About

Chad Lewis is one of the pastors at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, KY. His passions are music, writing, community, and spending time with his wife Ginger and baby Thomas.

Chad and Ginger met at a local Seminary and were married on June 10, 2006. The next summer, Thomas Brock Lewis was born 5 weeks early on July 25, 2007. Ginger developed HELP syndrome and was very sick. Through a rough delivery, Thomas was born and both mom and baby recovered quickly.

The Lewis’ love to be outdoors, play cards, and hang out with family and friends. You might catch them on a walk to Dairy Del on Shelby and scarfing down some ice cream as Thomas tries to climb out of his stroller.

The following is a write-up done by Sojourn’s Bobby Gilles. Bobby runs sojournmusic.com and is an accomplished songwriter in his own right. (Check out some of Bobby’s music here.)

Sojourn Pastor-Elder Chad Lewis’s Faith & Music: Looking At The Man Behind The CD “Fading Grass”

“I believe that music will play a big part
in my life in the next years to come.”
— Chad Lewis’ journal, October 21, 2002

I first saw Chad Lewis in March, 2005 in the basement of the old Narrow Path bookstore on Louisville’s Bardstown Road, where he was headlining a standing-room-only concert. I stood in the back in a crowd of mostly young Christians as he told stories and sang original material, including early versions of several songs that, along with never-before-heard cuts, form the record Fading Grass (four mp3s available here), available from our Store.

In a review of the show I wrote, “(Lewis’) voice is big … Nordic. Viking. I’d imagine if he lived a few hundred years ago, he’d have been some village’s leading troubadour of sea shanties or woodland ballads. Here is someone who could calm the villagers or lead them into battle.”

Collected and assured, he sang songs of loss and recovery, confusion and identity, fall and redemption, just as he would the next time I saw him, several months later in trickier territory. He performed a set during a folk music showcase at the Brick House, a community center in downtown Louisville, for a crowd of mostly agnostic and New Age college students, one of whom had grabbed the microphone shortly before Chad’s set and exhorted the crowd to protest U of L’s decisions to allow a “hateful Christian speaker” to lecture on campus.

Chad took the stage, gently performing his same songs of providence and grace, although taking time to win over quite a few spectators with his “folk version” of “Ice, Ice Baby.”

Hear Chad’s solo acoustic version of our worship song, “Lord of All”

This same calm, pastoral confidence permeates Fading Grass. And little did I know that I would go on to co-write a song with him called “Lord of All,” the first worship song of mine in the Sojourn repertoire. Not bad for someone whose high school senior class sarcastically voted him “Most Likely To Host A Talk Show” due to his extreme shyness.

Walking down this dusty, old road
My days of youth are faded grass
— “Oklahoma Fields,” from Fading Grass

As the son of a piano-playing mother and a Southern Baptist minister who occasionally led worship, Chad was exposed to the gospel and music from earliest memory. Saved after a revival service at the age of six, he often sang in church as part of a trio with his brother and sister. His shyness, however, would have made it hard to predict that Chad would grow up to preach and sing all over the United States in worship services, retreats, youth rallies, and coffee houses, and become both a worship leader and pastor-elder in a large inner-city church.

Hear Chad preach to his Sojourn family from the book of Romans

“I’m originally from Oklahoma,” Chad says. “We lived in five different places from the time I was born till we finally settled in Memphis when I was in sixth grade. I was already introverted by nature, but Memphis was such a different culture that I shut down completely. I would often go half a school day without speaking to anyone.”

I ask him if his battle to overcome timidity was in mind when he wrote “Oklahoma Fields” during a funeral trip back home as an adult.

“Definitely. Mainly from the aspect of God calling me out, using my weakness to become one of his strengths in me. I’m shocked at how God has given me strength to minister. That’s something I could never take credit for on my own.”

“Another aspect to that song is that I’d thought that my life would not be fulfilled unless I had a romantic relationship. When my dreams of marriage to an old girlfriend crumbled in 2002, God showed me that I’d never fully rested in Him. It was always God and something. Never just God. The lesson is that God is sufficient. He’s all I need. It’s the toughest lesson.”

