When they released their debut album in 2011, Canadian worship/pop/rockers The City Harmonic brought their high-level Brit-rock sensibilities to the airwaves, starting with the catchy and anthemic "Manifesto." 

 

The message of I Have A Dream (Feels Like Home) is one of realization that, as the title track states, "We are the body of our God!" That realization came with a charge to serve and be Jesus to a hurting world.

 

Much has happened in the lives of band members Elias Dummer, Eric Fusilier, Aaron Powell, and Josh Vanderlaan in the past two years. Besides experiencing tremendous professional success and critical acclaim, they've been getting married, and having kids. They've also dealt with some difficult life situations, including Fusilier's cancer diagnosis, which has taken him off the road with the band.

 

The band said it's this particular season in their lives together that shaped their brand-new release, Heart, which deals with living out our faith among everything else thrown at us. I sat down with Elias and Aaron to hear their perspectives on their ministry two years after I Have A Dream, and get the heart behind Heart.

 

Elias: That's a pretty open-ended question. Not the NHL. Our team was out in the first round! But they made it to the first round, which is an achievement.

 

Elias: My wife and our kids moved to Nashville this year and so we're now in a horrifying fashion attempting to attempt to a Nashville summer as opposed to the beautiful, mild Canadian summer. The other thing that is shocking is that the school year starts like the first or second week of August in Tennessee they're in school. We have all kinds of summer events up north and my kids are in school already. Kind of crazy.  
 

Elias: The new record is called Heart and it's sort of about—the album as a whole is really about trying to live like and for Christ in every facet of our lives. I think we came into this record with a lot of real life under our belt the last couple of years. Eric's cancer and Josh is getting married and Aaron and I are both having kids.

 
 

Since the record came out it's just been a crazy couple of years. So going into writing this record we were trying to really think about discipleship, really. How do we live? How do we do this thing? How does Jesus become more than just a man on a cross who's done his duty? What about all the stuff He did before that, and what about all the stuff that He means to me now—who He is in the cosmos or something?
 

It's that idea of trying to say what does it mean for Christ to be at the center of my Christianity rather than myself in the midst of all of this real life.
 

Elias: It's funny because we're in a situation where you go out to play a show and people cheer, people clap and they line up to take a photo and they shake your hand. The irony of it all is it feels to me like an increasingly humbling experience because in the middle of all of this I'm constantly reminded that it's a bunch of hilariously dumb accidents that brought this band together and resulted in songs as they did.
 

Every step of the way the thing that has propelled the next season has always been something we couldn't take credit for. Our best ideas no one notices. The great thing about that is it's like, "This is happening and God's just running with it and we're hanging on." For that reason it's hilarious to do a meet and greet, besides the fact that we love people. It's just funny because we're nothing special. We're just a bunch of dudes from a steel town who make music.
 

Elias: I think the thing about it is real life isn't easy. I think if we're to take discipleship seriously, we have to find a place for suffering and joy. We have a couple of songs on the new record that talk about grace in the sense of Paul in Corinthians. He has this thorn in his flesh. He's asked God three times to take it away and God's answer for him is my grace is sufficient for you, but what I don't think we notice is that Paul isn't talking about sin at all. This could be a physical ailment for all we know and yet Christ's answer to him is grace. We said it was like to reduce grace to this I have power over it because it's a transaction. God gives me grace because I did something wrong and I say sorry. It's grace, but yet His answer to Paul would be just as relevant if Paul says, "Why am I breathing this morning?"
 

I think that's been in terms of discipleship one of the key things for me trying to wrap my head around all this craziness that's been going on, all the happy accidents. The fact that I'm alive today is by God's grace at the beginning, let along sin and all the other stuff that comes along with that, but just at the very beginning of the day. It's a big perspective shift and I don't think I've succeeded in having it, but it's certainly something that's on my mind.
 

Elias: Very much so.
 

Elias: I wouldn't say it's very different. It's certainly a step forward for us. If you're expecting the same kind of record, you won't be getting that. We don't sit still anyway.
 

Aaron: I think with this record we basically wrote the songs together from a bunch of ideas like that in two days. I remember we were upstairs at the studio and Eric, the bass player, has cancer. He sort of had a song he wrote. We started working on it and I was just like, "Why don't you sing it?" He's on the record and the song, when you hear it, just brings you to tears. It's just so honest. The song is called "Love Heal Me." We had a lot of life happens to us. That's very reflected in there.
 

 

Aaron: I feel like we just started out as a band and then he got diagnosed. We had to figure out so much stuff, especially just having your own business. A band is a business, right? Tried to figure out what that means for him because we all quit our jobs to do this and then he gets cancer.
 

I remember when I got the email from his wife. I was just in shock about it. He had just gotten diagnosed. I was at the job I had previously and I had to go home. I was like, "I can't sit here the rest of the day. Do we still tour? Are we still going to be a band?" We went through a lot of crazy emotions.
 

Elias: It's fascinating too because Eric and I were close friends growing up. I've known him for 15 years. Eric sort of leaving the band for a time, being in the hospital, was in a sense great for the three of us because it forced us to have different kinds of relationships than we had when Eric was around. That is an awesome feeling, but certainly it's been fascinating and interesting period trying to work with Eric and help him. Help his family through it as much as we can from 1,000 miles away.
 

Aaron: For me I've never really experienced cancer that closely before. I just felt like I became a statistic.