Ep 160: Steven Félix-Jäger: Bringing Jubilee to the Church and the World

Michael Sarver moved to Nashville in February after a lifetime in Louisiana and East Texas, and the conversation opens the way conversations with new transplants do, with gumbo, hot chicken, and the strange feeling of no longer needing to book a flight home. Then it goes somewhere else entirely. He grew up Pentecostal, and jokes that the first place he went after the hospital might literally have been church. Music was around him constantly: live drums, real instruments, a choir he loved. But it didn't become his until he was eleven. His mother had remarried, and what looked like a good thing became an abusive one. Michael describes running to his room and turning music on, and finding that it shifted the atmosphere and shifted his spirit when he was frightened and in pain. That's when he learned music was more than a sound. Not long after they got out of that situation, he auditioned for a church choir with a minimum age of thirteen or fourteen, and got in at eleven. His first time leading was a Larnelle Harris song with what he remembers as about fifty key changes, and he says that was the day it went from wanting to do this to knowing it was his. At fourteen he wrote his first song, "Broken Pieces," the night before a Sunday special he'd already picked a Phillips, Craig and Dean song for. He credits Steven Curtis Chapman as the reason he writes at all, someone taking the noise in his head and putting it on paper. He's written over 3,800 songs since. While other kids played football, he went straight home and taught himself to sing like Michael English and the guys from Avalon, always finding somebody stronger and pushing until he could do what they could do. He's candid about the rest of it: legal trouble as a late teen, being bullied for years over his religion and for how little his family had, and real church hurt. He calls religion a poison that almost destroyed his faith. When his sister invited him to a church in Jasper, Texas, he sat there judging the pastor's wife for wearing makeup and the women for wearing pants, and recognized he was doing to those people exactly what had been done to him. What broke it was a worship rehearsal. The presence of God showed up in a room full of people who wore makeup and cut their hair and grew beards, and it undid the framework he'd been handed. That church is also where he met his wife, though not the way you'd guess: the man who kept shaking his hand every week and telling him somebody noticed him today, the one Michael found mildly annoying, turned out to be his future father-in-law. American Idol happened almost by accident. He drove twenty-plus hours across Texas to Arizona to support his sister-in-law's audition, and made it himself. He went back to the oil rig between rounds, sweating it out and waiting for the next call. What he thinks made the difference was worship leading. On group night, when everyone around him fell apart, he was the one feeding lines and holding it together, because that's what he'd trained to do on a platform. He also had something most contestants didn't: he didn't need the show. He had a wife, two kids, a church he loved and good money on the rig. When producers went looking for the story about his dad leaving when he was two, he told them that wasn't a tree they were climbing today. He finished in the top ten of Season 8, and speaks warmly about Danny Gokey, who he says held him up during it. Then the part he doesn't soften. He signed with Dream Records and went country, because everyone said country, the accent, the size, the Texas of it all. He explains it as a branding decision, sound and image as two brands that have to marry. And he says plainly that it was the wrong one. Not a detour God used, not a season of preparation. He says he liked being famous, chased what he thought would bring the most credit, and left his actual purpose behind. Around six years ago, right as COVID cancelled everyone's tours, he stopped. He gave back a large s

Tyler Roberts has been at Red Rocks Church for sixteen years, which in worship ministry terms makes him an elder statesman. He says so himself: everything looks the same, but everybody keeps getting younger, which can only mean one thing. Red Rocks started in 2005 with a plain goal, to be a youth group for adults, and a tagline they still use: make heaven more crowded. Tyler's arrival in 2010 tells you what the early days felt like. The church met in a rented red barn at the back of a theme park, a quarter-mile walk from the parking lot, with a wedding chapel on one side and a haunted house on the other. He auditioned on Halloween, singing "Our God," with a miniature train going by outside and a man in a Jason mask running around with a chainsaw while girls screamed. That was a normal Sunday. The origin of Red Rocks Worship is less glamorous than people assume, and better for it. When the church went multi-site around 2011, there