Quotes from Bart Millard

What I view as worship now is certainly a little different than how I used to view worship. I don't see it as a verse in a chorus, on a big screen with words, like I used to. It's just trying to be as real as possible in front of an audience.

We have jokingly said if you've got good hair, can sing and know three chords, you can lead worship at First Baptist Houston or wherever. But that's kind of scary, putting somebody on stage just because they have a good voice. Do they know theologically and spiritually what they're saying and why they're doing it?

We try to do everything that we can to make Christ the center of attention. Our goal is to kind of broaden the definition of worship. I know that God has always used us as a forefront for people to draw closer to Him and get into His presence.

Writing Christian or worship music is just because I love Jesus, so everything I do is going to be an overflow of that.

Probably about 10 years ago or so I told my grandmother that I always wanted to make a record of hymns if I could ever make a career of all of this. She kind of held me to it. She passed away in 1999. I just never forgot it.

If there's a moment on the record to reach people where they are, it's 'Even If'. We're ministers first. We're trying to reach the hurting first. This song wrecked us.

Some of our jokes we made up on the fly. I love Lecrae; we have been friends for a while and he is just one of my favorite people.

As long as there's breath in our lungs our story is still being written.

Then, when my dad was diagnosed with cancer, I started to notice this crazy transformation, where he fell desperately in love with Jesus.

12 years ago all I wanted to do was sing the right songs and get emotionally wound up, but now I realize my job is to make Christ the center of attention each night.

If somebody told me people would still care about our music 25 years ago, I would have thought they were crazy.

At some point, I talked about how I had never graduated college. I dropped out my sophomore year to start MercyMe 21 years ago. Part of the reason was I felt like I was treading water.

A Little Hope' is a song we wrote a couple of years ago and hated the thought of it not getting at least a little attention. It's a song that just makes you smile.

We started making independent records. We started in '94 until about 2000 when just kind of just did it ourselves... We'd write our own songs. No one cared... At some point, we decided to try and write our own original stuff and one of the last independent records is when we wrote the song 'I Can Only Imagine.'

I did everything religion told me to do for a long time only to end up frustrated, beat down and jaded. I couldn't keep up. No matter how hard I tried, it was never enough. So I decided to quit. And I did.

I have pretty much always been about - if I write that song or whatever, it is all for Mercy Me. Anything I want to do is for Mercy Me.

My son, Sam, is 15 years old, and he's been a diabetic since he was 2. When you're a parent of a child with any kind of chronic illness, these things don't go away. You have a lot of good days, but some days you feel like you're losing bad.

Good songwriters write about what consumes their heart, and ours is about our relationship with God.

I'm all into Jazz; I'm into New Orleans type music. There is country, there is southern gospel. I'm a huge southern gospel fan.

Whether you have an abusive father or the most amazing dad ever, every son is trying to find their way out from under the shadow of their dad.

We are not disqualified or bad people trying to be good. We are holy, righteous, and redeemed. Sometimes, we spend more time on what we used to be and not who we are now.

I've never met an artist who was at a certain level of spirituality offstage and then lowered it onstage.

I came to know Christ at the age of 13 during church camp at Glorieta, New Mexico.

I've been through difficult times where it just seems like hope is nowhere to be found, but those are some of the greater moments where we run to Christ a little faster and hang on a little tighter.