Hillsong UNITED – Right In Step

For me, stepping back is not a difficult thing because it’s my natural recourse in most ways. I love listening to music more than I do playing it, you know? I love the simple pleasures in life more than I do, I guess, the things that might be perceived as glamorous. And yet, so often we find ourselves thrown into what might be perceived as the opposite, and it makes me laugh. I think that’s true for most of our guys. They love being home. We love church. We love our relationships, with all of the little things. We love having a barbecue with friends or sitting around and just hanging out, and yet we find ourselves, in some respect, like we’re living two lives—but we don’t treat it that way. I think, if you have a healthy balance of one, you have a healthy perspective of the other.

I think when we understand that, then we understand the calling of why we step onto a platform, why we lead, why we use the things that could be perceived as “earthly things” in order to communicate a very eternal message. Jesus used all kinds of things to heal people that were considered “earthly.” He used wine, he used all these different things, and I think we’re actually completely missing it and we’re completely cutting ourselves short if we don’t live our lives and minister and do whatever we’re called to do. Whether it’s singing a song and standing on stages and all that goes with that kind-of stuff, or if it’s just everyday life of going to work and living in a way that reconciles the fact that that’s ministry as much as anything else in this world.

CCM: Same kind-of question to you, Taya, what is your natural response to, say, someone buying into any given perception—such as being critical for making a movie—as one example?
TS: I’m still required to be faithful with what’s in my hand, and for me it comes down to my every day. The way I do that is reading my Bible every day. Yeah, I guess my first comment about the movie… Maybe before I’m gonna hear, like, a negative comment, I’d firstly ask, “Did you watch it?” Because you’d see very quickly that we’re not rock stars at all. I live with my sisters. We’re just church kids. When we are traveling around the world, we’re covered by our church. Whatever we do in concert is exactly what we do at church back home. We lead worship week in, week out. I thought he film director did a great job of showing just how normal we really are.

The cool thing was, at the time the film director wasn’t a Christian. Here’s this guy who didn’t know us from a bar of soap (that was really nice, as well). We didn’t put on this film. It wasn’t something that was like, “Yeah, I really want to be in a film.” To be honest, there was a moment when we were a couple of months [into shooting], and I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t think anyone has even asked me if wanted to be involved?” It was just this crazy opportunity that our film partners just said “yes” to after being asked repeatedly if they wanted to do it. It was a crazy opportunity.

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