were suddenly two campuses, two worship teams, and nobody really in charge. Tyler is candid that they handled it badly at first. The fix was a question: what if we prayed together and wrote songs together? They started meeting Fridays at 8:30, praying for half an hour, then writing, on the theory that a song all of them liked could be sung at both campuses. The songs were mostly not good, he says, and he advises against going back to listen. What happened next was an accident. Around 2013 the staff wanted to record a Sunday-after-Christmas special called Holiday Hangover so nobody had to come in that weekend. Leadership asked whether the worship team had any songs, didn't much care what they were, and recorded them. Weeks before it aired, someone asked whether they could put it on iTunes. For one day only, the Rooftop EP was the number one Christian and gospel EP there, because the whole church downloaded it. Then those songs came back around on the weekend and the church already knew them. They had become the congregation's songs. Tyler's picture of a Red Rocks Sunday is worth the episode for worship pastors. They like to throw good parties, and they describe themselves as a front porch for prodigals, taking the father in the parable literally: he threw a party the moment the son came home. So song one is loud and full of energy, songs two and three go upward into high praise, the message lands, the response time leans into songs like "The Lord Is With Me," and then they send people out. We're not here to just play church and have a big audience, he says. We're an army. He walks through the multi-site structure in useful detail. Every campus has a worship pastor who sits on the campus staff, reports to the campus pastor, and dotted-lines to central. Those pastors own resourcing, developing, recruiting and pastoring their teams; central supplies the set lists, the Ableton sessions and the creative. Brussels, now ten years old, has grown into its own thing. He's honest that they've failed more than they've gotten it right, and have tried to fail forward. On set lists, the rule is at least fifty percent Red Rocks songs, sometimes seventy-five, sometimes all of it. They write to fill gaps in their own church, and right now the gap is song ones. When they bring in an outside song, it usually comes out of the message. Then Kurtis asks the question every church that releases music wants answered: why do your people actually sing your songs? Tyler refuses to give a formula, and says plainly that what the Lord chooses to breathe on is what He chooses to breathe on. But he does explain "The Lord Is With Me." Pastor Shawn Johnson learned a few years ago that he has a rare form of Parkinson's disease, and asked the team for a song to go alongside a book he was writing about it, something people could anchor to in the hardest season of their lives. They wrote it, the church preached a series on it, and suddenly everyone's story was connected to one anthem. Tyler says he doesn't even have to set it up anymo

Jordan St. Cyr grew up in Niverville, Manitoba, a town of about 1,200 people with six churches in it. He says a place that small keeps people's radar for what's fake and what's real very keen, and that's why his music has to be honest, conversational, almost blue collar. His dad was the worship pastor. His mom worked in children's ministry. There was never a dramatic conversion moment, just a home where it was obvious Christ was the center of everything. The first word he heard his dad use for God was loving heavenly father, which lands differently once you know his dad grew up without one. Jordan compares his own faith to marriage: he and his wife will hit nineteen years this year, and looking back he thinks, you idiot, you had no idea what that yes meant. He expects to think the same thing at forty years. Jesus got his heart as a five or six year old and keeps getting his yes daily. He was the athlete first, not the singer. That ended around fifteen or sixteen when he found himself batting against a six-foot-three pitcher and decided he was done. A buddy talked him into auditioning for the school's Wizard of Oz, mostly because there were girls there, and that same friend brought a guitar to rehearsals. Jordan picked it up and never put it down. When he sang at the church Christmas play, his parents were sitting in the back row and had no idea he could sing. Then comes the part that reframes everything. Jordan wrote "Fires" during a season of songwriting camps, after a year of country conferences convinced him he needed to say the name of Jesus in his work. Nobody bit on the song. He was too old, he says, and his numbers weren't high enough. His radio promoters initially turned him down because they didn't want to take food off the table of a guy with four kids. He put the money aside himself and released it independently on Easter weekend of 2020, which he calls about the worst financial bet an artist could make. It became a