|PIC1|Israel Houghton is an internationally recognised songwriter, singer, worship leader and producer, who has written such notable songs like "Friend of God" and "Trading My Sorrows".

In this interview, Israel shares more about his family, his vision for New Breed and where his ministry is heading.

The "Hello Love Tour' is scheduled for 35 cities, which is very busy. How do you maintain your intimacy with God while on tour and how does that also balance with your wife and family?

Well, I’ve been very fortunate to have my family out on the road with me and that’s made a sizable difference. As a group, every day we’re having a time of devotion, a time of Bible study, a time of conversation around the word of God, a time of prayer, a time of worship off the stage ...

And I don’t boast about much of anything, but I will boast of the heart of this team and that is they all have that in common that they would rather be in the presence of God whether it’s on the stage or off the stage. What you see on stage is about 10 per cent of what New Breed is all about [and] the other 90 per cent is about walking out what we sing about. It’s about working acts of justice all over the world and social justice, that sort of thing, and that to us is why we get to get on stage to basically raise awareness, again, of the church’s role and the Christians’ role in making a change in the world that we live in.

How much involvement do your wife and family have in your music?

Well, you know Meleasa, my wife of nearly 15 years now is very active within the team, very active, certainly with the females in the group. And we have three kids and we have three specific legs on this tour - so we’ve brought a different child on each leg. On the one we’re on right now our 12 year old daughter is out with us. So she gets up at the end of the set and dances with the team a little bit and she has fun being a part. And to me, my wife ministers to me, just by being with me. She takes that role very seriously and I don’t like being away from my family at all.

You've ministered in South Africa, how was your worship experience different from that in America?

I would break that down to a very simple answer. I think in America, we as a church, we have a lot of options, you know. "I can do this, I can do that. Our church has a great programme but that church over there has even greater programmes and this and that."

So we sort of have options and yet when I go to South Africa and Africa it’s like: "I don’t care who has the mic and I don’t care who’s preaching and I don’t care what the lights look like and I don’t care if the sound is great or not. I want to be with God."

And the reason is, you say to God, "You’re all I need because You are all I’ve got." And when He’s all you’ve got, you worship from an entirely different place than you do when you say, "I’ll get to you, God, when I can."

It’s not fair to say that the entire American church is like that, but we are spoilt rotten and there’s something about when we [Israel & New Breed] go to Africa and we get sort of turned around. We come back with a different type of desperation for the presence of God and it really is about the Presence. If the Presence is the cake and the 'lights, camera and action' is the icing, [then] I’m so much more interested in the cake. You seem to see that more overseas.

We do a lot in Asia and it’s just a different thing. The less Westernised the culture is, it seems like the more desperate they are for God. And we always come back home and say okay we want that kind of desperation in our lives.

And what do you guys do to seek out that desperation?

You know the scripture says, "Iron sharpens iron and so another man sharpens his friend" and I think for us we keep each other sharp and we keep each other challenged and encouraged and committed to just being in the word of God and just walking out what we’re talking about.

You know it’s just different. There are a lot of people who do what we do, who see this as a means to an end and sort of a viable business as opposed to a true character driven lifestyle. And for us we’re just saying well, maybe, that’s the long way but I’m going to take the long way because this love relationship I have with God is far more important than, "Do people know my name?" or "Do people know our songs?" The songs I write I want to write to cause people to discover God rather than to discover us. That’s very important.

Do you draw the line between a gig or ministry?

Well, we certainly try not to. I look at every opportunity. Especially, because we’re a worship group, so worship in it’s very nature is not about us, it’s about Him. So you know, the less we are seen and the less that it’s about us - the better it is for the worship experience because God is centrestage.

There times where you get "Hey you’ve got 12 minutes to sing two songs?"... We do television shows and award shows and sometimes you come off of those things and we’re just like okay, "What did we accomplish?" Because this just felt like it was promotional. And I can see the necessity of that sometimes but even in that we say we want to be mindful of what we carry. We carry the presence of God so if we’ve got eight minutes in which to display that let’s do it with a pure heart, let's do it with clean hands, let’s do it with proper motivation and let God do the work.

You once said your heart is "to deliberately diminish the lines that separate the Church, and bring all people together through worship". Your music truly covers so many genres and impacts so many different types of people. Can you elaborate on what that statement means?

|PIC2|I remember being 23 and signing my first record deal and saying "Wow". I went away and sort of wrote some of my vision out and my big ten year plan. And I loved to be a part of developing a movement of worshipers and worship leaders that have this in common. We want to intentionally be cross cultural, cross generational, cross denominational. In other words, we’re trying to connect with everyone and that’s always a big ambitious statement to say, "We wanna connect with everybody." But we really do.

I believe worship, by virtue of what it is, has the ability to do that. To bring people together and so we said upfront: this is what we want to do. And we’ve been very deliberate, as you said, and very intentional about being mindful, stylistically, of what we’re doing. It’s become now where we really don’t have to over-think it. We just do. It may be the way a song is done or how it’s sung. I’m always trying to think how can this be accessible to whoever comes along. And then we just do, [and] that is just fun to us, you know.

We want to make sure we're enjoying what we’re doing. But from the very beginning, in our sort of vision statement, this is the heart of what we were doing. And it hasn’t changed. As a matter of fact, if anything, it’s getting bigger. That reality is getting bigger and this tour that we’re on has certainly helped to sort of magnify that.

What music styles have contributed to make the "Israel & New Breed" sound?

I would just say world music. I would just say [that] we’ve experimented with Indian overtones and Middle Eastern melodies and world beats and African rhythms. And then just good old acoustic guitar worship songs to God, reggae, and reggaeton and Latin/Caribbean rhythms and everything sort of in between. And it’s only broadening.

