Transcript
WEBVTT
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Pull up a chair across the counter.
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Your one-stop shop for a variety of perspectives around Jesus and Christianity.
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I'm Grant Lockridge and I'm here with Elias Dummer, and Elias is a musician.
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He was a musician with City Harmonic.
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He is now a part of a solo project called Elias Dummer.
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You should check him out.
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It's really, really cool.
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I love the song.
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The gospel is rest.
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It's pretty sweet.
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The first little bit of this recording got deleted through some nonsense on the interwebs, so we go right into my first question of the a hundred thousand dollar question.
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So just so you know, we might mention it a few times throughout the episode.
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And yeah, so, elias Dummer, so tell me about the time where you and your band blew a hundred thousand dollars.
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Well, well there's about probably about five or six times where that's possible.
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We bought a bus once, but uh, heck yeah yeah no.
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So our band had come out of a interdenominational missions movement in our city, so we made a movie about it in 2015.
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It was kind of where our name is from, the the city harmonic.
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Our song manifesto was supposed to be the things we had in common the Lord's Prayer and the Nicene Creed and this kind of interdenominational thing.
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It's a big part of our DNA.
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We'd been commissioned by a movement of churches working together that made a tangible difference in our city, and so we had some complications with cancer in the middle and by the time 2015 rolled around, we were making our third record and we knew we kind of needed a reset and to focus again on that thing.
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It was kind of our mission in a sense, and so we did.
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We wrote that record and we decided to make a tour where we would go around to cities across the United States and Canada and we would pull pastors together from different denominations in each city and have a conversation, talk to them about what had happened in our city and all that, and in a lot of ways it was a success from a ministry standpoint.
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We had several cities where kind of initiatives that came from those conversations still have life in them and pastors are working together, churches are working together to do good together.
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Uh, with standing on, you know some pretty basic creedal common ground, you know?
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Um, it looks like I lost you again.
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Are you there?
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Yeah, I'm there, okay okay, sweet is it what happened?
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am I just video?
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yeah, well, it just kind of like looked totally frozen.
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But you're good.
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Yeah, yeah so we're trying yeah.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So so, standing on like you know some creedal common ground and that sort of thing, and then, um, basically saying, well, with that out of the way, let's work together, let's find a problem and do something about it.
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And, yeah, it was great from a ministry standpoint.
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There was a point where Eric, member of the band, was like, hey, we're going to lose our shirts on this tour, but it might be the most important thing we ever did, and I think he's right.
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And so, at the end of the day, it was a commercial failure.
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We just didn't.
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We sold the idea so hard that, had we just done a tour of our own, it probably would have been much more successful.
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But we sort of made it about a thing.
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And it turns out that in 2016, america wasn't deeply interested in the question of unity and it's a total mystery as to why and so, yeah, we lost over $100,000 making that conversation a priority, and I don don't regret it, but it was expensive yeah, I mean that's, that's super close to my heart, the idea of, you know, church unity, and you said before we were recording, like you could tell by the logo, you know the four churches kind of together, which we've gotten some flack on that and we've gotten oh, dude, if you look at the artwork for we are the city harmonic um, I did it, my, I actually did it.
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There's inside that album is something really similar.
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So the cover is like our faces done that same way, like kind of like stained glass and inside the artwork I don't have it handy or I'd show you.
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Inside the artwork is for there's, like other iconic things, including a very similar concept to what you have as your graphic well heck, yeah, well we're, we're on team uh church unity.
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So yeah, exactly I, I will give you a lot of not a lot of people are incredibly interested in that even now.
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Um, but it is, it is you, but we're coming around.
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Yeah, we'll get there.
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Well, I think part of it is the difficulty of being honest in terms of hermeneutics and being humble about your theological convictions, which is not something that evangelicals have been very good at.
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So I think for me, being raised in an environment where this kind of ecumenical spirit was part of it was really helpful for me, because I was forced, sort of at a young age to differentiate between things that are definitely Christian, things like, say, the creeds or whatever right um, and then like the rest of it, which is interpretive or, you know, developed over time.
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And and I'm just I'm still sort of shocked, having done a lot of this stuff in my 20s and having read a lot I'm a big nerd, um, on the subject I'm still surprised when people talk about like eschatological convictions as though they are like some point of orthodoxy when they're not even 200 years old.
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For goodness sake, like it.
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It's bonkers to me.
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But you know, people gonna people, I guess it's.
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It's almost like we should count others as better than ourselves.
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It's crazy, right yeah, a little humility goes a long way, it's wild.
