Curb | Word Entertainment band We Are Messengers continues to preview its upcoming third full-length studio album, Wholehearted, with the release of “Friend Of Sinners,”.
We Are Messengers’ frontman Darren Mulligan wrote his own story into “Friend Of Sinners,” alongside songwriting heavyweights Ethan Hulse and Jeff Pardo, the latter of whom also produced the track. “I always felt like an outsider at many of the churches I went to with my family as a kid. These places seemed eerie to me, so hopelessly cold and so deeply impersonal to my arrogant teenage mind that I was convinced that God, if He existed at all, would want nothing to do with someone like me. The God I heard about as a child was obsessed with me being good, and it didn’t seem remotely possible that He could ever be a friend of sinners, of which I was surely one,” shares Mulligan. “But something astonishing happened when I was 27 years old. My fiancée, Heidi, who I had been dating for eight years, had a radical, life-changing conversion to Christianity. She fell in love with Jesus, and shortly afterwards, I did too. You see, I realized something incredible about Jesus. He spent His whole time on earth with outsiders, with those on the margins, with the people society rejected, telling them that the Kingdom of God was close and that there was a place for them, somewhere they could belong. The Jesus I know and read about in the Bible was a friend of sinners, and because of that, I know He is a friend of mine.”
“Friend Of Sinners” is the third song to premiere ahead of Wholehearted’s release next month. In June, We Are Messengers dropped the album’s lead single, “Come What May,” followed by “God You Are (feat. Josh Baldwin).” Last week, the group surprised fans with a new collaborative iteration of the single: “Come What May + (feat. Cory Asbury),” as well as an acoustic version.
We Are Messengers is set to share new music from Wholehearted at arenas nationwide as part of the multi-artist lineup for TobyMac’s “Hits Deep Tour,” which kicks off Oct. 2 in Moline, Illinois. Later this fall, they’ll join Newsboys for the “Step Into The Light Tour.”
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