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Welcome.

To Together at the Table, where we gather to share stories and insights with extraordinary individuals. I'm your host, Andrew Phillips. Today, we're excited to introduce you to Andrew Osanga. Andrew has a rich and celebrated history in the Christian music community. As both a solo singer, songwriter, and singer guitarist. He brings that valuable, real-world experience to his current role as Executive Director of the Faithful Project. Andrew leads the modern hymns, multi-artist community, Anchor Hymns, whose heartbeat is to help people rediscover the beauty of the heart of Christ through the hymnal tradition. He lives in Nashville with his wife, their three daughters, and apparently a toy poodle named Pippa. That's correct. Andrew, it's lovely to have you with us on together at the table.

Glad to be here, man.

This podcast is based on a scripture, just one scripture, which is Luke 11:37. After Jesus had spoken, a pharisee said, I'd like you to come to my place. Would you come? That invitation was accepted, and Jesus went and reclined at that table. It's that beautiful thought that Jesus comes to our tables. I wonder if you could help us at the beginning of this discussion we're going to have. Could you welcome Jesus to our table with a prayer?

Oh, yeah.

Thank you.

Man, I'm glad. Father, thank you for the gift of this time and bless this conversation and give us wisdom and protect us from our own worst impulses. With mine that you know what those are, and it's a gift to be here and to be alive. Thank you for that. In name and pray, Amen.

Amen. The first question I like to ask, as it's table centric, is like, tell me about the table you work at. Tell me about the things that you do. You've mentioned anchor hymns and the faithfulful project. There's so many great things that you're involved in with integrity. But talk to me about your table, how you approach it, that table of work.

I have a real gift of being able to spend most of my time with brilliant, creative people. Some of my work is office work and making sure things are organized. I'm not great at that. But really, a lot of it is to find people who are creating songs for the church or creating other work that serves the church and then coming alongside them and helping them really be able to understand their own story. Often, the men need help figuring out what that story is and then what's the best way to tell it through music or through the other platforms that they're creating in. I get to both guide the project from a creative position. And then I also get to just be a friend and a guide to those people as they're in that process. Because we all know work that resonates with us is rarely safe work. It's work where people put their heart into it. They bear some part of themselves and they share some part of their real story. And so that comes with a lot of openness, and there's risk in that. And so a lot of my job is just to be a guard and be a friend so that people are able to be courageous in that way.

With the ultimate goal that believers, particularly churches, can be served by that work, whether that's resources or by just basking in the beauty of what they've created.

Yeah. In the two projects I referenced, which is Faithful and Anchor Hymn, there's a lot of people involved. Yeah, a lot. How do you cope with that? And how do you bring it all together and keep Jesus at the center of that?

Well, often I get to work with an artist, just this one person and they're making a record or it's a band and they're making a record. And that's really fun. You just dig in for a long period of time. These things are more... They're insane, Andrew. It's a lot of logistics, but it really is. It's like it's taking 50 people out to coffee and sharing a vision and saying, I think that you might really resonate with this. And I think there are other people that resonate with this. And then curating a time together so that if you're going to go to all the expense and trouble of bringing 30, 40 songwriters together for two or three days, that that time is not frivolous or that it's not even just productive, but that it's something that's really worth their time. How do we care for each other as individuals? How do we create memories? How do we build friendships? How do we do things that don't just serve the building of our businesses, but serve the kingdom. That looks different with those two different communities because they're different goals, different projects. But in all of them, there is intentional time to be productive, and there is intentional time to be productive for others or to be unproductive.

I don't feel like the productive time is ever as valuable without giving away other time. It's really fun to get to think about how do we care for people in that space, and then how do we create something that cares for the people who will encounter that work later on.

That's beautiful. In the Yanker hymns, I know hymns, people have this thing about hymns. They think that's old. It goes way back, right? But what you've actually done is revived. These words now, these songs are as powerful as they ever were, weren't they?