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But now I'm totally on, totally on that team of um.
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You know, basically the one thing that I will not bud on is jesus christ was the son of god.
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Right, he's the one savior there's.
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You're saved under one name forgiveness of sins through jesus to god, the father yahweh.
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You know, god of the bible I just got corrected.
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You know, maybe it's the bible of of the god.
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You know, whatever you get, what I'm saying the israelite god that's in.
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You know the bible, whatever.
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That's the one thing I absolutely will not budge on.
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Yeah, I'd throw a Trinitarianism in there, because it's actually really hard to build a coherent Christian philosophy without Trinitarianism.
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Yeah, you got to throw a God, the Father God, the Son God, the Holy Spirit, kind of thing.
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Yeah, and honestly I think it plays a pretty big role ontologically, which evangelicals and Catholics have not struggled with enough Like what does that word mean?
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By the way, you said, like the nature of humanness.
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There we go.
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So like so like I, like we we think of ourselves, partly because of Plato, as these kind of like dualistic things, like we're the spirit thing trapped in a flesh body and and we just can't wait to get out of it, which, frankly, israelites probably didn't think up, like it's probably not a thing they thought part of what they're trying to resolve is the nature of reality.
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It's like okay, so we have this embodied self, we have this sense that there's more than the body.
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We have this will and this generative will and all that.
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So it's.
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And yet we're also enmeshed in these social stratas, right, like you have relationships, you relationships, you have friends, you have family.
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You are not not the product of those things and you are not not intertwined with those things.
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You, we have a sort of certain social codependence.
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That's just a reality for humans, despite whatever we might like to argue in America otherwise.
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And so, like the Trinity actually makes sense of an awful lot of that, if we're made in the image of god and god is trinity and god is these persons in a social matrix, then where do we get off thinking that we're anything else?
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yeah like.
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We're people in a social matrix.
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We're both physical and spiritual, we have will and we have sort of this chaotic element.
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There's all of this stuff that like kind of adds up when you start to think oh wait, god's Trinity I made in the image of God.
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I am a complex creature myself, you know.
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You know this kind of embodied group thing, so I, I don't know.
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I think it's pretty fundamentally important that one as well.
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Yeah, I will agree with that.
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The understanding of the Trinity is huge.
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It's almost like Jesus and God the Father are one and he wants us to be as one with each other, as him and God the Father.
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Yeah, well, and I think that's the tension right.
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People hear that, exactly.
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People hear that and they think, oh, it's this or it's that and it's like well, probably it's both things.
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They're saying that they're distinct and one, and that tension is what we don't like, because it's not simple, but it also maps onto reality pretty well.
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There's a lot of ways in which both things can be true at the same time, right yeah, I mean it's definitely if you read the bible like from cover to cover and you don't come away with some things that are absolutely paradoxical, like yeah, you didn't read yeah, yeah, exactly you know, you've got to hold two ideas in the in, you know, at once that might even contend with one another, which is pluralism, which is what you know a lot of the reason.
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America is pretty cool, but also, you know, gets you in a lot of trouble, because then it's like, all right, my perception is reality, which is, you know, can get get sticky if, like your perception is the realest thing and there's not a thing outside of you.
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That would be god oh, totally well, and it and it.
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It just erases and baptizes cultural forces.
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I mean, I've run a marketing agency a long time, man like 100.
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Do you think that they put coca-cola banners in the stadium so that you'll buy coke that day?
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No, like it's.
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That's not the point at all.
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Yeah you know, it like these things matter.
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In fact, I was just listening to a podcast today talking about political signs in the lawn and how they've done some research on, for example, political signs.
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Or like they got a group of people together some students, I believe and they would have an interview and they would flash either random letters or a very nondescript word like a name, like, say, ben Griffin or something like that, and then later on they would say, with telling you nothing else about them, they would say these two people are running for office.
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Which one do you think you would vote for?
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They have no information, just two names, two relatively nondescript names.
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One of the names was one of the words that had flashed for half a second subconsciously across the screen that these people were told to ignore.
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So they had no context for the name and then, at a totally separate time, they didn't even realize they had seen the name, right, yep, and so the point differential in this study was like 10% Really.
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Oh yeah, a 10% difference in an election with no other facts other than name familiarity.
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Gosh.
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Right.
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The fact is, all kinds of stuff in the world shapes the things that we think are our thoughts.
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There are a lot of ideas that are born from all kinds of forces.
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Being honest and humble about that helps, in my opinion.
