The group’s Myspace page introduces them by saying:

“1998: A bunch of Jesus-loving, jalopy-gospel way-backers get together and do creative things: Shrieking, speaking, flailing, failing, storytelling, fear-quelling. In the process, songs and stories are smithed and written, friendships and families are stretched and shaken, stirred and strengthened. Genre-gender-class-past-death-defiers and town-crying demystifiers of mystery history lead these pacifistic, full-frontally ballistic missives. Best of all, on frequent occasions, we see entombed voices raisin’ and we peek through the haze. ***NOW: More than one dog year together, these doors’re gonna swing wiiiiide.”

The group’s unique approach to worship is borne from a unique community, The Bridge, in Portland, OR. Several years and three albums worth of material later, the lamp of creativity is still burning brightly for worship. I recently spoke with Todd and Angie Fadel from the group to find out more about them, their creative process, ideas of worship and views on “Christian” music.

• What is your typical songwriting process?

We’ve done this thing in practice for a while now. Angie and I have been writing songs together for about 10 years. One of the things I felt was really helpful going into songwriting was implementing a “no criticism” zone. We give ourselves totally leeway about anything; any words, any melodies, whatever. We record it all and then, after that time has passed, we go back and see what works, but not mid-way through the process, which I think a lot of musicians do that. Many artists get stuck because anytime something comes out, they’re critical, either of their fellow band members or whatever and they’ve got a real specific idea of how they want it to sound and impose that on everyone but that ends up being a real creativity killer. We’re really mindful of that in our process. We are not going to attack each other’s ideas, we just let them free-flow and then pick the ones that are our favorites, which there could be more than a few and we often find more than a single song.

• How did the group come about? It’s tied to the Bridge pretty closely, is that right?

That’s pretty much it. Prior to the Bridge starting, there was a really close-knit group of musicians and artists, involved in things like the TOM Festival. The result was that there was just a group of people that started hanging out together. The Bridge started after that initial group had been hanging out together for about four years. A bunch of people came down from Washington state with the hopes of starting a church for this group of people.

But what was original about the way they did it was, rather than coming down and saying “This is what we think needs to happen in a church,” they fell in love with the culture that was already existed and kind of asked “can we be you” and came into our culture rather than the other way around and then just saw how those things would play out in terms of authentic expression of worship and faith. As a result, we were really allowed to flourish in this new community and we were all grateful. But it did take some time. I think a lot of us were very skeptical at first about these people who kept saying “No one can take your future from you. You are valuable and we love you.” We had all, to some degree, been burned by older adults saying “This all sounds fine, but you’ve got to get right with God” and not giving us any direction other than saying things like “You’ve really just to tap into the Lord!” Then these other people came and just said “You show us what you’ve learned.” That sort of leadership drew a huge creative spirit out of all us in a community way.

After a good year of this community had gone by, we’d written a ton of songs and wanted to record. We rarely would do any songs that were written by people outside of our community. So we wanted to capture that in an album but didn’t know if we should call it “The Bridge.” As we were talking about it, one of the co-pastors, Ken, was praying for the music team and he prayed that God would be with these “Agents of Future,” and we just thought, “Well, that’s it,” that’s the name for the group. It wasn’t describing the music, it was describing us creative people. Agents of Future is just sort of the name for what we call ourselves as a collective. At least that’s the idea! Any time there’s any songs we want to record that come out of our community, we call it that.

• So the music we hear on the albums, is that used for corporate worship?

Yes, that’s all it is. We’ve only done three or four actual concerts out in the community with the music, just because …… Angie and I ran an all ages venue in Portland for about five years doing about 1,200 shows. It was a real crazy time in music where we had a chance to develop relationships with some really amazing artists like Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, Le Tigre, The Thermals, all the Portland bands you might have heard of, they came through the club. They’d just be starting out or we’d put them on a bill to help them get going. It developed in us a real respect that, in a very similar way as to when the people from Everett came down without imposing themselves on us, it made us realize that the context doesn’t necessarily fit. If I was going to open for Death Cab for Cutie, the context doesn’t fit because our point is a real participatory expression and that doesn’t work well in those performance settings.

• That brings up an interesting concept, because content-wise, you’re a worship band, but presentation-wise, you’re not what most people associate with worship and even “Christian” music.

