Sonicflood (CD)

“Everybody raise your hands in the air!” Sonicflood lead singer Jeff Deyo shouts to the small auditorium of summer camp worshipers. As the kids uplift sunburned arms, he explains the freedom Sonicflood finds in praising God through raising their hands or dancing in addition to using their voices and instruments. Because, he says, just as God created our mouths so we sing his praise, He created our bodies and thus should receive worship through them. The band is leading worship for a small Methodist youth camp outside Orlando. Though the kids came to the camp unfamiliar with Sonicflood’s idea of worship, by Thursday night, new life enters the daily services, and they rush the stage to join in the praise. Despite the Florida heat and monstrous spiders which fall from the high ceilings onto bare heads, the band and students energetically continue to sing, dance and teach.

“I see us being led places where people don’t even know how to worship,” bassist Rick Heil says after the service. “That’s such an integral part of a person’s life if they are Christians.”

“Right now at church, you hear about God,” Jeff adds. “How you should be a good parent, a good son, brother or sister, but you’re supposed to go home and work on that. Most people honestly don’t have any idea how to do that. We want to teach them, and then we want to actually implement that skill. Tonight we were teaching about lifting hands, and then they did that. Something changed.”

After the show, the guys are ambushed by admiring kids. Embarrassed by the attention, the guys hesitantly agree to post-concert autographs and pictures. They prefer to join the kids for conversations over meals of dry hamburgers and canned vegetables than superficial meetings after a show. None of the guys want the focus to shift from God onto them. With a collective resume that includes playing for dc Talk, Big Tent Revival, Out of Eden, Zilch and the Acquire the Fire worship team, the members of Sonicflood—Jeff, Rick, drummer Aaron Blanton, keyboardist Jason Halbert and lead guitarist Dwayne Larring—came together because of a common passion for worship. “We’ve all been part of other bands where we’ve been trying to draw people to us so we could tell them about Jesus,” Jeff says. “We’d spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort, shopping for clothes and all that to build an image so people will be drawn to us, and then we could turn around and share the Gospel.” But it’s different now.

The first time any of them played together was when Jeff and Aaron joined Jason in Zilch. Having performed a contemporary take on “Blessed Assurance” in another band, Jeff and Aaron convinced Zilch to add an updated “Lord We Lift your Name on High” to their set. “We started finding that was more and more a part of the show we wanted to get to,” Jason says. “During that time, the worship was unbelievable.”

One night after a Zilch showcase in Nashville, Gotee Records’ president Joey Elwood approached the guys. “He had nothing to say about the rest of the concert,” Jason remembers. “All he could talk about was that one song, like, I’ve never experienced anything like that before in my life. Man, you guys should consider capturing that on an album. That’s just powerful.”

First agreeing to do an EP, they quickly felt convicted to do an entire album. Right before the album was finished, Dwayne joined the group and Otto Price, their bassist, decided to leave. “Zilch was never designed to be a touring band,” Jason explains. “Otto did a lot of praying and sought counsel with his pastors, and he felt this would wear more on his family.”

The four remaining members met at Jason’s house to pray for a bass player who had been involved in Christian music but now just wanted to worship. The next day, Rick, then the bassist for Big Tent Revival, called their manager. “We thought, Cool, let’s audition him,” Jason says.

“He didn’t even know there was a position open,” Jeff laughs. Rick first became familiar with Sonicflood when a friend gave him a copy of their CD, which he listened to on the way from Nashville to Missouri. Seven hours into the trip, he had a horrible wreck. As he crawled out of the twisted mass, the first thing he saw on the grass, covered by shards of glass, was the Sonicflood CD. “I made mental note of that,” Rick says. “I didn’t know what it meant, but I felt I needed to get in touch with these guys and tell them how much the CD had ministered to me. I carried around a phone number with me for about a month. One day I was in Memphis, and I felt like I really needed to get in touch with them that day. So I called the manager.” After meeting with the other four for a time of Bible study and worship, Rick asked to join the band. Claiming John 12:32 as their theme verse, the newly-formed band decided to try a new method of reaching their audiences. “I used to think, I can’t do worship music if there are non-Christians around; that will repel them. We thought [we were supposed to] make music as close to the world as possible, but we found that people have heard it all, seen it all, done it all. We can’t wow them to love Jesus,” Jeff explains. “We’ve been realizing that if we just lift Jesus up, He will do the drawing, and He won’t be drawing them to us. He’ll be drawing them to Himself. No longer depending on man’s wow, there’s a supernatural wow that enters their souls.”

