by Matt Conner

Two years ago, London Gatch found herself facing the unknown.

For years, Gatch had worked with in ministry with her husband, Lance, as part of Elevation Worship. As they felt the call to something new, however, the questions remained. It didn’t help matters that she and her husband were expecting their first child.

With a growing young family, Gatch said the uncertainty was a bit unsettling, but it also provided some fertile soil for growth in her own faith.

“It was a very emotional time for us to step away from a community that had basically been our identity for so long,” she says. “When you’re part of a ministry that has a platform like that, it really can become part of your identity. So we had to get to a place where we would ask the Lord to reveal our true identity. I knew that my identity couldn’t be a job title. I knew that couldn’t be it. God was very sweet and clear to us to say, ‘Your identity is me. You’re a daughter of mine. You’re the wife of Lance. You’re a new mother. You are perfectly and wonderfully made for all I have planned for you.’”

Much of Gatch’s own spiritual growth came via the same way that she’s blessed so many others over the years: her music. Gatch has turned to music for most of her life to help her through difficult moments and this time was no different.

“I lost my dad to cancer when I was 20 years old,” says Gatch. “He battled cancer for 13 years, from the time I was in elementary school until college. For most of my formative years, my family was going through this really hard time. As a teenager, I found that writing songs and pouring myself into music was very therapeutic for me. It became something I was very passionate about.

“So I think I already had a history of turning to music and writing to cope with grief and hard times and sadness. It’s only natural that after being in ministry for years and years that we would turn to something familiar like writing and music for help and therapy.”

These days, Gatch has an acclaimed new solo album, New Stories, with BEC Recordings, a venture she never expected as she learned to adjust to life outside of vocational church ministry. Instead, she says, the new musical direction is simply the result of God ordaining her family’s steps as they leaned forward in faith.

“Even very first song that we wrote for this new album, which is called “Jesus Only You,” was written before we even knew we were making a record,” she says. “It was written as therapy in this time. We knew that God was telling us to continue writing songs, but we didn’t have a label. It’s not like there was a plan. I woke up one morning with the first few lines of the song. I was basically speaking them over myself when I woke one morning. I was saying, ‘Only you can make it right again. Only you can make me whole again.’

From there, Gatch said she wrote down more lyrical ideas and brought them together with friends who ended up helping to right the powerful first single. “We had no idea that two months later, we’d sign with BEC and then record it and release it as a first single. That was the Lord putting all the pieces together and guiding us before we even knew what we were doing.”

These days, the Gatch family is expecting their second child even as they discern the next steps for London’s own solo career. It’s yet another chapter as God continues to tell New Stories through her life.

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