From my standpoint, since I’ve been a part of, or at least observing the Christian music thing, I just feel like it’s really been diluted. It’s diluted the strength of people’s personalities and people’s spirit. But any type of marketing runs the risk of diluting what the people’s hearts are really about. It’s almost worse when you bring in people’s faith because then you’re taking something mystical and trying to make it quantifiable. You end up with people counting how many times Jesus is mentioned, or Bible verses, but that’s a joke to everybody. That’s a joke to artists whose audience is primarily Christian and it’s a joke to anyone else. So of course creativity does not compute when you’re talking about Christian contemporary music because it’s been divorced from it. Anybody whose creative sees that dilution happen when marketing is involved.

So the best way we can share our stuff is real directly. If people want to learn methods or us to encourage writers who are already there, or maybe even writers who don’t even know that they’re writers, artists and dancers, in their own communities, that’s what we feel called to do. We’d love to make a living at what we feel God has given us a gift for.

• You mentioned the dilution that happens when marketing becomes involved, particularly in a “Christian” music sense. But if you look over the course of history, it has often been the Church at the forefront of creativity. What happened?

Any time someone knows that they can make a living off of it, you run the risk of that. There are few people who can really pull it off, like Radiohead or the Beatles and really bring their fans along on this artistic journey. There are very few people like that, that people say “wherever they go, we’re going to follow them.”

And honestly, when the smallest run of LPs you can do is 1,000, you’ve got to figure out some way to sell it. So you’ve got to hear in a nutshell, “Why should I buy your record instead of this person’s record?” You have to get rid of your product, so it’s inherent. I was in a band on an alternative Christian label in the ‘90’s and it was hilarious trying to define for them what we were doing. I had been a big fan of Steve Malkmus’ lyrics in the band Pavement. So the lyrically approach, I got a lot of inspiration from people like him and Frank Black and most Christian labels don’t have a grid for that style, so you’re just left with words like “raw” and “passionate.” But that robs it of its organic process to become similarity driven and all inclusive.

Our goal is to show that you don’t lose your personality, you gain it. If anything, everyone finds their place in our community. There’s not a sense of one person taking over. Everybody is equally a part of it. That’s no easy task but we have really made that a priority in our community, to make sure that every single person gets a chance.

Recently, we had someone come to one of our services who lived in our neighborhood. She had a beautiful singing voice and we asked her to sing with us. We wanted to support that. She was in her mid 60’s or 70’s and just passed away. That was a reminder of how important it is to include and support people and use their talents and love them for who they are. Her daughter said that when we expressed excitement about her being involved in music, that she felt like God had answered her prayers. For me, it’s not about the music or the art, if I’m giving someone a sense that God has answered their prayers because they feel part of a community, that’s worth more than making a living at this.

• For someone who has yet to witness what you do, how would you try to describe it?

Anthems. Shouted anthems. Spirituals. Punk spirituals. Garage Gospel. Passion before precision. Female-fronted. I play the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis, so female-fronted, boogie woogie garage gospel? Garage spirituals.

• How did your collaboration with Glen Galloway of Soul-Junk come about?

That was really cool. Before the Bridge, one of the people that was part of the original group introduced us to Glen’s music and we got in touch with him. We just couldn’t believe there was this guy just singing Bible verses. Later, they came through town and we got to meet them all and they all came to church with us to our little home gathering and it was great. I was writing most of the music collaboratively even back then and we felt like we had a connection with Glen.

Then about a year ago, I decided to put together this thing called the WHIRRSHIP , a creative collaboration, sort of a workshop, but moreso just an experiment to see how many different things we could do all at the same time collaboratively. So we asked Glen to be a part of that and he came to the house and I played piano with him during his show. Then when he was doing his next album, he asked me to be a part of that which was a huge opportunity. I love Daniel Smith and we got to record in his studio. It was a great three days, I got to hang out with Lenny and Marian Smith.

• What’s next for you?

