John Ellis remembers the phone call that changed the trajectory of his career and perhaps saved his faith.
It came from his friend, fellow worship leader Matt Redman, sometime around 2008, after years of relentless touring, recording and carrying the weight of one of Christian music’s most beloved rock bands. Ellis, the founder, lead singer and chief songwriter of Tree63, was exhausted.
“Man, you need a break,” Redman told him.
What Ellis thought would be a six-month sabbatical stretched into nearly two decades. And now, after more than a decade away from the spotlight, the Dove Award-winning South African band is returning with VOYAGE, its first full-length album in 11 years.
“It’s as much of a surprise to me as it is to you that we’re talking about Tree63 again,” Ellis told The Christian Post. “I’ve gotten to the point where I go, ‘God, You’re good at this. You tell me what to do, and I’ll listen.'”
For a generation of Evangelical Christians who came of age in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Tree63’s songs, including “Blessed Be Your Name,” which Ellis co-wrote with Redman, formed part of the soundtrack of their faith. Yet behind the success was a growing spiritual and emotional depletion that Ellis told CP nearly consumed him.
While secular artist’s careers are structured around album cycles and touring seasons, Christian musicians can find themselves trapped in a seemingly endless rhythm of performance, he said.
“Every weekend, you’re somewhere else,” Ellis, who came to faith through a personal encounter with Jesus in his mid-20s while pursuing a rock-and-roll lifestyle in South Africa, recalled. “It was physically and emotionally and spiritually draining.”
Ellis’ sabbatical became an extended pilgrimage. The artist shared how he endured professional uncertainty, personal heartbreak, spiritual searching and eventually, the rediscovery of his faith.
“What was really needed was time to let God remind me why I was doing what I was doing,” he said. “I became somebody who wrote songs about Jesus because I met Jesus one on one. That personal encounter got lost in the busyness of the music industry.”
Ellis’ experience echoes a growing conversation within Christian music circles about burnout, the pressures of “Christian celebrity” culture and the costs of ministry performed on a public stage.
In recent years, the industry has weathered a series of scandals involving prominent artists and executives, prompting renewed questions about accountability within Christian entertainment.
Ellis shared how Tree63 was signed to Inpop Records, the label founded by longtime Christian music executive Wes Campbell and closely associated with the band Newsboys, whose lead singer Michael Tait, recently admitted to drug use and sexual misconduct. Looking back, Ellis says he and his bandmates sensed early on that aspects of the Christian music industry could be spiritually hazardous.
“We were very aware that things were very tricky, even as early as 2001,” he said. “Our experience of the Christian music industry from the start was pretty compromised.”
That experience, he reflected, left behind “a bit of PTSD” associated with the Christian music business in America.
“It took a lot for me to come back now with new material,” he said. “Part of the last 20 years has been asking God for restoration and healing, and for an idea of what Christian music can look like apart from that experience.”
During his years away from touring, the artist recalled how he immersed himself in the “inner journey” of faith, a spiritual practice of contemplation and stillness.
“We live in such a noisy, busy, overstimulated environment,” he said. “It’s hard to cultivate something quiet and silent within ourselves. But that’s what I got to do for 10 years. I feel like a monk.”
The result of that inward journey became VOYAGE, whose title track explores the idea that faith is an ongoing journey of doubt, questions, sanctification and restoration. According to Ellis, the song was birthed from a conversation with a priest friend about the nature of belief itself.
“So many Christians think, ‘I got saved on this day, and ever since then I’ve been sanctified and restored,'” Ellis said. “But what I’ve found is that it can’t just be about that one day.”
One lyric in particular captures that realization: “It’s not in the moment I turned.”
“Those moments are important,” Ellis explained. “But they’re signposts on the way, not destinations. The continual voyage is the key. … but it was the real-life encounter with Jesus that made all the difference to my faith in the years since.”
Now back on the music scene for the first time in decades, Ellis said VOYAGE has the same mission that first inspired him to write songs all those years ago: to offer hope; an alternative to a culture saturated with despair.
“When I started Tree, I didn’t even know Christian music existed,” he said. “I just knew the world was singing about depression and darkness and meaninglessness, and I wanted to sing about something higher.”
“This world is full of such negative messages about what it means to be alive,” he said. “I really believe music has the power to draw us back to God.”
The artist, who is now based in Cape Town, South Africa, hopes the album will resonate particularly with listeners who have become disillusioned by church scandals, the impropriety of professing Christian artists, spiritual failures or even their own doubts.
“I know what it feels like to be disillusioned,” Ellis said. “Some of this church stuff we’re seeing right now is really depressing. Sometimes you think, ‘Maybe this whole Christian thing is nonsense.’ We know it’s not, but it can feel challenging.”
“The thing I hear God asking me all the time is, ‘Do you really trust Me?'” he said. “We say it so easily: ‘God, I trust You.’ But do we really? Maybe if you ask me again in 20 years, it’ll be different. But right now, God’s message to me is just: Trust Me.”
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: [email protected]
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