Well, you know what's fun is when you start talking about hymns, you realize that no one actually knows what that means. If you talk to 100 people, particularly 100 people who care about that idea, they're going to give you 100 slightly different answers of what a hymn is. Often they'll go, I don't know. It ends up that I guess it's like an oldish sounding song that's old, that's like about Jesus. It tends to be what the answer gets to at some point because there's not really a clear definition. The word goes, we have translated word from the Psalms, and we're going to sing songs with... We're going to praise the Lord with hymns, songs, and spiritual songs. That word means different things depending on your tradition. If you're Presbyterian, there's a very strict definition. But if you grew up in a black gospel church, it's a very different tradition, a very different definition of that same word. For us, it's more about sacred songs that speak in the context of where we live right now. Because a lot of those songs that we would traditionally think of as hymns were not always old. They were new.

For the most part, they were radical. They often-In their time, yes. In their time, they tended to come from pubs or from places of work.

I've heard this. They rarely came from churches. They used to listen to melodies, didn't they? In the pubs and then.

Convert them. Yeah, people knew the songs, so they'd rewrite the songs. It's essentially like if we wrote a song about Jesus to party in the USA, and then we all sing that. We all know how that song goes. And so these songs have this rich history of being from a context. They're from a time and place. But there's something about the experience of singing a song that is not from your generation that is so powerful. We sing a lot of songs that are... People are writing great songs all the time right now. They're writing beautiful songs. But there's something about singing a song that my grandfather's singing that carries different weight. One of the most interesting things for me is that I've had, in my life, probably four or five different distinct theologies. I was raised as a fundamentalist kid in a cornfield in Illinois, Hell, Fire, and Brinston, almost. Not quite, but almost. Then I became a very big box, evangelical, non-denominational guy. Then I became a hardcore Presbyterian Calvinist. Now I'm an Anglican. There were a bunch of things in between. I've had a number of different ways of thinking about the Bible, about God.

But in every one of those settings, we sang the same songs. There's something about the power of not just the words and not just the melody, but I think it's in the generational DNA that those songs were speaking to me of truth that often the theology of the church I was in maybe didn't communicate. I think a lot of my faith has been shaped by the songs that I sing more than by the teaching I received. When we talk about writing hymns, what we really mean is we want to write sacred songs for the context that we're in right now that we can pass down to our children and to their children. It's not about having a hit on the radio. We literally are asking ourselves, Can people sing this song at a wedding? Can they sing this song at a funeral? Those are the songs that really matter. And why would they do that? We want them to be musically relevant. We want them to sound like music today. We don't want them to sound old fashioned because how great they were didn't always sound old fashioned. It used to be a pop song.

We want to write songs that feel modern but that carry the weight of generations.

Can I ask how you find those hymns and choose them for the project? How does that happen?

Man, it has been so fun, Andrew. It has been really fun to figure that out. One of the first things I did when we started this project is I went through this big collection of hymnals that I've amassed over the years. For a long time before I worked at a record company, I was just an artist and a guitar player and traveled all around and started collecting hymnals from these different places just because that's cool. They're getting rid of them. I have this huge stack in my house of... Here's the 1920s Baptist, the 1940s Methodists. I've got this African-American hymnal. I've got this one from Oxford in the 1860s. I spent a couple of weeks digging through probably 40 or 50 different hymnels. What I wanted to do is look for what set them apart, what was speaking just to that context of that moment. Often those would be radical theologies at times. But then I started looking at what songs are in every one of these hymnels? There's probably like 30 or 40 songs that are in just about every one of them. I don't even have to tell you what they are. We all know what they are.

I started really looking at what makes those songs so unique and why do they work in so many different settings? I felt that there were three characteristics I could pull away from them lyrically. Musically, they all work in a way that the melody implies the chord structure. Often in modern music, we start with a chord structure, and then we build melodies around it. These are very much, This is the melody, and we work from that. You can play tons of different chords under it because the melody is so strong. There's a melodic thing that's really powerful, but that's not what makes it last for generations. The things that I identified were there's a real honest awareness of suffering and doubt in every one of those songs. There's also an awareness of joy and of celebration, but there's never joy and celebration without the suffering and doubt. The honesty of that, I think, is really important. The second is there's a real awareness of time and place. We are only right here right now. Right now, I'm only in this little black room talking to you, Andrew. I'm not 10 years ago. I'm not 10 years in the future.

