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Human Fusion By Jenni Isaac Conclusion

Charlie Lowell   Steve Mason   Dan Haseltine   Matt Odmark

Despite the immense difference in personalities, the four members of Jars of Clay have somehow managed to bond, creating a ministry that has stayed at the top of Christian music for nearly a decade. They have grown from inexperienced college kids to self-produced, Dove and GRAMMY Award winning professional musicians. They have touched millions of fans, both Christian and not. They have stretched their ministry beyond the boundaries of the church and throughout the world. They have all started families of their own and, most of all, they have remained great friends.

But two things have never changed. First, Jars of Clay is still comprised of the same four members who together celebrated the success of their first single. And second, Dan Haseltine, Charlie Lowell, Steve Mason and Matt Odmark are still as committed, if not more so, to following God's direction. Never has it been so apparent than with their sixth album, Who We Are Instead.

Going back to their unplugged origins, the band decided that, for this newest album, they would set aside the electric guitars and instead go with the "subtlety of acoustic playing." In doing so, they revisit their early years and consider the growth of both the band and each individual member.

"I think the new album reflects the basic elements of our relationships with each other and how we've tried to love each other and pursue each other," Mason says. "It's not so much a direct connection in terms of the songs, but the process was that expression."

Odmark agrees. "The challenge for us has been to say at the end of the day, 'There's music that's created in this meeting of the minds that really inspires us, that really seems to speak of who we are and what we walk through as four men who are trying to make sense of living their lives in reference to a gospel that seems increasingly harder to make relevant in this day and age.'"

The members of Jars have made it clear that they will persevere in their relationships with one another to continue to do the work God has called them to do. After 10 years, they have not given up on the idea that with God's help, human beings can endure in lasting relationships that shape them to be servants. And though four individual college students from Greenville College may never have expected to wind up as Jars of Clay, they have finished a sixth album that makes it clear who they are as a group.

"Jars of Clay is a band that is searching and trying hard to figure out how to tell the gospel story in a way that makes it genuine," explains Haseltine. "A lot of that is simply telling the story with all the characters involved. It's telling the story and not, for the sake of comfort, leaving out the characters of suffering and frustration and anger and sorrow and pain and only trying to tell the story with things like love and peace and joy and victory. Joy is never joy without suffering."

As with the telling of Jesus' impact on the world, the telling of life and of relationships is empty and false without looking at all the parts that make up the whole—the things that combine to create the exceptional. In the same way, Jars is the sum of its members—passionate in its mission to create godly music and to save the world's people.

"We're coming to understand that Jars of Clay is a group of guys who love music and feel called to be excellent in whatever God has given our hands to do," Haseltine says. "In that, He's teaching us how to tell the gospel story in a way that is honest, genuine and relevant."

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© 2003 Christian Music Planet

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