Hailing from a small town off the coast of Northern Ireland, Rend Collective (Gareth Gilkeson, Chris Llewellyn, Ali Gilkeson, Patrick Thompson and Stephen Mitchell) wants to be known as a celebration band. The group’s authentic and energetic style of worship has attracted an international audience, with songs like Build Your Kingdom Here, My Lighthouse, and Counting Every Blessing. Their most recent albums have hit the highest non-Christian charting any worship album has ever achieved in the U.K.

In 2018 Rend Collective sold out their hometown show at the SSE Arena in Belfast making it the largest attended Christian concert in the country. With good reason too, Rend Collective continually draw in fans across the world with their electric performances and a good dose of Northern Irish charm. From playing sold out gigs in Canada, mainland Europe, Scandinavia, Brazil, Hong Kong and the U.S. , to the fact that “Boldly I Approach” has become the most popular hymn in the German church: the band are undeniably a global force.

Despite all this, the band seem to be doing it differently than most other artists before them, living and working—singing and sharing the laundry duties—as a tight-knit family, even touring with their young children most of the time. The word “Collective” is not just in their name, but in their foundations forming the heart and strength of their ministry.

"Rend Collective came together as a few friends started to pray and seek God. We wanted an authentic outworking of our faith and felt that we would just step out into the unknown and see what happened," Gareth shares. "Before we knew it, people just started gathering around us and we had more than 100 people involved, musicians and artists, bank workers and teachers, and together we tried to figure out our faith."

Concerning the band itself Gareth comments, "We are a collective of people like a family and not just a band. We want our music to be what we call Organic worship, an honest and natural connection with God, something which is authentic and not artificial. We want to create an environment for people to have genuine encounters with Him and to find themselves singing to Him in ways that they find real"