Even though I'm constantly thinking about mistakes I made 10 years ago and worried about my future, I'm not those places. I'm only right here right now. The third thing that I would see is that God is with us in our suffering and our doubt, in our joys and our celebrations. He is with us right here, right now. Those things were present in every one of those songs that was in every one of those hymnels. This is a long answer to your question. But when we got to gather this group of songwriters, I shared that. I said, What we're going to do is we're going to write songs that meet these criteria. These songs have to talk about these things, not because that's what makes a hymn, because that's what people need. These are the songs people need to sing. It's what their hearts are longing for. We need to sing them and we need to hear our neighbors sing them to us. It was really fun then to get to break these songwriters into groups. I went and I found really old texts that I'd never seen. I dug deep and found my goal was to hand somebody a lyric they'd never seen before.

Here's an old hymn from the 1600s, the 1800s. Then here's a scripture that I think relates to that. And then here's a topic for you to write about. They could do everything from just update this lyric or take one word from it or ignore it. But we're going to write about this theme. These are themes that have lasted. If this song has been handed down 200 years, somebody kept passing it down for a reason. Let's find that theme, whether the theme is grief or longing or hope or the future life or poverty or whatever the theme is. There's these things that we always wrestle with. We then broke them down into themes and people wrote about those themes. We also had things like, we did one day where the goal was to write songs that could be sung at funerals, which are not funeral songs, they're not Durges. But we sing How Great They Are at funerals. We sing, Great is Life, Faithfulness at Funerals. But we know those songs because we sing them outside. We sing them all the time, but they carry the weight that can hold up to an event like that.

Then we also did things. One of my favorites is, usually we would write in... My voice cracked. Usually we would write in three, four-hour chunks. That's what songwriters typically do. One day we thought, worship biblically is not a genre of music. It's an action. It's a lifestyle of giving up our rights, giving up our lives for each other. We spend most of our time thinking about worship as a genre, particularly my job. My job is to make worship music. But worship is not music. Worship is one tiny element. Oh, sorry. Music is one tiny element of what worship is. Instead of writing for three or four hours, we took about two hours and we volunteered for a community, a special needs ministry here in Nashville that had a bunch of work. They needed to do envelopes and stickers. We just got all these big boxes of stuff that needed to be done. Time that we should have been productive for the company, spending a lot of money for all these people to be there. We, quote-unquote, wasted that time by serving this community that had a lot of need down the street. Then we had an hour left for our songwriting.

I gave everybody a scripture, and the goal was write a song that paraphrases the scripture and we have to be able to... It has to have a call and response piece to it. There has to be a part where you have to have two people at least to sing the song. Because there are some really powerful songs in my childhood that had echoes, had call and response. You have to write songs that only work with more than one person. Those are hands down my favorite songs that we wrote. They wrote them way faster. They are not pop songs. They are in my head all the time, Andrew. There are so many moments where I have needed to hear, This is love. This is love. Not that we love God. Not that we love God. I'm going to cry. I can't even sing it. Or This is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. Father, help us love like Jesus. Dude, in my marriage, as a parent with my neighbors, as a guy who works with a bunch of people who he loves but drive him crazy. How many times have I been so glad that I have a melody in my head that could just pop like that?

This is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. It's been so fun to be able to create, to set the... I set a table for these people to come in and create in a way that can hopefully serve generations to come. I'm talking a lot.

No, I get it. I feel it. The key word in that is tradition. There are some traditions that we should never get rid of. I think the family table is one of those, and hymns are very much a part of that. Absolutely. We have been over time. Tell me about your family table in some of the traditions that you've had and you've held and you practice now maybe when you were growing up and now with your own family?

Yeah. Okay. Family table, that's a fun story or a fun question. I'm from a small town in Illinois. It was just me and my brother and my parents, a little house. Now I've got three girls and a puppy, like you said. My oldest just went to college. Our table looks different now. We've had to have a place that everybody sits. And now there's an empty seat, which has taken some getting used to. We were only a couple of weeks into it. I both love it and hate it. And yeah, I think you know what's great about the dinner table is that much like I was talking about this productive time, you're just notyou can't be productive at dinner. And we live in a culture that is so much about earning and growing and presenting. And there's something about just taking time. You just have to be there, and you're just telling stories and you just can't get stuff done. You're not working, you're not on Instagram, you're not watching TV. You're just there with somebody else. And those are all of our favorite memories. Nobody has great memories of watching TV. You never look back, man, that was a great year.