hit. And it was written six months before the birth of his youngest daughter, Emery, who was born with a rare brain condition. He used to feel guilty that a song about fires hadn't come out of his own experience. He now believes God gave it to him for his experience. Emery has been four years seizure free. On songwriting and style, Jordan credits the town he spent decades trying to escape, and the twenty years of construction work he cursed more than once. He describes his upbringing as a safe harbor and a diving board, and says of his parents, who came out of a lot of trauma and moved to a small town to recalibrate the family, that he got to spend what they saved up. Kurtis stops him mid-sentence and tells him to write it down, which he does, live on the call. The two new singles get their turn. "Wild Love" is about the pursuit of God, and Jordan explains why wild is the right word: when you're in your sin nature and your shame, the love of God is foreign, otherworldly, something that pierces the veil rather than something you solve your way into. He follows it to a striking place, saying it's practically a prerequisite to be a screw-up, because no perfect people are allowed. He grew up as the churchgoing brother with brothers who partied, and credits his parents with threading the needle of not accepting bad behavior while never affirming self-righteousness in him. His own posture now: your sin doesn't bother me, because I've got enough of my own. "The Storyteller Man" is his upbringing set to music, right down to the green Dodge Monaco with the rear-facing seat, a detail he confirmed by calling his dad mid-write. The song name-checks Billy Joel, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan as the world's best storytellers, and then points past all of them. As Jordan puts it, people call him the storyteller man, and he isn't. He's a storyteller telling you about the greatest one. He closes on working with producer Paul Mabury, which he describes as terrifying, and on what it taught him: anything

Orlando Palmer records as IAMSON, produces, writes for other people, and is married to the gospel artist DOE. He and Kurtis start where you'd expect, on what it's actually like when two artists share a house. His answer is more interesting than the question: when they're commissioned to write professionally, it snaps on immediately, because both of them were raised in this and know how to work a room. At home, safe and comfortable, it takes much longer. DOE runs lyrics past him for a theological read, and he says he's grateful she trusts him with that. He also admits that before they ever spoke, he critiqued a cover she'd done of one of his songs. They still talk about it. Asked which part of the work makes him come alive right now, he doesn't pick the one he's best at. He picks performing live, because it's the thing he needs to grow in. He's been drilling keyboard sounds and breath control and learning material to the point where he isn't thinking about the piano while he's singing. The goal, as he puts it, is to practice enough that you can be present to the audience. The center of the conversation is mental health, and Orlando doesn't soften it. He names the prosperity gospel as the thing that ruins it: a framework where praying a specific prayer is supposed to produce an immediate result, with no process and no theology of suffering. He calls that especially damaging in the mental health conversation. When he writes about anxiety, he's writing with specific people in mind, his parents' generation, for whom it was even more taboo and who may not have had or sought resources; men who need permission to be soft and vulnerable and to feel their emotions; his own cousins, and Black men raised in environments where the only available responses were violence or argument. His summary of the whole project is one line: it's all about giving people language. He traces where the songs come from, and it isn't a strategy. God gave him a passion for the piano and for words, and he started writing because he needed the songs himself. Then something clicked and it became a love for the church too. He talks about ADHD not as an obstacle but as the shape of how he was made. He'll read a book and stop after chapter four, not from boredom but because he's overwhelmed with information and needs time to process. What he's landed on fairly recently is that he doesn't have to become an academic theologian to be useful. Romans 7 means more to him because he expressed it through music. That's how he prays, and it's enough. The theological heart of the episode arrives when Kurtis asks how he'd write about the cross. Orlando says he'd go straight at the humanity of Christ, and try to get inside where Jesus actually was in that moment. That opens into the best exchange of the hour. Most Christians, he says, hear the question as striving upward to get to where God is. But the point of the incarnation runs the other direction. He descended so that