BART MILLARD

If you go to a Christmas concert, you take your wife on a nice evening, people are dressed up a little bit more, and it's definitely a sit-down event.

As long as our heart's beating, there's a chance for us, or whoever that person is in our life, and I don't know how the story turns out, but I do know that no one is out of the reach of God, and that anybody's capable of change.

If there's a moment on the record to reach people where they are, it's 'Even If'. We're ministers first. We're trying to reach the hurting first. This song wrecked us.

A Little Hope' is a song we wrote a couple of years ago and hated the thought of it not getting at least a little attention. It's a song that just makes you smile.

God was always a refuge for me growing up.

We are not disqualified or bad people trying to be good. We are holy, righteous, and redeemed. Sometimes, we spend more time on what we used to be and not who we are now.

What I view as worship now is certainly a little different than how I used to view worship. I don't see it as a verse in a chorus, on a big screen with words, like I used to. It's just trying to be as real as possible in front of an audience.

Part of the tradition of the Christmas season is every night my son and I hit the town and look for every Christmas light we can find. This is something my son absolutely adores.

I finally got the dad I always wanted and then he left. At 18, 19 years old, I was really upset and had to work through that.

More than anything, whether it's my dad's fault or whatever, I wouldn't allow myself to be loved. I lived most of my life thinking that I was unlovable, that I was broken goods, or whatever.

I have pretty much always been about - if I write that song or whatever, it is all for Mercy Me. Anything I want to do is for Mercy Me.

I just want people to not assume their story is over, especially when maybe they have somebody in their life that they've given up on or they think it's hopeless.

I am just sitting back and trying to take in the idea that the God who created everything around us, He didn't call the mountains or the forest or the ocean to spend eternity with Him, but He called us.

12 years ago all I wanted to do was sing the right songs and get emotionally wound up, but now I realize my job is to make Christ the center of attention each night.

We started making independent records. We started in '94 until about 2000 when just kind of just did it ourselves... We'd write our own songs. No one cared... At some point, we decided to try and write our own original stuff and one of the last independent records is when we wrote the song 'I Can Only Imagine.'

I don't know what it is, but St. Louis has always welcomed us with open arms.

We have jokingly said if you've got good hair, can sing and know three chords, you can lead worship at First Baptist Houston or wherever. But that's kind of scary, putting somebody on stage just because they have a good voice. Do they know theologically and spiritually what they're saying and why they're doing it?

I have one brother who's five years older than me and he was a huge part of my childhood.

I'm not trying to shove anything down anybody's throat.

We try to do everything that we can to make Christ the center of attention. Our goal is to kind of broaden the definition of worship. I know that God has always used us as a forefront for people to draw closer to Him and get into His presence.

When I was a kid, my dad would let me stay up and watch 'Cheers' each week. Granted it's not the most 'kid friendly' show, but I could've cared less. I was getting to stay up past my bedtime!

Yeah, musically, from a production standpoint my favorite is probably 'Have a Little Talk with Jesus'. Just the way it turned out production wise with the clarinet and everything, it sounds like something from a movie.

On Christmas Eve, it's my wife and my son and my daughter and I. We're home, and we open our presents together on Christmas Day, and then after we go visit the rest of the family.

Writing Christian or worship music is just because I love Jesus, so everything I do is going to be an overflow of that.

When my father died of cancer in 1991, he left me with the assurance that he was headed to a better place. He used to always tell me that I was getting the raw end of the deal because I had to stick around here.