Rob Beckley: We are, yeah. On a scale of 1 to 10, we're probably at like a 5 and a half. The songs are done, but most of them are demo form, we're just getting into recording right now. Some of the guitar stuff is done, drums I think will be next week, finish up GMA, we have to fly to Toronto, fly back in, work for like a week, fly back out and do it. It's like - work for a week and go play shows on the weekends.

Rob: Tentatively. There's still some arguing going on about it, but the one that's kind of rising to the top is "Confessions." There were some other ones that were possibilities, but we just finished up this "Confession Tour" - and just the whole vibe of it was really cool. About 2 years ago or so, my church did this thing called "My Secret," where just in our small groups we were encouraged to share whatever it was that we were trying to cover up, or whatever. And there's were like 6 couples in my small group, and just the things that came out … all the way to a girl that went all the way to sharing for the first time that she had an abortion, ya know - like, things all the way that deep. Heavy stuff. And, what it did for our church, and what it did for our small group and all the way up through the whole, ya know, three thousand of us at the church... It was crazy. And I thought, ya know, that would be a really cool theme to do for a tour, if you could somehow set up a confession booth out by the merchandise tables, and you could encourage people to go in and do their confession or whatever.

Rob: Themselves, to God... It was like when you're sitting there in your room - and you know you have a problem, and you're doing it, and you're trying to hide it from God, or you don't wanna say it out loud, because then you'd be acknowledging it... So you just kinda think it, and God's like - "Yeah, I know." Ya know, but it's like, "yeah, I really have this problem with pornography." And God's like, "Yeah, I know." But to physically acknowledge that - to either speak it or to make a physical acknowledgement by writing it down - you're acknowledging before God. "This is coming out of me, and it's on paper." And, we were encouraging them to put it in like this treasure chest-like looking thing, and then we would pray over the box. The confession booth would have like incense and candles, and a little picture of Jesus. For me, I wanted to do something that could start a process. Now, I'm not naïve and I don't think that just because we did this confession, and they put a little piece of paper in a box, that they're just healed. And, so what I was doing, was meeting with the youth leaders before the show. We would make an announcement, y'know, and there would be like 20 or 30 people come back. We would talk, I would tell them what's going on... "This is like a confession booth, what we're doing..." I wrote out 1 John 1:9, "Confess your sin..." "And then after the show on your way home, I'm leaving it in your hands. I'm telling you this, because I leave town - and I can't follow up."

Rob: So the youth leaders could like follow up with the kids, and say like, "Hey - did any one go in the confession booth?" Well, because the first step is a physical confession to God. That's why we are trying to get them to write it out, and some of them are like, "Hey, I didn't get a chance to go the booth." And they send a MySpace message or whatever. But, then we try to get them to talk to their friends, to their your leaders, to their parents, whoever, and they were deep, heavy stuff, man. Like, we would read through them at night and just in that crowd of like 500 to 1,000 people, there would be like 300 cards and every night there were some cutters, there was pornography, there was an affair, and almost every night there was a girl that said that she was raped, and that she carries the guilt and feels the blame. Now there were some, that were like way deep, and they would take 5 or 6 cards and somehow they would get them together, fold them together. One girl was molested by her father at age 6 for 10 years, raped by the age of 16 by her neighbor, like - just all this crazy stuff! And then at the end, she says, "The only place I know how to find love, is by having sex with another guy." And, so there's a lot of hurt out there, and there's a lot of stuff to cover up, and I use this example, because I heard it - and it's probably fairly common. Parents are dumb enough to let their kids have a computer in their room, behind closed doors. Why? I don't know. If they do, it shouldn't be Internet-accessible, for one, but kids are staying up all night on-line, either chatting, or looking at pornography and then they're not getting any sleep. So when they (the parents) get them up for school, and they're tired, and their groggy, and their grumpy... Now you go through a month of that, where you're trying to carry the guilt of knowing what you're doing, and you're not getting enough sleep... so what are you? You're depressed. So here's some medication... take this, and you'll feel better. Now, you'll get in to where you can't live without these pills, and you're still doing the whole no sleep, going through pornography, and you start to get worse. Well now, you're bipolar because you're happy when you're happy - and you're depressed, and then it's just this huge process, and you have to hurry home and you got to cover up the history on your computer... You spend so much time consumed by this one thing.