we could be known. Once that lands, there's safety, and from that safety he can behold mercy and kindness and grace. Then the weight. Orlando says he's been thinking about the weight of God's glory, precisely because he knows the weight of depression and darkness. He's careful about the claim: it isn't that the presence of God removes everything, it's that there's something weightier there, something more transcendent than his own comfort. Sometimes it's just bread for today, a reminder that it's going to be okay. Kurtis takes it to Isaiah's exchange of heaviness for a garment of praise, and Orlando lands it as a warm blanket that covers you. The last stretch is about tradition. Orlando was recently on staff at an Anglican church, and he says it formed him more as a Christian than any other experience: access to the history of the faith, the church fathers, the hymnody. Be Thou My Vision will make him cry. Be Still My Soul, It Is Well, 'Tis So Sweet. What it gave him was scale. He doesn't have to be inno

Natalie Layne grew up in Colorado watching her parents lead worship together, her mom singing and her dad on bass, while she ran around the rehearsals singing along. Her parents never pushed piano on her. They put a little keyboard in the playroom with her toys, said nothing, and let her discover it. She decided it was the coolest toy in the house, and started lessons at three. Her grandmother, who ran a piano studio for thirty years, was her first teacher and taught her to read music, to play by ear, and to write songs. By twelve, her church was asking her to lead worship, and she spent high school leading several times a week under worship pastors including Cory Asbury, John Egan and Jared Anderson. Kurtis asks what made that mentorship work, and her answer is one worship leaders will want to hear. We tend to think discipling someone means handing them a ten-step plan and all our best nuggets. What actually shaped her was simpler: they invited her into what they were already doing. Come to the writing camp. Come sing BGVs. Sit in on this meeting. It's not as hard as we think, she says. It's just the invite. Her grandmother also gave her the first songwriting method she ever used. At ten or eleven, she was told to come back next week with a song, protested that she didn't know how, and was told to take the words of Scripture and put chords underneath them. The Psalms were meant to be songs anyway. She still writes that way, because those words don't return void. She's also firm that writer's block isn't real: you may not be able to write something good today, but you can always write something bad, and the point is to show up. When the piano runs dry she switches to guitar just to change the palette. Her sound came from the car stereo. Her mom played Christian radio; her dad, a bass player, played gospel, jazz, blues and Earth, Wind & Fire. She remembers wondering young why Christian music didn't have all those styles, and deciding that a God who contains multitudes should have all the music, and the best of it. The road to a label was not a straight one. Nashville told her it was a ten-year town, or maybe five. It took five years, almost to the day. She stayed at Belmont long enough to finish a master's in piano, and in her final year won the school's Christian showcase, where labels quietly scout. Several reached out in 2019. Then March 2020 hit and every conversation stopped, and she spent a confusing season asking why God seemed to fling doors open only to shut them. What she did with the waiting is the practical heart of the episode. She spent two years in practice rooms, started sharing verses and choruses on a new app called TikTok while she was still writing them, and let people weigh in. It turned into a giant online co-write. People started asking her to come play shows, and she built a real career with a manager and no label, reaching her one definition of success: doing music for a living. When she did sign with Centricity, about four years after that first conversation, it was to add radio and marketing to something already moving. That's also how "Grateful For" happened. She wrote it with Mitch Wong, who told her the chords she was playing sounded like gratitude. Her team thought it was fine. The internet disagreed, and it became a small thankfulness movement. Kurtis names joy as the thread through her music, and Natalie explains where it came from. Right when she signed, she felt the Lord tell her to go write a whole bunch of songs about joy. It was the first direction that specific she'd ever felt, and she connects it to the moment, with everyone carrying heartbreak after the last few years. But she's careful about what joy is. We say choose joy, and that's true, but we slide into thinking we have to manufacture it or put on a smile. Joy is a fruit of the Spirit, not of our own striving. If she wants more joy, she needs more of the Spirit. That's why the songs aren't only about joy when life is easy, but