Now more than ever, faith and Bible-based stories are hitting movie and TV screens alike, and now these visual stories are making their way to another medium: The Bible Tour concert series.
On April 14, The Bible Tour will make a stop at Reardon Auditorium. It is a multimedia concert experience featuring footage from “The Bible” TV series, its recent feature film “Son of God,” and the music of artists Matthew West, Sidewalk Prophets, Aaron Shust, Love & the Outcome, and Blanca.
According to The Christian Beat, the tour started two years ago as a collaborative project headed by Francesca Battistelli. The concert tour aims to bring the stories of the Bible to life in a fresh way by uniting cinematic storytelling with live music. LightWorkers Media, the producers behind the show, worked together with the national Christian radio group K-LOVE to sponsor and promote the concerts since their inception in 2014. The show, along with its follow-up series “A.D.: The Bible Continues,” dramatize significant events and stories from the Bible. For the concert, the team carefully selected each song and artist—sometimes alone, sometimes performing with another artist or group—to match up with or add a connection or extra meaning to a scene from the Bible. With each new set of artists, the tour subtly changes, swapping out stories and clips to suit the talent on stage.
Jodi King and Chris Rademaker, of the group Love & the Outcome, shared their thoughts on the concert experience with the Andersonian just as they were finishing rehearsals in Nashville, Tennessee. The duo, who are married, have been collaborating since they first met while they were playing with separate bands in their home country of Canada.
They are most excited for the opportunity to work closely with and support the other artists traveling with them. According to King, each artist “swaps places every song,” rather than each artist playing a time-restricted set before moving on, and the tour has given them the chance to really get to know all the musicians and team involved.
King especially appreciates the sense of camaraderie and mutual support that comes from the tour process, especially in a highly collaborative tour like this one.
“We’re still new to the U.S. Christian music scene, and even in just these few years they’ve been very welcoming,” King said. “It’s like a big family.”
On the other hand, touring is not without its challenges, and while many of the artists involved may see family or friends at various stops around the country, King and Rademaker are still adjusting to a new member of their family: their baby Milo.
The couple was pregnant during the recording process of Love & the Outcome’s next album, and the two look forward to sharing their newest single “The God I Know” for the first time on The Bible Tour.
King is grateful for the help they’ve received in this time of transition—her mother is traveling with the band to help take care of the baby—and she laughed as she expressed her certainty that this change will not end their careers in music.
“We’ve always dreamed of doing this as a family, but we’re just praying that the Lord continues to open doors for us,” King said. “We are not losing steam. We are asking for more and more strength as we sleep less and less.”
The two agreed that the scenes of the Crucifixion, matched with the music by Matthew West, and the group finale are especially powerful, but their new roles as parents have added more depth and meaning to other parts of the Biblical narrative.
King expressed her relief at not having to watch the visuals during some of the concert’s more emotional moments.
“One of the scenes is the birth of Christ paired with Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac,” King said. “That is just really hard to watch having just given birth myself.”
The concert pairs these two scenes—one from the book of Genesis and one from the much-later book of Luke—to draw a connection between Isaac, who is spared from being sacrificed by God’s provision of a lamb, and Jesus, who, in the words of the book of John, is “the lamb who takes away the sin of the world.”
It is these connections that make the Bible Tour special, and Rademaker hopes that the concert experience will help attendees understand the Biblical narrative and the music they hear in new ways.
“The music and the video help bring the Bible story to life in a really unique way,” Rademaker said. You can reinterpret those scenes together with what the artists were thinking of when they were writing those songs.”
The concert will take place Thursday, April 14 at 7 p.m., with student ticket rates as low at $19. Tickets can be purchased online or through the Reardon box office.