers of God. That’s what we are. There is an artistic bent to what we do, but we wanted to create a term that carries a question with it: Why did you use that term? Then we can answer and say, Because we don’t want you to look at these guys and say, Oh, they’re artists. That must mean they get artist treatment. We want them to be seen as worshippers first.
Inverting the words “worship leader” to “lead worshipper” helped me enormously. A worship leader is primarily concerned with leading something, meaning, my main focus
is leading you. So I’m up here playing the whole time, trying to figure out how you’re doing. Oh, Bruce isn’t with me, I’ve got to crank the tempo up; I’ve got to get some more volume. Let’s do “Undignified.” Come on, I’ve got to get Bruce going! You know how it works: There could be a thousand people in the room, but if Bruce isn’t with me, I’m
missing the 999 and I’m totally on Bruce. That’s all I can think about.
But if I invert the words and become a lead worshipper, my primary focus isn’t leading you; that’s my secondary focus. My primary focus is worshipping. I’m a lead worshipper. I want to be the first guy in the room worshipping God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. Now I’m not disinterested in Bruce, because I’m here as a psalmist, and part of my responsibility is to lead him into the presence of God. (That’s mostly the Holy Spirit’s job, but He’s going to use me as a vessel.) So I’m going to come back and check on Bruce periodically, in between my worshipping, to see how he’s doing. But I’m a lead worshipper, so I’m going to leave today saying, Somebody flat-out worshipped today, and I know it was me.
The other extreme is the guy who closes his eyes and lifts his hands and never checks on anybody the whole time he leads. They could have all gone home, while he was over there worshipping. That’s not good. But the preoccupation with how are you feeling? How are you feeling me? How are you doing with the songs? How can I make this work for you? That, to me, gets burdensome.
We’re not shying away from radio. A few months ago, Chris Tomlin became the first person ever in Christian radio to have two songs in the Top Ten at the same time. We don’t say, “Oh, we don’t want that, we’re artist/worshippers”. All we care about is worship. We say, “Thank you, God, this is awesome!” Especially because both are very God-ward worship songs. We recognize the artistry side of it. I just don’t ever want David Crowder to turn into a prima donna, and I don’t ever want Chris Tomlin to think he can’t carry his own guitar. And you know, the truth of the matter is, they don’t feel that way. It’s a miracle, given how much success and attention they’ve been given, that their heartbeat is so true to just wanting to shine the light on Him.
Here’s the thing about being a Christian celebrity: You can’t stop people from shining a light on you. Passion can’t do that. Sixsteps can’t do that. I can’t shield David Crowder or Chris Tomlin and say, Don’t shine a light on Chris Tomlin. I can’t stop that, and I don’t want to stop that. I’m like, shine a light on Chris Tomlin if you want to. The question is, “What is Chris Tomlin going to do when you shine that light on him?” And it doesn’t have to be Chris Tomlin, the same stuff trickles down to the guy leading worship on Sunday for 177 people at his church. He’s got the same pride issue as Chris Tomlin, exactly. And he wants someone to come up to him after the service and say, Man, your song this morning was amazing! And that’s the little light. It may not be K-LOVE Radio light or CCM Magazine light or Worship Musician cover light, but it’s
light. You can’t stop that—unless you’re just terrible. And if you’re terrible at what you do, why would anyone want to shine the light on you? The question is, “What do you do when they shine the light on you?” Do you bask in it? Or do you reflect it to where it belongs. I hope this sounds okay, but I want to be a guy and hang around with guys who are good enough to get light shined on us, and I want, by the grace of God, to reflect every beam of it to God.
WM: Last question: You’ve got 11,000 kids in Nashville. When you’re doing these worship events, what is it you think they’re getting that thrills you, and what are you afraid they are missing when they come to these events?
Louie: Well, I don’t want to just pat Passion on the back, but when they come to a Passion gathering, I pray they’re not not getting anything. Because if they’re not getting
anything, there’s only one person responsible for that, and that’s me. I can’t walk away and go, Man, we had 11,000 people come to Nashville; I can’t believe this didn’t happen. Because I have the ability to change that. If we accomplish what Passion is trying to do, I don’t think we’re going to miss anything.
What we’re trying to do is wed some things together: worship music (which is different from worship, it’s part of worship) and amazingly deep theological teaching. Passion is not about music; Passion is about theology. Most people don’t know that until they get there. They come through the worship door, saying, I’ve got the CD, man. I love Passion. I can’t wait to get to this worship event. They come through the door, and these messages fall on them like a truck. And they’re like, I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t ready for teaching to rock me down at the core of my life. But when you wed any expressions of worship and the teaching of God’s Word, the truth is what sets you free, not the music. Music makes you feel good, but the truth is what sets you free. When you put those two things together and you add to them a call to action, then I think you’re finding a sweet spot for what worship is.
If the call to action is not there, then we’re just soaking up a great experience, and man, give me more, more, more, more. We are consuming worship. The point of worship,
though, as far as I can tell from reading the Bible cover to cover, is not for people to consume the worship, but for people to be consumed in the worship for the glory of God.
Here’s my life, Lord, use me any way you want to for your kingdom. If you take that out, then you’re just consuming. We consume these songs so fast: Thank you, that was a great song. Thank you so much, we’re finished with that now. New song, please. People at our churches go, We don’t want to sing that song anymore, that’s old. We want to sing this new song. We’re just consuming the music.
The truth of the matter is, we are supposed to be the consumee, not the consumer. God is the consumer, we’re the consumee. We come into worship and say, Here’s my life. And God says, Thank you, I’m going to take your life and burn it up as an offering for me. When these three are together—worship in music, teaching that rocks kids’ world views, and the expression of how to live it out—then worship is in a zone. If you take any of the three away, then you’re missing it. If you’ve got super-tight theology (and we have incredible mission focus), but there’s not this heart/soul/mind/all-of-me emotion, this engaging, full-on, killer response to God in worship, then we’re missing it. If you have that and social action, but you don’t have any strong teaching for a foundation, then you don’t have it. If you have great music and strong teaching, but don’t have an expression and outlet, then you still don’t have it. I think it’s those three pieces coming together.
So when I walk into worship environments, I just go, Yeah, I see a call to action. This is about getting out of this worship service and into the world where these songs really
need to be sung. Not in here where we’re already singing it. And I see the Word of God really being lifted up high.
These students sat in Gaylord Arena for 45-minute chunks of teaching from people like John Piper. The guy isn’t talking in fairytale land, he’s unpacking some big-time theology. And they’re sitting there glued to it like they’re watching MTV. And that happened session after session after session after session. When the music starts or ends, it’s no wonder an eruption happens, because truth is unlocking.
This is a phrase that I haven’t published a lot, but Passion’s secret heartbeat is “theologically informed freedom.” We don’t care if kids dance in the aisles or if every hand in the house is raised. We don’t care if people are shouting or if they sing a spontaneous song. Let there be freedom! But l want the freedom to not be emotionally informed or musically informed (like if I play this certain chord progression, I can get everyone’s hands in the air). I want it to be theologically informed. I want truth to smack their lives so hard it unleashes this uncalculated freedom in their lives. When that happens, I have a confident hope that maybe it can continue when the music isn’t on. So my new little thing that I’ve been carrying around lately is, “Let’s turn down the music and turn up the worship.” And that’s from a guy who’s putting out a worship CD tomorrow! I am so for music, but let’s not just keep turning the music up. At some point, let’s turn the music down and see if the worship is still there."
Aritcle provided courtesy of Worship Musician Magazine.