Rob: Yeah, oh yeah! And that's just one example of being consumed by something, and therefore there's no room for God. Because you spend so much time... like the girl who cuts herself. She wakes up in the morning, and she's got to spend, y'know, 2 hours the night before thinking about what she's gonna wear, to cover up the scars. Or like, "it's 85 degrees in South Florida in March, but I gotta wear long sleeves." You're just consumed by covering up the secrets. We have a song called "Secrets and Regrets" and the whole presence of that song is based off of this, and that's why the confessions thing... there's a song called "Better Off Now." When you let go of the junk, you're better off. When you're in the presence of God, and you allow that room. We claim that we don't have time, we're such a busy society, we don't have time. But if you cut out the junk, if you cut out the secrets and the things that you're trying to cover up, there's a lot of time. And, just take 20 or 30 minutes of that a day, just to be still and be in the presence of God, and to say, "You know what? There's a peace that's overwhelming, there's a peace that can consume me. I don't need this." Dude, it'd be like - you don't need the depression medication, you're not gonna reach a point of like chemical imbalance of bipolar disorder or whatever, because you're gonna have a peace that surpasses all understanding. It's not rocket science, but we make it so complicated. Like, we don't have the time to be the parent that we're supposed to be. Dude, that's like a whole other story. But, the whole point of the record is starting people down that confessions path, of just acknowledging before God that I'm a sinner and this is my sin, and this is what I need You to take from me.

Rob: Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Just with me and my wife... like, earlier on, I partnered up with XXX Church... I knew about it before they started it, before they went public with it, and I was like, "dude, that's awesome!" cuz those guys have a ministry called Fireproof Ministries, and we had just put out the Fireproof record, and so we met up and we knew each other, and it was a struggle, and the Internet had become such a fast-growing thing. And pornography took over the Internet like, immediately. And I had just the same struggles that all these other kids are going through now. I have a heart for it, because, y'know, cuz I know what it can do to you, especially with going with the XXX Church guys. People that had let it consume them so much, that is no longer an on-line addiction. Like, Craig Gross (he is the founder of Triple-X Church), one of his friends took it so far that he got arrested for indecent exposure, because he was exposing himself to people. It became such a fetish in his life that it consumed him. And, it's not like he's a bad person. It's just that when you let the darkness consume you, and you don't make room for God, it's like that old Native American metaphor of like which wolf wins the battle. It's the one that you feed. Y'know, it's like when they're constantly fighting each other, which one wins? The one with the more strength. Y'know, and if you don't make time for God, if you don't get it out, if you don't confess it, the secret will consume you. And, that's a tough spot to be in.

Rob: Yeah, well, in general...

Rob: We have this couple that was at our church... our pastor is like really, just embracing of whoever and we have a pretty radical church, and he just says every week, "Welcome to Life Church, if it's your first time here, you might find out that this church may not be for you because we play our music loud and some people think that it shouldn't be that loud, and they're instantly turned off." Like, "oh, wow - the worship was too loud." But he's very adamant about being embracing and letting people in. Like, why do we have this stigma that you're supposed to wear a three-piece suit, and have the tie all prim and proper to be this is the image of the church. And it's like, "no, it's not that's the image of Wall Street," if you wanna be honest. Y'know, it's not the image of the church. It's like - God never said we had to wear... He said we had to give our best, and to wear our best, technically-speaking, your suit... it's not the best look for ya. Y'know what I mean? So this couple came to our church one Sunday, and they were like, "this is an amazing church, we love it here. This is like the most comfortable we've ever felt in the church, and we're really wanting to try to get into a church. We're not Christians..." and the guy said, "I'm in pharmaceutical sales," and the girlfriend said "I'm a dancer." Well, come to find out: she was a stripper and he was a drug dealer. Like, after they started getting to know them more, and they felt more comfortable, y'know, the next week they met them again, and they felt comfortable sharing, so he's like, "you know what? Don't feel bad, you guys can't feel bad about who you are or where you're at right now because you didn't know. And now, let's get you in a place where you can learn and where you can make your own decision on whether you wanna be a follower of Christ." So, he invited them back, and they said, "We wanna be a part of this church, but we just don't know - we don't know how to follow Jesus." And he said, "I'll tell you what, here's the first step." And he handed them a stack of the pamphlets. He's like, "I want you to be our greeter." And so they had them be the greeters at the church. And the girl just straight up said, "But what if somebody recognizes me?" And he said, "Well, shame on them." He's like, "You're here for the right reasons, 'cuz you wanna get your life into a place that's Godly, and you're doing it genuinely, you're pursuing God and you know something's going on." And since then, they both have been saved, they both are members of the church.