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I just find a lot of people end up really uncomfortable because they're like wait a minute, aren't I a total agent in the world with complete individualistic power, who can shape the universe around me?
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Sorry, no, you're not that thing.
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But then also also yes, you can, but then also yes, you can do these things, but it's not as simple as you say.
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You are part of an ecosystem, you know no advertising is wild dude like yeah yeah the.
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The best example I can think of is just like big tobacco is like we are.
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You know, by we I mean, you know I don't smoke, but it's just like absolutely insane of like how big tobacco convinces us that that's like kind of fine Not really but like that that's like a good thing to do, even though nicotine like really doesn't do a whole bunch of anything ever no no, yeah, and I was reading a book about that and it was just like man, they just, they just got us, it's in our movies, it's everything like it's well and that's, everything is that way.
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I mean that's, and, and you could say I mean the joke in advertising is that advertising is the second oldest human profession, um the like, because you know what.
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There's actually this funny thing, uh, in the movie gladiator, which is um called the Tiffany problem.
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So the Tiffany problem is when in movies there's something which is historically accurate but contemporary audiences perceive as an injection of modern values.
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So in gladiator, give me that one more time.
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Yeah, so it's, it's, it's when, when a movie or a story would include a name such as Tiffany or something else which is historically accurate to the story, like to the time period or whatever, but it's perceived as a modern injection.
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Okay, I got you so audiences then are like the bubble bursts, because the thing which is accurate they don't believe to be accurate and so the story falls apart.
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Does that make sense?
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Yeah, so that's why it's called the Tiffany problem.
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Well, gladiator had this where the first version of the Coliseum scenes accurately included billboards.
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Because the Coliseum had such billboards, people painted signs for their local stores in the Coliseum.
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But early test audiences saw it, thought it was an injection of modern values, like some statement, like assuming that ancient history didn't have advertising, and so they took it out.
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Yeah.
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And it's like the reality is.
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We've been trying to persuade each other of our ideas, of our offerings, of this from the beginning of hunting Hunt here, not there.
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So I have a lot of thoughts about advertising and I have a lot of beliefs about how to do it ethically, which is a big challenge.
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But the reality is human behavior is super complicated, and that applies to worship music, that applies to church unity, it applies to discipleship.
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We're just not simple, linear and certainly not purely rational creatures either.
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So these things influence us and it's helpful to know what they are.
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These things influence us and it's helpful to know what they are.
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Yeah, I mean, that's definitely huge.
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And also, being a musician too, I mean you said you had how many streams right now?
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100 million, maybe, I think.
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So, yeah, somewhere around there, which is absolutely wild, which means that 100 million people listened to the words that you put in lyrics.
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Yeah, man, either that or 12 people really listened.
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Yeah, exactly, maybe it was 10 million and they're just like ready to go.
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They're ready, they're in.
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But yeah, that's a good distinction, but let's just say, 5 million people.
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Yeah, sure, whatever it is, yeah, yeah, yeah, more than 10.
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Yes.
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Probably, probably.
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No one has that much time.
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Yeah, more than 10.
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I think we can agree, but even if it's just 10, I mean, good gosh, that's influence man, like, just like yeah, I guess, and it's funny how often it's invisible, and that's okay.
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Um, I think, yeah, I mean, I think it does sort of put some gravitas to what we're putting in our songs.
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You know the role that we play.
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That can be overstated too, you know I think, like you know, I listened to Offspring when I was a kid in the nineties and I didn't go breaking things like that didn't happen, you know.
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So you know, I think we can overstate some of those things, um, but at the same time, like I think there's some value in what you repeat, what you live with, what you chew on, and so being thoughtful about that, you know, funny enough as a songwriter, I think it makes um the job of Christian songwriting, if you will.
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A weird category, of course, but if you're going to choice, you used is heretical at all times, and that's just a which.
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I mean, I do care about.
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I don't want to say things that are like false in scripture itself.
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So the idea that there's to be none now is kind of silly as well.
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So it's just this tough balance of navigating worldviews which you just don't have in rock and roll.
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People don't even care unless you're just saying hate speech.
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They pretty much don't care what you wrote down if it feels good.
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So it's an interesting challenge.
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I think we have in sort of faith-based music and they almost want you to be controversial, like that's, that's kind of cool and you know modern music, but like, yeah, christianity, christian music.
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It's like, did you, did you make sure to you know, dot your t or dot your eyes?
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Cross your t's on theology before you?