The broken relationship with his ex-girlfriend in 2002 left Chad despairing, bringing him to the point of realizing his inability to heal himself as well as the fact that he’d made human relationships into an idol. His grief also drove him deeper into songwriting, an activity that provided catharsis.

“Oh, how I hurt now. I was awakened at 4:30 a.m. and couldn’t sleep.
I penned the following words to a new song and prayed
that it would minister to thousands of people.”
Chad Lewis’ journal, September 2, 2002

Chad slowly found his voice as a writer, a voice of bitter experience that has refused to harden, a voice that admonishes and comforts, after the cataclysmic break-up. He wrote many of his nearly seventy songs in the months that followed, and this is still the way he typically writes.

“I write songs because I can’t not write them. I write out of a stirring in my spirit, when I’m feeling despair, longing, or even love. The times when I’m really struggling internally are when my songs pour out. I write to get out what’s inside, as well as to let the broken-hearted know that they’re not alone.”

This theme dominates Fading Grass, a record that chronicles God’s sovereignty, that asks Him to remind us who He is, and, as Chad sings in “Remind Me”: Remind me whose I am.

Chad had learned guitar several years previously. “I started taking lessons from an old hippie-folk lady. She instructed little kids — and me. She taught me Peter, Paul, and Mary, John Denver — songs like that. I wrote a few songs that summer, but of course they were terrible. I look back now and realize I was just at the beginning stage of my development as a writer.”

I ask him the songwriting equivalent of “chicken or the egg”: Which comes first, the lyrics or the melody?

“The music usually comes first and I just start singing, making up lines. Whatever is on my heart comes out. But it might be a year or two later when I go back and revisit it.”

And then, revision enters the picture.

“We beat him over the head with song structure.”
Mike Cosper, Worship Arts Pastor, Record Producer

Chad credits Mike Cosper and Eddy Morris, who respectively produced and engineered Fading Grass at Morris’ Ear Candy Studios as well as played several instruments each on the record, with making him a better writer, although they are loathe to claim too much credit. “His songs were great,” Mike said when asked about the original drafts of Chad’s material, “and if you know Chad, you’ll hear his music and see how clearly his heart shines through it. They just needed to be tweaked and tightened. He was incredibly humble throughout the whole thing.”

Eddy added, “The key to making an interesting record is to start with an interesting batch of songs and keep working at it until it is done … Chad was unusually receptive to our criticism.”

Chad also received advice from his friend, Nashville singer-songwriter Matthew Perryman Jones, a contributor to the Indelible Grace series of hymn records and a member of the Square Peg Alliance, a group of songwriting friends that includes Derek Webb, Jill Phillips, Eric Peters, Randall Goodgame, and Andrew Osenga of Caedmon’s Call, among others. Chad visited Jones in Nashville shortly before recording Fading Grass, and noted Jones’ advice on everything from songwriting to avoiding burnout.

Chad he says that he’s grown immensely in this process as a writer through the help of Jones, Cosper, Morris, and Sojourn songwriting workshops. “Just learning about structure, getting critiques — I’ve never been around a whole songwriting community before.”

I have no plans anymore
But to live and die well
Spread love profusely all around
And Your grace tell, of Your grace tell
— “Sweet Release,” from Fading Grass

Chad became engaged to friend-turned-sweetheart Ginger Glass during the recording process. The two were married June 10, 2006 and had their first child, Thomas, just last year. God has guided them in the early years of their family, and they trust Him to continue to guide them no matter what the future holds. ”My heart is just to be a minister who reaches the broken-hearted with the message of the Gospel,” Chad says.

As far as Fading Grass goes: “With Sojourn’s help, this CD went far beyond my dreams and expectations. I can’t believe these are my songs. ‘I don’t have any idea what You’re going to do with it, Lord, whether it’s just for the Sojourn community and a few people as we travel, or whether it really takes off.’ It’s all in God’s hands.”