In this episode we sit down to talk with our dear friend and worship leader Jon Egan about his new album “Unveil” and all that he’s seeing and learning as a worship leader and songwriter. (You can pre-order Unveil wherever good music is sold online. You’ll get one song each week till the album releases on March 29th.)
For me this project was about singing song together… almost like giving the songs back to the people… we have so much going for us in modern worship, but my burden is “Are people actually singing?”
My story is not my story but God’s story… I can declare the realities of my life or I can declare something else… these songs are designed to equip the church to rise out of their own reality and sing a greater one…
Most of my life I’ve had a propensity to get lost in my feelings, and worship has been the thing that’s “unveiled” my eyes to see something greater… I run toward worship and I want my church to run toward it… worship has been the antidote to my propensity to fear…
I could have had the label give me a budget to record in a studio somewhere, but it would have been missing the church… I get emotional about it… my love for the church and their love for me has lifted me…
The song “Unveil” is one of those songs that we can only sing now… when all things are made new there will be a fullness of glory… but in this life we can cry out for things we don’t see… we can cry out for the glory, for God to “unveil” our hearts and eyes to know him…
The song “the Table” began because I was imagining a table where the Father, Son, and Spirit were at, and there was an empty seat where they were saying, “Come, there is a seat for you here…”
The song “Pure Exaltation” came because we didn’t have a song like that on the album… language for the church to help pull them up out of their reality and into heaven…
A burden of mine is that the voice of the worship leader is being muffled… we have great production, better than ever… which means you can get by now with echoing and not being an actual voice…
My challenge to young worship leaders is to use their voice… to write original songs for their church… churches sing their own songs the loudest…