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Oh yeah wrote this thing even though, like you, could have been writing like a song that's purely based on feeling yeah, oh yeah, totally you know just straight poetry, like maybe this is wrong, but this is how I feel, kind of thing.
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And you know, maybe you know a christian you know beats down your door and it's like that's not theologically accurate, but it's like that's how I feel and I door and is like that's not theologically accurate, but it's like that's how I feel and this is like a prayer that I'm saying.
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Yeah, yeah, and I think we can differentiate between, say, songs which are intended to replace the Book of Common Prayer and songs which are intended to be songs that exist.
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Yeah, and I don't think we've done a very good job of delineating those things, and it's true that sometimes those lines aren't helpful, where a song that wasn't intended to be congregational easily could be, and so I think that's one of the things we've learned with worship leader.
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Research is just like or, I guess, affirmed, I guess is that like one of the attitudes of people when they hear just how monolithic the industry is?
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Is that like, oh well, there must be this worship leader, this group of like churches and worship leaders, like a cabal secretly ruling the world, like the Wizard of Oz and, you know, bringing on the downfall of every small church so that they can all become mega church McDonald's locations.
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And nobody?
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I don't think that at all.
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I think what has happened is that the worship leader at the local church doesn't realize the influence and power they have in merely choosing what the diet of their church is.
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They underestimate their power.
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They are often naive to commercial forces like marketing and advertising that benefit the existing people who do the thing that they do, and so they attribute that trust to sort of spirituality and, you know, like trust in a brand, they give it a sort of holy.
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You know, they might call a song anointed because of who it came from rather than what it is, which seems bizarre all the way down if you really break it down.
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So I think the thing for me is like helping tell the truth in my music, helping tell the truth in our research, and you know, that's part of what our unity thing was and and I've continued to try to do that, I think, in my solo stuff.
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Now I mean, that's kind of the attitude.
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I made a, a record in 2019 that came out and it was a song called enough, which was, I think, some vulnerable song about, you know, admitting that I'm insecure and had just broke up a popular band and it was like, like I had, I didn't do it, the band broke up amicably, but it was just sort of this, like am I only as good as the last thing I did, sort of song.
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Yeah.
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And that and that connected with a whole bunch of people.
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That was great.
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But going into my second record, it was like the world got real complicated between 2019 and 2022, that turns out, you know, and so it was going to be bittersweet and it was um and so it really is sort of a concept album, not of deconstruction, because, honestly, my sort of album not of deconstruction because, honestly, my sort of journey of reevaluating my beliefs happened 20 years ago, before anyone knew the City Harmonic.
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We were already a band who had read too many seminary books and we're halfway different than a lot of our audience in certain things very orthodox, but you can't be an ecumenical band and be simple in that sense, right, um and so, but yeah, but by the time 2022 came around and all these songs were coming out, there was a lot of real life and a lot of mixed feelings and a lot of pain in there, mixed with hope and grim determination, I guess guess.
00:22:11.297 --> 00:22:33.652
You know, I think that's super wise too, to deconstruction is such a buzzword, but just like to evaluate, you know, basically walk out your faiths, you know, with fear and trembling, oh, definitely, you know, be constantly thinking about the ideas that you hold about God and whatever.
00:22:41.355 --> 00:22:42.277
Yeah, and how well anchored they are right.
00:22:42.277 --> 00:22:46.404
I mean, I think it's not hard to pick up a couple of Christian history books and go, oh, where did this idea come from?
00:22:46.404 --> 00:23:05.452
And learn If something that you believe is sacrosanct and fundamental to the faith was first ideated in 1890 or whatever it is, you probably need to reevaluate just how central that thing is.
00:23:05.773 --> 00:23:06.034
Oh yeah.
00:23:06.055 --> 00:23:08.823
Because it's impossible that Paul fought it.
00:23:09.625 --> 00:23:09.846
Yeah.
00:23:10.615 --> 00:23:14.025
So you know just a little tip.
00:23:14.045 --> 00:23:18.845
Just a tip, so we might have gotten cut off.
00:23:18.845 --> 00:23:21.742
So describe to me what worship leader research is again.
00:23:22.565 --> 00:23:22.826
Yeah.
00:23:23.395 --> 00:23:24.641
Because we dropped that in there.
00:23:25.202 --> 00:23:26.468
Oh yeah, totally yeah.
00:23:26.468 --> 00:23:32.694
So worship leader research is this thing I started with some friends who've become friends to.
00:23:32.694 --> 00:23:34.300
Research is this thing I started with some friends who've become friends.
