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Ten Questions with Jars of Clay's Steve Mason
Laura Harris
Contributing Writer
S4W.com: Can you think of a passage of scripture that recently has spoken to you about worship?
Steve Mason: Lately Dan has been quoting out of Isaiah. In the Old Testament they were presenting sacrifices and doing everything to the letter of the law. And Isaiah talked about the new worship being taking care of the widows and the orphans. That sort of theme has been undermining what we experience worship to be. What is worship? It’s a response to God--coming in contact with the truth and the grace of the gospel and responding to that.
S4W.com: Are there any books that have given you a greater vision of what worship is?
Mason: I really liked The Brothers Kby David James Duncan. I think God has made us for relationship. That’s why society is the way it is, because we’re made for relationship and we’re in a broken place. We want to know and be known – I think God has set in our hearts a desperate need to be connected to others in community. So I resonate with a lot of books that just talk about relationships, that explore character development and stories. I just think that if we look for God in these unexpected places, we’ll find him. Hopefully that will expand our knowledge of Him and our love for Him, and we will be changed.
S4W.com: Of the people who are putting out worship music these days, whose work do you admire?
Mason: I think Martin Smith and the guys in Delirious have a way of communicating the magnificence of God. I appreciate their hearts. As we embarked on Redemption Songs, we chatted [with them] about it.
Listen to samples from Redemption Songs or buy from Songs4Worship.com
S4W.com: In one sense Worship seems to be the “hot” thing in Christian music these days. Were you at all concerned that making Redemption Songs might appear to some that you were “jumping on the bandwagon?”
Mason: Completely. In fact, that’s why it’s taken us this long to do [an album] like this. We knew that some people might say, ‘They’re jumping on a bandwagon” or “They’re doing a worship album.” But we also knew that this is completely just an expression of our story at our church community and what has moved us.
S4W.com: Musically, Redemption Songsseems like it’s right on track for where your sound seems to be migrating. But lyrically, it’s quite a shift from your typical studio albums. Are there any challenges in switching formats?
Mason: Well, for all the flak we got in the early days for not having explicitly “Christian” lyrics, now we’re saying “Jesus” quite a bit. We’ve always loved metaphor and allegory, [which means that] we’ve kept certain parts of our story pretty safe and not fully disclosed. The process of going through these songs and picking out what we were doing and how we were going about it, that meant revealing to people the ways that God has met us in our church community. And we haven’t been that honest before. We haven’t spoken about our faith in such a plainspoken manner.
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