The Story Behind The Story: Colin Edge, worship leader at the McKinney campus of Covenant Church, Texas, explains how God took over with their latest album "Kingdom".
It’s some time in the fall of 2013, our Senior Pastor Mike Hayes is up the front of church on a Sunday morning, and it’s obvious that something special is happening. He’s talking about something that he feels God wants him to share, and like so many of my team here today, I’m in awe.
He’s talking about getting to a new place with God, a place that’s more than simply a restoration of how things used to be. He’s talking about reaching some place entirely new, a place of creativity and breakthrough that will flow out from our church here in Dallas, Tx and affect the nations.
These words that he shares in our church get us all thinking, and over the days and weeks that follow we find that we’re talking about something that we call a "kingdom renaissance." In time these prayers and conversations will become an album — called Kingdom – but for now some of our conversations are about the past. We talk about the way that the renaissance represented a wave of new art, literature and ideas that shifted a culture from the old world into the new.
It’s that very word — renaissance — that jumps inside us. Pretty soon we’re finding that new songs are unleashed and our church is being taken to an exciting new place in our worship. We decide to invite Israel Houghton to team up with us for the project and find that his heart completely lines up with ours.
The result? Well, so much of this is still dynamic, still very much in play and we’re still seeing God do new things through the music. But we can say this: the result is a collection of songs that aim to take the people of God to a new mindset, a new plane, as the body of Christ.
The simple, beautiful, life–changing truth is that God has a great plan in mind for His people. He always has and He always does. The church of Jesus Christ now lives in a world of dramatic and rapid change, and God is giving us creative ideas that the world will look to for direction and inspiration. This is the heartbeat of our church, and the heartbeat of the kingdom renaissance.
From Leonardo Da Vinci to Bob Dylan, artists have always served as change—agents for a culture, creating a ripple effect that permeates communication and commerce. We believe that the church will rise to this place of influence through art and innovation. Yes, it’s a big vision — one for which God has perfectly equipped His church. We don’t fear the future, but we walk into it knowing that the words we say and the songs we sing will be soaked in God’s presence.
So here we are. “Kingdom” is the first Covenant Worship project produced from this vision. Will it be the last? I hope it will be the first of many. Our passion is to see the renaissance spread throughout the body of Christ and change our world with the message of Jesus Christ.