By Ben Alder,
Helsinki Vineyard
All Our Efforts is a collection of songs that I recorded and produced at home over the last 18 months or so. Because I mixed and mastered this at home almost entirely by myself during lockdown, the quality is lower than I would have liked. But I’m still very proud of this project. Although I’ve been writing songs for a couple of decades, I had never recorded and released anything before. One evening, after a song writing lesson I gave to a friend, the Holy Spirit began to challenge me. He kept asking me why I had never published anything, and I felt a real sense of conviction that He wasn’t at all happy about that. The feeling was so strong that I can say I’ve only felt convicted like a few times in all my years of following Jesus. I couldn’t understand why it was so important to Him though, because I don’t usually write worship songs. I write music to help me process things. If I’m sad, angry, frustrated, hopeless, feeling critical of political leaders or the way something is in society, it usually comes out as an alt. rock song. I couldn’t understand why it was important to the Lord that I try and put these songs out, but I knew that He wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t. These songs cover a variety of topics. Some of them are about the breakdown of my first marriage, trying to process the reality of that while still looking to Jesus to transform the situation. Others are political protest and my attempt to draw urgent attention to issues. All of them have at the core of them the idea that the underlying problem is human heart. Whether it’s broken relationships, Brexit, climate change or rising authoritarianism, our hearts are twisting the world around us in ways that don’t always reflect the Kingdom of God, that ‘all our efforts don’t really matter; if we don’t allow God to come in and rescue us. In fact, the old Gospel tension of the Kingdom now and the Kingdom not et was very much on my mind as I made this album. The songs are obviously meant to be listened to individually and have their own self-contained stories. But I created some fictional characters when I wrote three of the songs, and their story has a sci-fi context. That context helped me process my own perspective of Brexit back home, and the conflict that put me in with my own family. As the album evolved, I realized that every song had it’s own place, they could also each be sung from the perspective of one of these characters. And so, this is my British sci-fi rock opera album that the Holy Spirit insisted I should publish. Some have said this isn’t a very hopeful album. I would say that misses the point. I didn’t intend to offer a clean solution to messy problems. I set out to recognize honestly the reality and the conflict, but also to hold that in tension with the hopeful, painful longing that one day, by the grace of God, this will all be transformed.
