New Advent album by The Porter’s Gate is balm for a pandemic-weary world
'It also feels like a particularly good year for Advent. It feels like, this has been a whole Advent year, a whole Advent two years,' said The Porter’s Gate founder. Read the article from Religion News Service.
The Porter's Gate released a new album featuring all "Advent songs" as a response to the realities of 2021, including the song "O Come." Screengrab courtesy of The Porter's Gate youtube video
The newest album by The Porter’s Gate is a far cry from the peppy “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”-type Christmas tunes flooding the radio waves this time of year. Drawing heavily from biblical Scriptures and written with congregational worship in mind, “Advent Songs” is meant as a hope-filled response to 2021’s weighty realities.
“We’ve lost Advent,” The Porter’s Gate founder Isaac Wardell told RNS. “It’s not just the most wonderful time of year, it’s the time of year when, historically, Christians do self-examination and ponder what it means that Jesus is coming, and Jesus will come again. That produces a really different set of songs and prayers that we need to hear in this moment in history.”
The Porter’s Gate is a self-described “worship project” founded in 2017 by Wardell, a longtime worship leader, and his wife Megan. Conceived with the intent of making worship spaces more universally hospitable, The Porter’s Gate begins most album-writing processes with diverse gatherings of songwriters, pastors and theologians who discuss a theme they see missing from church music, such as vocation, lament and justice. These conversations then inspire the songs written for each album.
The ever-evolving project has produced five albums or EPs and has had roughly 300 collaborators over the last four years, including Audrey Assad, Liz Vice, David Gungor and Urban Doxology. Today, Wardell continues to lead the project from Belgium, where he is a graduate fellow at Catholic University of Leuven. RNS spoke to Wardell about The Porter’s Gate’s unconventional approach to songwriting and its latest album. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.