Fellowship Creative will release their major label debut album,
Running To Follow. May 13. Partnering with Fair Trade Services for this first LP, Fellowship Creative is excited for the opportunity to bring their music to the masses. As the music arm to Fellowship Church based in Grapevine, Texas, the church has grown to multiple locations found in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, as well as in Miami and London.
Fellowship Creative is not just a new band making music out of their growing church. It is truly a movement, and a unique one at that, where a core group of like-minded people decided to collaborate their music, all of which was organically grown out of Scriptural teaching and the grit of everyday life. Simply said, the music of Fellowship Creative begins and ends with the Church.
"Without Fellowship Church, there's no Fellowship Creative," says leader Derric Bonnot. "Our pastor [Ed Young] started our church with a vision to use creativity to help people, regardless of their religious background, to discover the Bible's relevance to their lives and to lead them into a relationship with Jesus. There's no better fuel for a song than seeing life-change and being a part of it."
The songs on
Running to Follow reflect Fellowship Creative's main objective: preparing for a life-changing weekend experience. "We believe the church should be the most creative entity on the face of the planet," Bonnot offers. "We want to create the most creative weekend experience possible for the person who's showing up, because it could be the one hour in their entire life that they give Jesus a shot."
Running To Follow was produced by CJ Eiriksson (U2, Matchbox Twenty), who, with a limited background in Christian music, helped form the album to a cohesive unit. The story behind the album's first single, "Glory In The Highest," as well as a live video of the song, can be found by clicking on the YouTube tab below.
One of many unique aspects of Fellowship Creative is the mixture of cultures and ages. While recording the album, it wasn't uncommon to find a high school student playing alongside a hip-hop artist or a 16-year-old laying down drum tracks, while a 20-something father of young children played bass accompanied on piano by a middle-aged man. This is a group with a wide range of backgrounds, ages, skills, and levels of spiritual maturity, and the result is an album full of eclectic styles. "We try to unite these different styles in order to continue to reach a diverse audience," he says.
Running To Follow is truly the result of raw, honest collaboration at the intersection of faith and art. "We did not set out to create some sort of agenda," Bonnot concludes. "We were inspired by the movement that we were part of in our church, and it's that movement that inspired this art. Now we're just excited to see how God's going to use that art to continue the movement, not just in our church but in the bigger picture of the story He's telling about who He is."
