Friend to me went out into the world
We wrote Friend to me in a lounge room in the Adelaide Hills. For a while it was just ours — a prayer between three friends, one we thought was for our own devotional times and never imagined would be heard by anyone else.
Then, we recorded it live after a series of events that could only be God, in a room full of people longing for God to fill them like empty vessels.
On the 13th of February, we let it go.
That's the part we keep coming back to. We didn't release a strategy. We had no label, no industry backing, and not a single connection in most of the places it would end up. We just said yes to putting it out — and where it flows from here is His.
Something happened on release day we couldn't have arranged. Friend to me went live on the same day Ps Bill Johnson was preaching at a conference here in Adelaide — and without any coordination, he spent his session on John 15: intimacy with God, covenant friendship, love that isn't performance but relationship. The same day, the same passage, the same message that the song was built on. We didn't plan that. God did.
Within five days, on Spotify alone, Friend to me had been heard across fourteen nations — Australia, the United States, the Philippines, Canada, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Germany, Chile, Ghana, Guatemala, Ireland, Lithuania, New Zealand, Zambia. Along with its evangelistic companion site nogreaterlove.live organically reached into places including Iran, China, Thailand, and Korea, places where the gospel meets real resistance. The grace and truth of Jesus as our greatest Friend who laid down his life for us reached around twenty-four nations in under a week.
We can't go to all these places. But the song can. The grace and truth it carries, and God himself, go with it.
In that same first week, some of the Adelaide advertising boards we'd booked rejected the message — approving the artwork but excluding it from delivery, specifically citing religious content as the reason. We found it sobering: doors closing to the gospel on the very streets where we live, in the same days it was crossing oceans to people who'd never heard of us. But it settled something. Doors that close to the gospel don't close to God.
We poured out what we had. It's still overflowing.
Let us know how Friend to me has impacted you:
