Music from Hillsong United has impacted Christian communities all over the world. Now, one singer is revealing that the church’s pastors are heavily involved in the music making process.

Jonathan Douglass, also known as J.D,  is a part of the worship band hailing from Australia. He previously told faith were that the band takes their call to make music very seriously. The teaching pastors vet the songs that the band creates to ensure that the messages line up with scripture.

“We have a simple process. We have a couple of our teaching pastors that have to approve the lyrics of all the songs we write,” he revealed. “Because we write these songs to be sung and we feel like we are putting God’s word in people’s mouths we want to make sure we get it right. “

The musicians do not lose sight of the fact that they have a responsibility to the people that listen to their music. Allowing their church’s pastors into the process ensures that they take that responsibility seriously.

“None of us are Bible scholars — we’re all passionate and have read the Bible, but it can be so deep and we also want to make sure these songs can be translated and still make sense,” he said.

The musician admits that there can be struggles in the creative process when the artists feel passionate about their messages that pastors feel need changing.

“To be honest, that can be a really hard process. There’ll be this battle, we’re going ‘this is what we want to say, it sings so well, it’s so poetic and it rhymes’ or whatever it may be….they’ll be like ‘yeah but it can be misinterpreted, or that wasn’t the original purpose of that scripture,” he wrote.  “So those songs go through a washing machine.”

Still, the band knows how important it is to make sure their music lines up with the word of God.

“But above all, United wants to make sure they are not leading people astray in their thinking,” he wrote. “The most important thing is that it is Biblical and lines up with Scripture.”

 

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