BackstageThe respectable churches sit on respectable streets. I have preached in some of them, and I am grateful for them. But I could not shake a thing I kept noticing: the people the gospel came for most were almost never the people in the building.
So I made a record about leaving it. The Outlaw Apostle is my honest confession that the call of God does not always point you toward the polished sanctuary. Sometimes it points you the other way, toward the honky-tonk, the cellblock, the trailer park, the roughest terrain in town, the places nobody is staking their name.
Why I had to make it
I got tired of a gospel that had grown comfortable. The opener says it plain: "They got respectable churches on respectable streets, but the prophets aren't there, where the broken folks meet." That is not a jab at the faithful. It is a map. I was reading my Bible, and I noticed the pattern is almost embarrassing in how consistent it is.
Yeshua stood up in His hometown synagogue, opened the scroll of Isaiah, and read His own job description: the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, He said, to preach the gospel to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives. That is Luke chapter four. Then He spent the rest of the Gospels doing exactly that, eating with tax collectors, touching lepers, letting the wrong kind of woman wash His feet. When the religious crowd complained, He told them straight: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. That is Matthew chapter nine.
If that is where the Master went, I could not in good conscience make a record about staying safe. The apostle Paul said it was his whole ambition to preach where Christ had not yet been named, to build on no other man's foundation, out past the edge of the comfortable map. That is not a personality quirk. That is the shape of the sending itself.
What the title means
"Outlaw" is a hard word, and I chose it on purpose, but I want to be careful with it. I do not mean lawless. I mean the ones the respectable world writes off.
An outlaw, in the old West, was a man outside the protection of the establishment, and that is exactly the ground the apostle is sent to. The whole second track leans into it: my past is my proof, my wreck is my warrant. I am not credentialed by a diploma from a place that would never have let me in the door. As the opening song puts it, "my credential's conviction, my commission is this, go find the forgotten, and tell 'em they're home."
An apostle is not somebody the establishment approves. An apostle is somebody the Master sends. Those are not the same credential, and they never have been.
That is why the record keeps naming the prophets, Jeremiah crying in the street, John the Baptist out in the wild, men fired by a vision too big for the temples to hold. Every one of them was pushed to the edge, and every one of them found God waiting there.
The heart under the songs
The center of this album is a sending, and it moves through three deliberate stages.
First comes the going. Go to the Margins and Go Feed the Poor are boots-on-the-ground marching orders, and I built them on Matthew chapter twenty-five, where Yeshua says the King will one day tell the righteous: I was hungry and ye gave me meat, I was a stranger and ye took me in, inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me. That verse rearranges everything. It means the poor man at the margin is not a project. He is where Christ is hiding, waiting to be met.
Then comes the wilderness. Wilderness Calling and Return to the Ground are the songs about being emptied before you are useful. Every apostle starts in the wilderness, even Yeshua Himself, driven out to a solitary place to pray, as Mark chapter one tells it. I wanted the record to admit that the road to the margins runs through your own desert first. You cannot carry a gospel of liberty to captives while you are still performing for the respectable crowd. The wilderness burns that need right out of you.
And then comes the fire and the answer. Apostolic Fire draws on Pentecost, Acts chapter two, the tongues of flame, because the sending is not powered by grit alone. And the record ends where Isaiah's whole ministry began. In Isaiah chapter six the prophet hears Yahuah ask, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" and answers with the only words that matter: "Here am I; send me." That is the closing track, Send Me. The entire album is a long, dusty walk toward being able to say those three words and mean them.
Who I made this for
I made The Outlaw Apostle for two kinds of people, and they are usually sitting far apart.
The first is the one at the margin, the man in the cellblock, the woman in the trailer park, the addict, the outlaw, the one who has already been told a hundred times that the kingdom door is closed to the likes of him. Hear me: the God they say denied you will be found in the kneeling. Yeshua did not come for the people who had it together. He came for you, on purpose, by name, and the whole record is one long way of telling you that you are not too far gone to be sent for.
The second is the one who has grown comfortable in the building and can feel, somewhere underneath the comfort, that God is nudging him toward the door. Maybe you have felt a pull toward the rough part of town, the jail ministry, the neighbor everyone else avoids, and you have talked yourself out of it because it is not safe and it is not respectable. It was never supposed to be. The record of Scripture is that Yahuah loves to save the people the establishment gave up on, and He loves to do it through people willing to leave the safe street.
So here is the commission, the same one I wrote into the first song and the same one Isaiah answered on the day the coal touched his lips. There is a margin near you where nobody is staking their name. There are forgotten people there who have never once been told they are wanted.
Go find them. Tell them they are home.
And when you get there, do not be surprised to discover that Yeshua was already standing among them, waiting on you to show up.