Rob: And you know what? Where I grew up? Those people would never have even been let in the door. In a small town, Methodist church they would have been frowned upon, they would have been like, "You're a drug dealer, you don't need to be in our church." Y'know, and that's what it's all about - is showing people Jesus, not telling them about Jesus but showing them first, where they're like, "This is awesome, tell me about it." Y'know, and Jesus never approached anybody with word - it was always with action first. When He approached the woman at the well, it was to go and help her. He didn't go and yell from afar, "Hey, you're a prostitute, get away from that well." And then go talk to her over here.

Rob: Yeah, He went first and took action, didn't speak. And that's what people want. They're afraid of action. It's easier just to speak. It's easier to throw a stone than it is to walk up and say, "Okay, I don't know what to say..." It's nerve-wracking.

Rob: You can't say that in a church, because, it's like, God forbid you say, "I had an affair" on my wife, especially if you're on staff at the church. It's like you gotta cover that stuff up. God forbid that ever gets found out. And then if it is, if you are of pastoral staff and there's some bad decisions, and there was an affair, I think it's so wrong that these churches just throw them out on the curb.

Rob: Oh, yeah. Well, they definitely should be removed from the teaching position, but to throw them out in the cold... They need the church now more than ever and they need you to be the church, and to love them.

Rob: Yeah, and disciple them. Y'know, we had a guy, and I heard this story - this is a great story, "the church being the church." The worship pastor at this church ended up living this other lifestyle. He was going to all these raves at night. And he had gotten married, he was newly married, and he was going out and ended up getting another woman pregnant. And, there was no covering it up any more. And it was just like, "here it is." Now listen to this: the senior pastor was absolutely disgusted and walked in and said, "Alright, here's the situation. Do you want to be forgiven? Or do you want to be restored?" And the guy was like, "I wanna be restored." He's like, "Alright. Don't talk to me for six months." And then he walked out. Like, the pastor was furious, because there was no integrity in this guy, and he was doing all this stuff, leading worship and then he was doing all this stuff. So, they gave him a job. They got him a job at like Home Depot, or something like that and he had a board. Five members of the church that were his accountability board, and he had to meet with them once a week. And they literally walked him through the restoration process. Of - get this junk out of your life, this is where you need to be, here's where you are, this is where we got to get to. His wife that he was married to, they adopted the child, but they still allowed the legal mother to be a part of that child's life. He has legal custody basically. And now, he has grown up, he is actually now on a pastoral staff at another church ten years later. And it's like... if the church - now that was a lot of work, and he put a lot of people at an inconvenience. A child, his wife, this other lady, his pastoral staff, the congregation because it was hard for them to digest. But, they were all there for him. And, they went through a lot of work to help him be restored and back into the loving hands of Christ.

Rob: Exactly. And that stuff encourages me so much. Like, it's okay - share your story, because there are people that want to help you. And to hear stories like that, cuz unfortunately, you hear people get the boot. Like, "See ya later! Hope you do good … good luck finding Jesus!"

Rob: Oh, no! No, no, no, not at all. But, yeah, those are encouraging stories though.

Rob: Yeah! We appreciate you guys!