On a tour bus near the end of a summer arena run, worship singer-songwriter Cory Asbury explained that watching his 16-year-old son embrace Jesus has reminded him what faith felt like before disappointment taught him caution.
“I’m watching him fall in love with Jesus,” Asbury said in an Aug. 10 episode of the “Becoming Something with Jonathan Pokluda” podcast. He added that the teenager’s friends are getting saved, getting baptized and attending youth group together in Nashville.
“I think in our older years, we kind of get more cautious. We get a little more reserved,” Asbury said. Seeing the teenagers’ passion has taken him back to the season when his own faith felt like all gas and no brakes.
That rediscovered zeal now beats at the heart of Asbury’s song “Outsing the Angels.” The track leads a 15-song album of the same name, set for release Sept. 18 through BEC Recordings.
Asbury knows what can happen when worship reaches a vast audience. His official biography says he began singing in church at 14 before becoming a full-time performer at 21, and his breakout song “Reckless Love” spent 18 weeks at No. 1.
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The Recording Academy later nominated “Reckless Love” for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song at the 2019 Grammy Awards. Yet Asbury said the size of the platform cannot become the point.
“The idea was always audience of one. That’s what matters,” he said. Asbury recalled leading worship for rooms with five people, two people, one person and even nobody at all, drawing inspiration from David singing to God while tending sheep without applause or fanfare.
That conviction followed Asbury onto Forrest Frank’s 29-city Jesus Generation Tour, where organizers said he would lead worship alongside Frank, Tori Kelly and The Figs. During the interview, Asbury pushed back on describing those arena nights as performances.
“We are not performing to a room of 20,000. We are worshiping and pouring out our hearts before God in song, and people are following along,” he said. For Asbury, the direction of that worship matters more than the room’s capacity: It goes to God, not toward the crowd.
Asbury also admitted that frustration with the worship business once made him want to run away, but he described the past year as a renewal of the soul. His son’s young faith has supplied a wonderfully simple reminder on the way back: Years of hurt may explain caution, but they do not have to get the final word.
Asbury did not dismiss pain in the church as imaginary or tell wounded believers simply to get over it. He said pastors and other Christians will inevitably let people down, so believers must recognize the offense, grieve what happened and invite the Lord into the hard work of healing.
That makes the new song more than a burst of volume. It is Asbury’s answer to the instinct to stand back: Bring the hurt to God, keep the focus on Him and sing again without pretending the broken years never happened.
Asbury’s challenge is not to fake youthful emotion or ignore hard-earned wisdom. It is to lay aside cynicism, worship God wholeheartedly and let the next generation’s joy remind older believers why they began singing in the first place.
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