00:23:34.300 --> 00:23:41.484
One of the researchers is a guy named Dr Mike Tapper who, with Mark Jolliker, who's also on the team, had run this research project on the shelf life of worship songs.
00:23:41.484 --> 00:23:46.585
So in other words, hey, are songs in the church sticking around less long than they used to?
00:23:46.585 --> 00:23:49.180
And they found that they were significantly less than they used to.
00:23:50.343 --> 00:23:51.967
And that has just been ramping up.
00:23:51.967 --> 00:23:55.082
And so, building on that research, him and I had been friends.
00:23:55.082 --> 00:23:56.346
My band played a show at his church.
00:23:56.346 --> 00:24:09.355
Building on his work, he was like we should put a little team together and look at the relationship between market forces and the industry and these charts and the local church and do some survey data.
00:24:09.355 --> 00:24:09.977
So we did that.
00:24:09.977 --> 00:24:27.026
We ran two phases one which looked at CCLI and praise charts and sort of examined the trends that exist in the songs themselves, and then the second being how do worship leaders in the local church feel about the people who make the music and the state of the industry and the industry itself?
00:24:28.035 --> 00:24:30.503
So, we did that and have done a whole bunch of articles since.
00:24:30.503 --> 00:24:37.180
We've been covered by the Washington Post, christianity Today, a bunch of people, roy's Report talking about this stuff.
00:24:37.180 --> 00:24:53.638
One of the reasons is that our first finding was pretty shocking, which is that 100% of the top 25 CCLI songs between 2010 and 2020 came from basically four megachurch movements, or were popularized by four megachurch movements, even when they didn't write them.
00:24:53.638 --> 00:25:00.561
So what people thought from that was sort of this like, oh, those people are ruling the industry.
00:25:00.561 --> 00:25:01.926
I don't think that's it.
00:25:01.926 --> 00:25:17.759
I think what happens is local worship leaders attribute a lot of trust to those brands and have mixed feelings about it or have certain expectations of songs which come from those churches or are popularized with those churches, and so they become functional gatekeepers.
00:25:17.759 --> 00:25:23.526
But they're not gatekeeping in a sense, they're just being normal.
00:25:23.526 --> 00:25:31.888
In every vertical, every industry, it's going to have one, two, three, four players who make up 80, 90% of the activity in that domain.
00:25:31.888 --> 00:25:35.839
So it's actually not even special or unique to worship music.
00:25:35.839 --> 00:25:41.398
So it's just one of these things where there's and we examine a lot of different findings.
00:25:41.558 --> 00:25:45.086
The most recent article was about the role of aspiration.
00:25:45.086 --> 00:25:56.435
So we know, in advertising, for example, that if I show you a thing you wish you were like enough times and associate it with a product, you're more likely to buy the product because it might make you into the thing you wish you were like.
00:25:56.435 --> 00:26:08.237
And so we asked that question to what extent do you wish that your worship culture in your local church was more similar to the videos you watch on YouTube of Bethel or Hillsong or whatever?
00:26:08.237 --> 00:26:10.964
And 54% said sometimes yes.
00:26:10.964 --> 00:26:20.368
So a small majority of churches across all sizes are wishing their church was a little more like that church, and that matters.
00:26:20.368 --> 00:26:25.022
So those are the kinds of conversations we're having over there.
00:26:25.022 --> 00:26:26.386
It's worshipleaderresearchcom.
00:26:26.386 --> 00:26:36.144
We have this great board of advisors from all walks of the industry and academia, so it's people with the best of intentions just trying to tell the truth.
00:26:36.144 --> 00:26:44.332
It's pretty cool, in a sense myth-busting about the industry and the church, and I think myth-busting is God's work.
00:26:46.858 --> 00:26:47.203
Nerd.
00:26:47.203 --> 00:26:47.993
No, I'm just kidding.
00:26:47.993 --> 00:26:48.615
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:26:48.615 --> 00:26:49.017
No, I'm just kidding.
00:26:49.017 --> 00:26:51.242
Yeah, yeah yeah, no, that's so interesting to me.
00:26:51.242 --> 00:26:52.285
I guess I'm a nerd too.
00:26:52.285 --> 00:27:02.140
Then, yeah, and man, this is something that is so good to actually do real research.
00:27:02.140 --> 00:27:04.826
People skew data like you wouldn't believe.
00:27:04.826 --> 00:27:19.188
I'm sure you would believe it because it feels like you got your head on straight and your eyes open towards like marketing and you know advertising and that sort of stuff.
