Brian Johnson – Resounding Silence

I’ll tell you this, personally, what is so helpful for me is having a personal devotional time with God. I have to have that devotional time with God. It’s not every single morning, but several times a week, I’ll get up early and make my coffee and I’ve got my little lamp and my desk and I just start reading. It’s the most tangible, practical thing I tell people they can do. It’s literally like having your car on empty and then filling it up with gas. I have to literally approach it like my life depends on it.

CCM: You’re so deeply involved with Bethel Music and you’ve had the chance to work with and mentor so many worship leaders. What trends are you seeing for worship music’s future and what would you like to see happen?
BJ: I think the space has become really crowded, but that’s not a bad thing. In the past, when a song hit the CCLI top ten, it would stay there for a long time. Those songs would be sung over and over for a while. Now, those songs come and go a lot more, but there’s some good things about that. There’s a fresh expression of what God is doing, and you can quickly see what God is doing with social media and how communication and information gets put out there. It spans the globe. It’s crazy.

The fruit of that is God can put His hand on a song and reach the entire planet. You know when you listen to a hymn, it can feel like Heaven is actually on some of those hymns? You feel closer to eternity when you’re singing some of those hymns. It’s like God puts His stamp or wink or nod on some songs. I feel that way even about “10,000 Reasons (Bless The Lord)” because there’s just something on the song. There’s something that God has done with that song. He takes our simple melodies or our simple progressions and He puts His supernatural power on that and it goes around the world in a day and changes lives. It reminds people why they’re alive and gives them the courage to live their lives. It’s a mind-blowing thing to me.

I think there are a lot more songs that will become runways into prophetic moments, where you sing a song and it can’t help but evoke a response from the church that just sang it. It’s a runway into the more of God, into a personal outburst of praise, into spontaneous overflow of praise that happens when someone really realizes they are forgiven, just for example. So instead of a lot of noise or a lot of the same-old, which is not bad, there will be moments with these songs that pop through and provide a perspective the world really needs right now.

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