We’re getting ready to embark on a pretty ambitious project called "Alive All Over the World" so from May of this year to March of next year we’re just going to be recording worldwide and doing a new record. We’re going to be going into China and going into Japan and Dubai and Israel and Egypt and the Middle East.

So in different places, we will borrow indigenous sound and rhythms. Really the intent of it is back to what we talked about. That is, helping the church worldwide realise that there are people you’ve never met and that you may never meet who are worshipping God. And it may sound a little bit different but the heart behind it is the same.

Your new album "The Power of One" is launching March 24. What should fans expect from this album?

I think they should expect what they’ve come to expect on every record we’ve done and that is you can never really quite forecast how it’s going to be. You know, there’s a very obviously common thread because I’m in most of the songs with different guests. I’ve got Mary Mary, tobyMac, Martin Smith, Chevelle Franklyn, who’s this great reggae artist, she’s amazing, so on it are gospel songs that people have sort of come to know us by. There's a little bit of rock inflection stuff, there’s a 'full on' old school Bob Marley-type of reggae tune on there and there’s sort of everything in between.

The tune I do with Toby, he’s singing and rapping on it and it’s a very very rocky kind of song. There’s a live acoustic song on there called "Others" that actually I think you can only get that on iTunes.

It’s a wide range of really what’s coming out of my heart. But it’s coming from a very authentic place. It’s what I believe and I stand by everything I sing on this record. It’s the first studio record that I’ve done since 2002 and it’s the first solo record I’ve done since ‘97. So it’s sort of different and we’ve done that very much on purpose.

Cos at the same time of doing this record, we did a live "New Breed" record that I’m not on. It’s just "New Breed" and so we’re really expanding our base and making sure that people understand "New Breed" was never designed to be my back up group but that they are a group of individuals that love God, who are great worship leaders themselves, songwriters, producers themselves. So I got behind that record financially. I’m as excited about that record as I am my own. And then we’re going to continue to do things together as "Israel & New Breed" and we’ll continue to do things just as New Breed as well, so it’s exciting.

America and the world for that matter has been experiencing difficult economic times. Could you share some encouraging words?

Well, you know again, I think that what people don’t need are cliches in times like these, you know. I think we hear a lot of them. So I believe the song we did "Just Wanna Say", it just borrows from the Psalm. It says "I once was young but now I’m old and I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken" and it doesn’t matter how tough the squeeze gets, He’s with us.

And my prayer, I’ve had to learn to make this my prayer lately because, you know, it’s effected everybody I know, including me. I’ve got a house and I go "Lord in this current time I can’t maintain this..." And it’s a second home but it’s still like one of those things where you go okay I’m feeling this like anybody else.

And at the end of the day you know that song says "I still wanna say I’m not afraid" and I think there’s almost this thing where I want to encourage people and say it’s gonna be okay and all that, but I think we have to encourage ourselves. David said, "I’m going to encourage myself in the Lord." And I think sometimes you have to say, you know what man, "I’m not afraid, I know your with me" and sometimes there’s something when you get that steel in your spine and just say I’m gonna square my shoulders and I’m not going to give way to fear and it’s gonna be alright and if it all crumbles down then God Himself will build it back up.

And I have that confidence because He said, "He’d never leave me and He’d never forsake me." And I also just believe that those of us who call ourselves Christians, who walk with God and have this love relationship with Him, we’re not governed by an American economy, we live in God’s economy and it’s just a different way of looking at life. And there’s a real confidence that just rises in knowing that we are His and He is ours and He’s with us no matter what.

What is worship to you?

Well, I’ve heard it defined so many different ways. I tend to always answer it by saying what worship is not and worship is not music and it’s not singing and it’s not lights and words on a screen. Those are all things that sort of help us get into the corporate environment of worship but worship is the position of the heart. It’s a lifestyle.

There’s a mother who every morning gets up and worships God by looking after her kids. And she’s not singing and she’s not jumping up and down and clapping but maybe she’s packing a lunch. She’s looking after the miracle that God gave her and that is a life of worship. That is a heart after God.

And what I say in the corporate expression is - and this is just my definition - but worship is a conversation between friends and if God has called me His friend there’s something about honouring Him. And conversation is an important phrase because a lot of times we co-mingle "God, you’re great, we love you, we worship you, we lift our hands", and we leave and we never listen for the response [from God] because God does want to encourage our hearts. God does want to speak to us and sometimes you just need enough of that exhale in the moment to let God do only what He can do. So worship to me is a conversation between friends.

What can we expect from Israel Houghton five years from now?

Whew, well you know I haven’t made the turn yet but I’ve got the blinker on. I’ve been telling everybody, when I turn 40, I expect to make some significant changes and that’s in about three years. But I’ve seen people who I really admire sort of try and perpetuate something that is really for another generation so that doesn’t make them obsolete. If anything that makes them more necessary to say, "Okay I’m going to take whatever platform I’ve been given thus far and whatever relationships I’ve been blessed to be apart of cultivating and make a way for another generation."

And for me, I think when I look at "New Breed" and when I look at my daughter’s generation, we’re actually doing something with her and her friends called "New Breed Next" where we’re looking at that next generation, and saying, okay you go for it. And I think I can get as excited about being on the side of the stage and watching that next generation win their generation as I can about being on the stage and being front and centre.

So I think five years from now, if you see me, you’re going to see me in a bit of a different capacity and just promoting and helping other people realise their dreams. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop leading worship. That is always going to be a part of what I do.

Israel Houghton next CD, entitled "The Power of One", is set to release March 24.