Райан Эллис покидает систему христианской музыки ради поиска глубоких ответов о вере и науке

Ryan Ellis didn’t set out to become a Christian artist. Long before “Heart of the Father” put him on Christian radio or Chris Tomlin recorded one of his songs, Ellis was leading worship in California house churches. He had recently gotten out of the military, didn’t grow up in church and found himself swept into a worship movement that felt spontaneous and alive. Songs weren’t written during scheduled Nashville sessions. They came from spending hours in rooms with other people, singing until something emerged. “I loved worship nights and I loved gathering people and I loved encountering the Holy Spirit,” Ellis says. “I didn’t grow up in church, so this was all very new to me.” Eventually, the rooms got bigger. Ellis crossed paths with the people who would help shape Housefires and Maverick City Music. Tomlin picked up his song “Resurrection Power.” A record deal followed, and Ellis found himself inside the Christian music industry he hadn’t known existed. Then came everything that went along with it. “I got signed with Sony, or the Christian group underneath it, and then I was deep,” he says. “I was super deep into the Christian realm, into the Christian scene.” For Ellis, being part of that world increasingly seemed to come with an unspoken job description. There was the music, obviously, but there was also an expectation of what a Christian artist was supposed to sound like, look like and believe in public. Ellis, tattooed and blunt and considerably less polished than the archetype, never felt especially suited for it. Now he’s out. Ellis recently left his label and is operating independently. His new album, No Halo, arrives at the exact moment he’s trying to untangle what was real about the past decade from what he felt pressured to perform. “I left the whole CCM industry, and I said, ‘I don’t vibe with your expectations,’” he says. “I’m a normal human being that goes through life, that goes through ups and downs. And I think the expectation for these Christian artists is overwhelming. I think it’s unrealistic.” That tension became the premise of No Halo. The title isn’t Ellis announcing that he’s abandoned his faith. If anything, he talks about God constantly. It’s his rejection of the idea that loving God requires presenting himself as someone who has everything else figured out. “The whole thing from top to bottom [is], I’m a regular human being,” he says. “I love Jesus. I love God. I love my family. But I go through life and I don’t know what’s going on. And I don’t have all the answers, and I might not always be perfect.” The distinction matters because Ellis’ frustration isn’t limited to his own career. After more than a decade around modern worship and Christian music, he thinks the larger ecosystem has become too comfortable with repeating itself. “I think there’s a lot of people that are trying to do in Christian music what’s already been done by people who are not even in this space,” he says. Ellis points to a genre increasingly shaped by social media, where artists are sorted into recognizable lanes and rewarded for giving audiences something familiar. His criticism isn’t that the music is bad. It’s that he’s not convinced familiarity is enough. “I think we’re saying the same thing over and over and over and over,” he says. “And it’s nice.” But nice isn’t what Ellis is looking for anymore. He wants bigger questions. He wants conversations about science and spirituality. He wants Christians to be less afraid of admitting what they don’t know. At points, his curiosity takes him into decidedly unconventional territory — aliens, quantum physics, dimensions and frequencies all make appearances in a conversation that can move from modern worship to extraterrestrial life in about 30 seconds. Ellis knows how some of that sounds. He also doesn’t seem particularly worried about it. “I’m looking for deeper,” he says. “That’s the thing in me that pushes me forward and makes me create and makes me want to create better.” For years, he says, he felt the pressure that comes when an artist begins asking questions outside the boundaries of what his particular corner of Christianity considers acceptable. Ellis still believes the Bible contains truth. He still talks about the Holy Spirit as an active presence in his life. But he’s increasingly suspicious of any Christian culture that treats curiosity as a threat. “I think we don’t have the full story,” he says. “I think that it’s out there, but we’ve settled for a comfortable one.” There’s some grief underneath his criticism. Ellis isn’t talking about an industry he never cared about. He loved it. He remembers the worship nights and relationships that brought him into this world in the first place, and he still gets emotional talking about the people he met behind the scenes who were struggling with the same tensions. “There was a season when I thought I was doing something, like we were actually making a difference,” he says. Some of the moments he values most weren’t onstage. They were conversations with producers, label executives, pastors and other artists who privately admitted they felt stuck. “Those are the moments that I thought, to me, were better than having a filled-out stadium and arena,” Ellis says. Leaving that system hasn’t exactly produced instant clarity. Ellis jokes that he still has unfinished Lyft and Uber applications sitting around in case he needs the side hustle. He’s building One Ten Productions, a company designed to help other artists develop their ideas and careers, while using the same team to build the entire No Halo rollout. Mostly, he’s learning how to make music without waiting for someone else to tell him what version of Ryan Ellis is marketable. “I’m not trying to go viral. I’m not trying to be no famous,” he says. “I just wanna make sure that I feel good in my own skin. That’s what this project’s about.” For all the questions Ellis is carrying, faith itself hasn’t disappeared. Lately, he’s been finding a metaphor for it in his garden. He planted tomatoes. He prepared the soil, watered them every day and waited. Somewhere in that routine, a thought stuck with him: If you want to learn faith, grow a garden. Eventually, the plants started thriving. “I just watered, I just watered, I just watered,” he says. “I did everything that I could myself, right? And then you just gotta let nature do its thing. And I think that’s the same as faith.” Ellis doesn’t know exactly where any of this leads. He doesn’t know what his career looks like outside the CCM system, and he’s increasingly comfortable admitting he doesn’t have every answer about God either. What he does know is that he still believes. “I don’t know what the heck is going on,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I know that I gotta have faith.” For years, Christian music gave Ellis a world where artists were expected to project something more certain than that. No Halo is his decision to stop trying.