We spent a lot of time over the past few years getting to know some people from Enter the Worship Circle. Just on a whim we sent some stuff over to them. It was right after Village Thrift and I thought they might be ready for us. They weren’t. But they did tell us that out of all the stuff they got we were the only original sounding ones because everyone else just mimicked the Enter the Worship Circle style and we had been in our own little niche for so long, we couldn’t do anything but sound different. Our friend Tracy Howe who lives in Colorado and has worked with Ben and Robin Paisley, she’s doing this thing called The Restoration Project, touring with Brian McLaren on his Everything Must Change tour. She helped us be a part of the Fall Out Arts Festival. She’s got a bunch of different thing lined up for us this summer. We’ll probably be in Texas and then Colorado and that’s pretty much it. One of the things we really want to do is just sit down in our living room and record. We have like 36 songs that have yet to be recorded so we want to record a triple album in one night! The other thing I thought of was to record all of the songs and then release them one a week and just have people sign up to receive the songs over the course of a year, give ourselves a 36-week head start! As far as the music goes, we’re just trying to gather up these songs.

But one of the things we’re doing that would be cool to let people know about is if they e-mail or message us through Myspace, we’re going to be giving updates on a very regular basis of what we’re doing, whether it’s just putting up a new song or whatever. So we’re working on developing an e-mail list. We just want to maintain that personal connection.

We would love to work with any churches or small communities that are looking tap into everyone in their community and try to find ways to involve and include everyone and just make it feel like nothing they’ve ever felt before. Not run of the mill, this is what a worship service should look like type of thing. If they’re wanting help challenging the way of looking at things, they should let us know. We’d love to be part of that process.

We believe that every community has their own voice. It’s great if they want to use our songs, but our passion is to help them figure out what their songs are for their community.

It can tend to be for some people just “OK, everyone is doing Hillsong now, that’s what we should be doing too.” Hillsong is probably flattered (and they’re making money), that all these churches are using their songs, but how does that make them feel? Do they really think that it makes sense for a church 5,000 miles away to sing exactly what they’re singing and dress like they do?

One term I really want to introduce is “Rubinizing.” Rick Rubin is a famous producer who works with people like Neil Diamond and Johnny Cash, people that we’ve almost forgotten about and he’s helped us look at them in a different light by putting their music into a completely new context. I really believe that if we work hard at including people that have been forgotten by helping to put them in a new context, “Rubinizing” them, I think we could truly see some beautiful things happening in our own communities, realizing that maybe that 87-year old Grandmother who sews in the back of the church, maybe she’s got stories to tell, maybe she’s got artwork she’s not showing because she doesn’t think it’s important to anyone. I feel like that’s the kind of church that would attract the entire world. Not the kind of church we have right now because when an artist goes into most churches, they just don’t feel like they can justify doing what they’re doing.

• So if a church wants to take you up on this offer, how would you help them find “their voice?”

Trying everything you haven’t tried before. A songwriting game for example. If you put anything in the context of a game, it tricks our minds into feeling that things are approachable and manageable. What we do, we start covertly helping people develop this ability to not be critical of each other’s expression. We involve every age group and background.

I see it as a community being like a 50-legged race. You know the 3-legged race where you’re tied together? Everyone has one leg tied together. At the beginning, it’s the most awkward, gross feeling and you don’t know what to do but then after a while, you just count, 1-2, 1-2 and soon, you have this community, 50 people strong walking, slowly but surely to a goal. That’s possible with any community.

There’s also obviously a context because we’re not going to go and just impost a “Contemporary Service” because I don’t think that’s necessary. People just try to throw this “Contemporary Service” band-aid on stuff and it’s just silly. How do we include everyone? We find out what their voices are, not only with the young but the old people.

So we’ll play games and help people develop tools of being non-critical, helping people to look at one another in a loving, inclusive way, laying their aesthetics and preferences aside in hopes of making a beautiful collage. In fact, one of my future ideas is a media player that would show all of the different media at once. Like the YouTube players that have eight different mini-screens or something but what if the entire player was talking about Grace or something. So you have your musicians, your artists, your storytellers, your dancers, your comics, whatever expression is represented in your community and that player contains every single one of those things. But then each community has their own player and it’s all on one page. How beautiful would that be?! How beautiful is the church of the world! Realizing that these are all different people and expressions, this collage of beauty, that’s what Jesus is wanting us to do for one another. I know that’s a long-term goal, but that’s the type of thing I see happening; people looking at their lives and seeing everything, the imperfections and everything and making it into this way to appreciate what God has given them in their community.

• Visit the Bridge’s website
• Visit the Agents of Future’s Myspace page
• Read an interview with Todd at The Blah Blah