Elevation Worship

Elevation Worship Artistfacts

  • 2007-
    Chris BrownLead vocals, acoustic guitar2007-
    Mack BrockLead vocals, electric guitar2007-2017
    Jonsal BarrientesVocals2015-
    Jenna BarrientesVocals2015-
    Tiffany HudsonVocals2020-
  • Elevation Worship is a contemporary worship collective that grew out of Elevation Church, a multisite church based in Charlotte, North Carolina, led by Pastor Steven Furtick. The band has turned a single congregation's Thursday songwriting sessions into one of the most streamed acts in Christian music, racking up multiple GMA Dove Awards and a string of #1 hits on Billboard's Hot Christian Songs chart.
  • Steven Furtick planted Elevation Church in 2006 alongside seven other families, drawing inspiration directly from U2. A massive fan of the band, Furtick had picked up their 2000 album All That You Can't Leave Behind as a college freshman and named the new church after its hit single "Elevation." The church's in-house worship team, formed the following year, inherited the name as well.
  • The band's global breakout hit, "The Blessing," started in a songwriting session with Kari Jobe, her husband Cody Carnes, Furtick, and Elevation Worship leader Chris Brown just weeks before COVID-19 lockdowns began. Jobe told worshippers on March 1, 2020, that the track, based on the famous benediction in Numbers 6:24-26, represented "the heart of the Father over us as His kids." Within five months, it had been covered by over 100 "virtual choirs" across 25 countries, from South Korea to Zimbabwe.
  • Chris Brown describes the band's writing process as "a messy birthing process."

    "It's collaborative and ever-evolving," he explained to Marriagetrac. "There are lots of voice memos on the phone, mumbles and hums, text messages back and forth between writers asking, 'What do you think about this?'"
  • Some tracks take up to 18 months to finish. Their classic invitation song "O Come To The Altar" sat unfinished for a year and a half until Furtick suggested stripping the concept down to its simplest core message.
  • Several of the band's biggest anthems began inside Pastor Steven Furtick's sermons instead of a recording studio. The title track to their 2020 album Graves Into Gardens, for instance, grew out of a message called "The Mystery of Potential," based on a passage in 2 Kings about the prophet Elisha.
  • Despite their massive streaming numbers, the group's members insist chart success isn't the goal. "You should decide early on that your motive for writing songs can't be for other people to hear them," Chris Brown told Worship Fuel. "Your drive can't be to get your songs out. The motive has to be that you feel on mission and called to do that."
  • Their 2021 album, Old Church Basement, was a joint project with Maverick City Music (including the song "Jireh"). The idea started when Furtick was riding in a car and imagined a song centered around an old church basement. He reached out to Chandler Moore and Dante Bowe to map it out, and the concept expanded into a full collaborative LP that won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album in 2022.

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