That year I watched Grey's Anatomy four times. That's not a great year. I remember that night we got to sit and just have that long conversation. My kid did that crazy voice or told that or Zaney's story or in my house because I have girls, often dinner ends up in dance parties or Broadway sing alongs. And it's pretty great, man. That's pretty great.

Together at the table.

Matt.

Redman was such an influential artist for me growing up because as a young worship leader in my youth group, reminded me constantly that Jesus was the center of everything that we do. Our praise, King.

Jesus, glory to God forever.

Stream Lamb of God, the new album from Matt Redman. Anywhere you listen to music.

Together.

At the table. Hi, and Andrew Phillips here. We've put together a resource for you to take your podcast experience to the next level. You can now bring the heartwarming conversations from our podcast to your very own table. Introducing the Together at the Table PDF Listening guide. This guide provides a deeper insight into our series and offers you the chance to host your very own Together at the Table gathering. Inside, you'll find all the thought provoking questions we discuss in every episode. Use these questions to create meaningful conversations with your friends and family, just as we do on the podcast. It's a great way to connect and grow together. Download your copy now by going to integritymusic. Com/togetheratthetable. We'd love you to share your responses with us. What insights did you gain and what conversations were sparked around your table? We've set up a voicemail so you can get in touch and tell us about your stories from your table. Call 1-607-9-six table. That's 1607-968-2253. We look forward to sharing your stories and thoughts on a future episode. Thank you for being part of this beautiful community.

Together at the table.

Jesus often dined with various individuals that most people wouldn't dine with. He chose the marginalised, the people that you wouldn't dance with you maybe. They would be there, but they wouldn't dance. Do you do that in your life? Do you bring people to your table in your family and in your work that are marginalized, people that are forgotten?

I'd love to say that I do. I'm in a phase right now of really looking through a lot of my life because I think a lot of ways, and there are some ways in which the things that I say I care about and that I think about and that I talk about all the time, I've not actually made space to live them out very well. And that's one of those things, if I'm being really honest. I wish that I had a great answer with wonderful, inspiring stories. I do in my past, but I think in my present, I'm so busy working or being a dad that I often don't do some of those things that I wish I did that I know I value.

How do you work on the atmosphere that Andrew brings to the table? If he's invited as a guest or people are invited to his house, how do you work on who Andrew is at that table?

Well, I think the way you work on who Andrew is at the table is working on who Andrew is outside the table, who Andrew is on his own, because that's who we really are. That's definitely, I think I'm at an age where that's the project. I've learned the limits of who I am. There are some things I'm good at, most of the things I know what I'm not good at. I've continued to learn them rarely in fun ways. I was literally just down the hall with a guy that works in this building, an old friend that we caught up for a few minutes while I was waiting to get in here. That's what we talked about. We both hit our limits of what we thought we could do. Now we have to figure out what do we do with those limits. For me to be the person I want to be at the table with somebody, I'd say for a lot of years, I was pretty good at turning on who I was supposed to be at that table. Then I realized that I really hated that guy because I wasn't him. I want to be the same person everywhere.

You know, what's interesting? I had a podcast for a little while, and I would interview people, and then I would edit the podcast. I could look on my computer at the wave files of, Here's what they talked and here's where I talked, and I could see how much I talked. The conversation that was about me hearing from them. Then I would spend hours editing out all my dumb stuff to hear what they had to say. It hit me about 10 episodes in like, Yeah, I could do this in real life. I could just ask the question and shut up and listen, not waiting for my answer, waiting for my response or figuring out my next great question, but just listen. The question will show up when you need it to show up. That was actually a really profound moment for me. It just sounds so dumb, but it was like I remember sitting at the kitchen table being like, This would make me a better dad. This would make me a better husband. I could edit in real life.

That's a little example of what I mean.