As their new mind-set evolved, they became increasingly less satisfied by the traditional concert mentality. “We were changing, but we were still doing the same concerts,” Jason explains. “One day we were driving to an event and I had this idea, Wouldn’t it be great to set up where we would be able to do whatever God placed on our hearts? A lot of other bands out there get booked for events where they are sandwiched between the speaker and the puppet show, followed by drama skits and pony rides. With all the new information we’ve been given on how to worship, we aren’t able to share that in a 30-minute interval.”

Sonicflood decided to try a new approach. The band goes to a city, meets with the leadership of local churches and teaches them how to worship. “The whole idea of Sonicpraise is to set them up so that once we’re gone they can keep interceding and worshiping for themselves in their city,” Jason says. Focusing on a theme of reconciliation, the band has seen large divisions and barriers torn down through these services.

“It’s surprised me how all these little boxes that everything in life gets put in get smashed,” Dwayne says. “Age doesn’t matter as much. Denominations and races don’t matter as much. My dad and all his pastor friends who are in their 50s and 60s are just blown away, and it’s not the music. If they looked at us, they would probably turn around and run,” he adds, glancing at the band’s assortment of earrings and platinum hair. “But when God has His hand on something and has anointed something where people get together for the purpose of worshiping Him, it’s not like, The guitars are really loud. It’s just like, Man, people are getting gifts to worship Him.” Thus, the band is not surprised when everyone, from junior high campers to middle-age pastors, enthusiastically join in the worship.

“A lot of different moves of worship are based around a denomination,” Jason says. “What we’re finding is that we’re being brick-builders between United Pentecostals and Churches of Christ, the charismatic non-denominationals and the fundamental Baptists.”

“Satan’s biggest tool is to divide and conquer,” Rick explains. “In the Garden of Eden, he divided Eve from Adam. What he does with the Church is divide and then put [people] against each other.”

They find that God is using them to meld different cultures together despite their own lack of diversity (“We’re just a bunch of white guys,” Jeff says). Excitedly, Jason tells of a black pastor’s wife he met in Cleveland. “She shared that she felt this event was a culmination. She had been praying for something to bring the churches together. She was saying, This is going to do it. Worshiping together is going to do it. Not loving people, but getting together to worship.” “It just made my heart jump,” Jeff adds with a slight smile.

“When you’re busy looking at God, you don’t notice the little differences between each other anymore,” Dwayne says. “The whole dynamic changes.”

“We certainly are brand new at this,” Jeff says. “We’re learning with the people, but that’s what Sonicpraise is [supposed to be]. It’s a chance to spend time with people—not just an hour or a couple of hours—and say, Hey, what does the Word say about this? Then let’s do it. Let’s do it together.”

And the learning curve also includes the basics of worship: Rick tells of a certain family he saw at last summer’s Creation East festival. Sonicflood was playing the Praise Tent, and by the time they finished sound check the canvassed area was overflowing with hot, sticky worshipers. In the crowd were a father and son. As the dad began to praise, the son looked at the raised hands around him in confusion. Suddenly the man reached down, took the child’s arms, and held them up. “It was as if he was saying, This is how you worship God,” Rick recalls. “Stand that way, son.”

“I never had anybody to teach me how to do that,” Jeff says. “It’s amazing that we get a chance to teach these kids and adults how to worship God.”

Suddenly realizing that their next service is in a few minutes, the band shifts gears and begins to discuss their next set list. With an air of anticipation, they prepare for God to change lives and refine visions once again.

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Used with permission, Release Magazine