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Other worship leaders like Paul Baloche and Tim Hughes have used their success to spearhead worship ministries of their own: Baloche's Lead Worship and Hughes' Worship Central. How have your used your platform to be a blessing to others?

Tomlin One of the things we're doing right now is OneMillionCan.com. The site asks what $1 million can do and how it can help support the poor. You'll see eight different causes on there that I'm part of—different places in the world where I've seen a need. It's a challenge for students and for people at our concerts to get involved. Everybody doing a little can change a lot—that's kind of the general idea. It's not asking a few people to give $1 million, but more looking at what [many people] can do to change a people's whole world. We already passed the $1 million mark and we're well on the way to the $2 million mark.

Four years on, congregations are still singing songs like "How Great Is Our God" and "Holy Is the Lord." While your newer songs are certainly still popular on radio, why do you think they haven't had the same impact on a congregational level?

Tomlin I think because there are so many songs coming out. From See the Morning, I think the song "Uncreated One" is one of the best songs I've ever written for the church. But because there's so much infiltrated into the church, it's difficult for a new song to stand out these days.

Do you feel the competition to score "the next worship hit" has stifled creativity a bit in modern worship?

Tomlin I don't know. I can't judge what other people are doing. For me, this is what we've done since I was 18 years old; I've never done anything else. With people coming along and mimicking our style, that's actually quite flattering to me, but I just want to continue to write songs the way God has gifted me to write them. I definitely see a lot of the critiques, the likes, the dislikes—"This is the same type of stuff." That's fine. If you want to hear something different, maybe somebody else should [try something different]. This is me. This is the way I write songs. U2 sounds like U2 when they make a record.

It's kind of funny to me that some people would expect my music to be completely different every time I make a record—that's impossible when you're just one person. So I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. Worship is not a business—writing a worship song is not a business. The songs that come out of your heart as a response to God as you're singing at the piano or reading Scripture—those are the songs [that have the most impact]. That's why I'm most proud of a song on the new record like "Praise the Father, Praise the Son." It came about naturally. When you're just singing out to God and worshipping him, those are the songs that last.

You're saying that good worship songs occur naturally.

Tomlin Sure. I'd love to say it's just a matter of sitting down and saying, "You know, I think I'm going to write a song today that the whole world will sing." Those are the songs you've never heard because they're not any good. It doesn't work like that. It's the times of just really sitting with God and singing to him and worshipping him and trying to craft it in a way that you're not thinking about yourself—you're thinking about people singing to God. That's where the good songs come from.

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