How Jesus Culture’s Chris Quilala Learned to Worship Through Pain
Chris Quilala is a recording artist and worship leader with Jesus Culture. He has been involved with the music label and church since its founding. If you don’t know his name, you probably know his music.
Studio 5 caught up with Quilala during a stop on the Outcry tour in Raleigh, North Carolina, to talk about his music journey.
Efrem: You’ve recorded your first solo project, Split the Sky. What experiences birthed that out of you?
Chris: For me—I mentioned this on my last album—my wife and I, we lost our son Jethro. He was still born in December 2014, and even in the hospital room we were praying that God would breathe life into him, and we didn’t see that. But we had to make a choice. We were going to choose to believe that God is good. That God is a miracle-working God. That God is a healer. You may have been told otherwise from whatever perspective you’re looking at.
The truth is that God remains the same, and my response needs to remain the same. So, for me, writing songs was my way for me to remind myself that God is.
I wrote a song called “Miracles,” and it’s just about that miracle-working power of God, that God is faithful, that He is with us, that He remains the same.
All that being said, it was just a season of writing and a lot of songs came out of that season of writing and a lot of those songs came out of the place of encountering God in the midst of pain, doing my best with the skills I have in front of me to remind myself that God is good, that God is faithful.
Efrem: How do you worship through pain?
Chris: It definitely is a choice. For us, during the loss of our son—I remember my pastor telling us, which in the moment spoke volumes, “You can trust God with the mystery.” In the middle of pain, whatever circumstance anyone is going through, there are always questions, and they may never get answered. And it does take a certain level of faith and trust on our part to say, “God I don’t understand, but I trust You.”
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