Cory Asbury returns to worship after six years
His first worship album since Reckless Love was released on September 18 with BEC Recordings.
Cory Asbury returns to worship with Outsing the Angels, his first worship album in six years, released on September 18 by BEC Recordings, according to RELEVANT Magazine.
He left the system, not Jesus
For an entire generation, Asbury is the man behind Reckless Love, the biggest worship song of recent years. Then he disappeared: he moved to Nashville, recorded a country album, cracked jokes about the church on social media, and this year toured arenas with Forrest Frank.
Today he is 40 years old and doesn't disown any of those versions. "Every season was so visceral and so real to me," he told RELEVANT (Sígueme translation). And he clarifies something that bothers him: he never stopped loving Jesus. The narrative that he lost his faith and regained it he calls garbage.
«The failure of a leader does not cancel the invitation.»
What broke him was the machine. Inside the Christian industry, they told him the lyrics of Reckless Love sounded effeminate, that he was writing a song like "Jesus is my boyfriend." He saw up close a world he had idealized his whole life and didn't like what he found.
The final push came with numbers on the table: his agent proposed taking advantage of the moment, filling arenas, selling tickets. Something inside him rebelled. "This is not what I signed up for," he said.
His critique doesn't stay abstract. He talks about a church that operates like a business, where growing means more offerings, and more offerings mean a better salary for the one at the top. "The church business made me furious," he stated.
What he says to those who left the church
Asbury also writes for those who saw pastors fall and walked away from the church without walking away from Jesus. It's a group a generation younger than him, and he knows that stance from the inside because he lived it.
His message doesn't depend on the church fixing itself first. "He is not those people. He is Jesus. He is completely different," he said. The failure of a leader does not cancel the invitation.
He is also honest about what offense does when you feed it: checking every scandal, saving every headline, replaying the wound until it becomes your identity. "That is poison to your heart," he warned. He doesn't ask you to submit to the one who hurt you or to pretend it didn't happen.
He compares it to Hagar: God reaches her in the desert on the way to Egypt, tells her he saw everything they did to her, and asks her to return anyway (see Genesis 16:13). "No matter how far you run," he said.
The psalmist wrote something similar centuries earlier: "The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit" (Psalm 34:18, ESV). The God who sees the wound is not the leader who caused it.
One album to sing along and another for the room
Outsing the Angels is divided between big songs, made for a room full of strangers to sing, and others almost like a diary, which he never wrote thinking of a Sunday. That tension doesn't bother him. He remembers that Reckless Love wasn't built for congregations and ended up being one, just like How He Loves, by John Mark McMillan.
What he was after was recovering the enthusiasm of worshiping as a teenager, when it hadn't yet become routine. That's why he listens to Elevation Rhythm and SEU Worship. He wants that energy back.
Ten years after almost leaving everything, Asbury maintains that nothing was lost: everything was redemptive. His advice for anyone today at that same entrance of their house is simple: "Go through it with joy."
If a church wound still weighs on you, you don't have to pretend or go back to the same place tomorrow. This week you can take a small step: talk to a trusted adult, a counselor, or your pastor, and pray with just one person in your living room.
Would you go back to a church that failed you? Tell me.