It's a good point. It's a really good point. What do you think people say about you when you leave the table? Or what would you like them to think about you when they leave the table?

Well, there's two ways to answer that. There's a part of me that walks away from every table going, I probably think I'm an idiot. But I'm really trying to parse in my own life what of that voice is a lie and what of that voice is true. What I want is for people to feel like they were heard and they were seen and they were cared for. I think that's what we all long to be known. We all long to be known. Well, we long to be seen and recognized. I see that you exist. And then we long to be known. And then we long for someone to, once they know us, to love us. And it's no good to love someone you don't know because you're not really accepting them. That's sentimentality, as C. S. Lewis would say. But to get to know someone and to love them, I know that's my deepest need, and I think that's most people's. And so I would hope that as I grow, I hope that the conversations that I'm having now, people would feel more seen, more known, and more loved than they would have with me 10 years ago.

And I hope 10 years from now, they would feel more of that.

If you could leave something on the table today for us, a gift.

Oh.

Man, that's fun. Or something that you don't want to keep.

Something I don't want to keep? Yeah. Oh, that's different than a gift.

I know. But you can choose which one. But if you left that on the table, what would it be?

Yeah. Well, if I'm going to leave it at the table for someone else, it would be a good book. It would be a book of good stories. Not a book, not a how-to or a self-help, but a book of good novel or good stories. That's what we really need. We don't need someone to tell us how to live our lives. We all know. Be nice to people, don't steal. But we get inspired by stories. We're inspired by watching people make mistakes, learn, grow, fight past them, fight to do the right thing. I try to leave somebody a good book. Okay.

You've done a lot of things. You're a talented man and you've done lots of things. But if you look back on time and you've sat at lots of tables doing lots of things, brought lots of people together at that table, is there a particular memory you recall from one particular table, a moment that will last with you forever?

Oh, man. I mean, there's a million. Like I said, you make the memories of those things. And I've had the gift of music is a real uniting career. I get to spend a lot of time bored with my friends. When you're traveling with a group of musicians, when you're working on records, you get to spend time with people in a way that I don't want to have worked in... Seasons when I've worked in an office. I will say one of my favorite memories is just what popped in my head. There's a million of them. But I used to have a studio at this place called The Art House that was Charlie Peacock, an old producer and writer had bought this old church building and turned it into a home and a studio. He worked out of there forever, made a bunch of amazing records there: Switchfoot, Civil Wars, his own records. They retired. He moved out of it. Then some friends of mine took over that place, and I moved my studio in there, and I worked out of there for four or five years. That's where we did all of our faithful Writing Camps, which is Faithful was this project that brought together a number of women who were authors and songwriters, and they would write together based on the stories of...

Initially based on the stories of women in the Bible, and then more recently based on feminine imagery in the Psalms. The living room of this house is the sanctuary of an old church. It's still shaped like a sanctuary, but it's decorated like a living room. It's a fascinating room. It's beautiful. There's this huge table. What I love about it, too, is that there's a few on one side of the table and then there are chairs the other side of the table. It really does feel like you're in a church and in somebody's house. The first time we gathered, the women had written all these songs, and then for about two days they've been writing. And then that second night, we all came in and a few friends came in. We had a big dinner. And then people sat on the hearth of the fireplace there and would play through the songs. And I was sitting at that table finishing dinner and these just amazing songs were being sung. And there was this song that Ellie Holcombe and Sarah Mcintosh and Anne Voskamp had written together about the about Mary when she sees Jesus right after he returns.

The first person that Jesus sees is a woman. In that culture, women's voices were not valued. He doesn't just show up to her. A, he doesn't show up to the people in power. He shows up to this one lone woman and says, Go and speak. They sing this song called The Woman that eventually went on the record and Ellie and Amy Grant sing it together. It's one of the most powerful songs I've ever heard in my life. But getting to hear it the first time anybody'd sing it, it was Ellie Holcombe just sitting on the floor. I think Anne Voscombe is holding the computer in front of her with the words, and Ellie is just singing her hard out and just tears streaming down her face. I'm standing there by the table and I've got my daughters with me. I'm like, You don't understand what you're getting to see right now. You're too young to grasp the gravity of this moment. This is one of the best moments of your life. This is a special, I know the best, but this is a very unique, special thing. And to get to experience that with my daughters who were 14, 12 at a time, they could get it.

