Worship band Rend Collective is on a mission to inspire the masses with the “good news,” with frontman Gareth Gilkeson recently telling Faithwire that the band wants to “call people back to unity.”
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It’s a pertinent message that comes as Americans continue to grapple with deep social and political divides.
Gilkeson and his fellow band members, who recently released their eighth album titled, “Good News,” are surely familiar with the pain that comes from such heated differences, as they are all from Northern Ireland, a nation that was gripped by sometimes deadly battles between Catholics and Protestants from the middle to the late 20th century. With that in mind, the singer said that the current fractures in society are quite concerning.
“[What] really troubles us is the fact of segregation and people disappearing into their own tiny little world … I feel like there’s a lot of fear mongering,” Gilkeson told Faithwire. “We’re so quick to run to our tribes — people who think like us, talk like us, look like us.”
He lamented the fact that so many in society have figured out what to fight about rather than what they have in common. And rather than being the exception to this unhealthy trend, the Christian world serves as a prominent example of it.
“We believe in a savior who came and died for us, he defeated death and rose again,” Gilkeson said. “He’s given each one of us the personal resurrection story.”
He said it’s important not to water down truth, but that the church should be known, no matter what, not by what it disagrees with, but by its points of agreement as well as the things that it stands for.
Fellow bandmate Chris Llewellyn agreed with this assessment and said that too many people focus in on the negatives and miss the “actual personality and character” of the faith.
“I think one of the things that I find surprising about Christianity is not so much that we get the message wrong, but that we get the actual personality and character around it wrong,” he said.
And just as society is dealing with these conundrums, Rend Collective is out with the “Good News” album — music that carries an important message.
“In a time when we are inudated with bad news, tragic news … despite all the difficulties and all the darkness there is that essence of redemption,” Gilkeson said. “We as Christians have good news, we have joy, we have celebration.”
Find out more about Rend Collective’s new album “Good News” here.