It's just an amazing memory.

Beautiful story. If you could sit at the table and invite someone-who I want to be with you now who may have passed on sadly or is still around, who would that be and why?

Oh, man. So many wonderful people. I've been deeply impacted by... I got him GK Chesterton. A lot of people have. I don't know if I would enjoy dinner with him. I feel like he might be a bully sometimes, but I'm not sure. I'm just sure I have been really deeply moved by a lot of the things that he's written. And so I would really love to get to sit at a table with him. I think it'd be fun. People who are with us now, N. T. Wright, and Anklican from over in England as well, that one of my friends has gotten to sit at the table with, who may be in the corner of this room, but I've never gotten to, who I know he's taught me so much about theology, about the Bible. But I know he also loves great songwriting, so I'd love to be able to talk about Bob Dylan and the New Testament and explain to me what I don't understand about Revelation. I think that'd be a really great conversation. I would love to have that.

I guess the question I want to ask is if you sat with Jesus at a table, actually sat with Jesus, what would you say?

I have no idea. I don't know that I could say much. I think I would want to start apologizing, and I don't think you would let me. Then I think I'd probably just start balling. Honestly.

Yeah, I know. Yeah. What would you like him to say to you?

I'd like him to say that he sees me and that he knows me and that he loves me.

Andrew, you've talked a lot about the table and things that you have done on that table in songwriting and hymns and bringing people together. There may be people listening to us today who are still hesitant about coming to the table to meet Jesus or even understand Jesus. But you've done a lot of thinking about that, and you've heard a lot of songs that talk about that. What would you like to say to people who are hesitating about coming to the table with Jesus?

Oh, man. I feel like this is the next phase of my life is these kinds of conversations. I've been a part of a lot of people telling other people about Jesus. I feel like we live in a culture. Like when I said earlier, when we talk about the old hymns and that it matters that they come from a cultural context. The culture that we're in now is one where people are leaving the church in droves. They're not leaving because of Jesus. They're leaving because of scandal or corruption or toxic leadership or politics have taken over. They're not leaving because of Jesus. Even when people are returning to the church, they're tending to go statistically to more liturgical, more older forms of more older expressions of worship, which are maybe a little less marketing-driven. I think there's some safety and longing for those things that have stood the test of time, those things that have existed for generations generations. All that to say, what I would and do say to friends who are trying to figure out what do they think about Jesus is.

Read the.

Stories of Jesus from the Bible, see what he did. They're both more beautiful and stranger than you will expect. Then I would say, Go for walks and try talking to Jesus. Maybe with some friends, maybe on your own. But he will meet you. If you can go walk by water, I'd suggest that. He says, In the Psalms, you lead me beside still waters. I've spent a lot of time seeking out water to go walk by because he said he was going to lead me there, so I assume he might meet me there. That's what I would say.

Andrew, I can't think of a more wonderful way to end our conversation. I want to thank you for being at the table with us today.

It was a real treat. Thanks for having me. Together at the table.

Together at.

The table is an Integrity Music Podcast and hosted by Andrew Phillips. The show is produced by Lasting Media Group. Our executive producers are Andrew Phillips and Jason B. Jones. Special thanks to Cali Argent, Bruno Baldwino, Olivia Buchana, Madison France, Alicia St. Jolie, Matt Lott, Noah Newman, and John Schneck. Our theme music is Good God, Lofi version by Special Music from their upcoming album, Still Worship, Lofi, Volume Two. To listen to more Lofi and Christian instrumental music, search for Still Worship wherever you listen to music. To learn more about at the table as well as Integrity Music, visit integritymusic. Com. To get more involved with the show, follow us on socials at Together Table Pod. We've also set up a voicemail at 1:607. Com1-9-6 table. That's 1607.968. 2253. If you have comments or questions or you'd like to be a part of the show, please call and leave a message. Also, be sure to subscribe, rate, and review our show wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps keep Together at the Table on the charts where people can find our show. Thank you once again for being with us Together at the Table.