A brief history – 2003

Written by Matthew Jacoby – founder Sons of Korah.

Rod Gear and I toured as a duo around Australia and New Zealand right up to 2003. All our tours were organized either by, or in conjunction with the Bible Society. In a way they acted as our management in each state. During that time we also recorded another album, Shelter, our mellowest and perhaps moodiest album. I had been through some tough times at home as my wife Kate and I had been unable to have children. Rod was also struggling with his health on tour and he had some tormenting times to push through. 2003 brought many changes. Kate and I finally had our first child, Sophia. We started touring as a trio, this time with a young multi-instrumental ace, Jayden Lee. Jayden really helped us explore a lot of new and interesting instrumental flavours which we stuck with and developed even after he left the band. In this year we also made our first tour to America.

The year before we had met Stuart Briscoe at a conference we were playing at on the Gold Coast. Stuart is a prolific international speaker and author who is also the pastor-at-large of a mega-church in the midwest of America. On the morning before the conference Rod and I had a big discussion about feeling we should move out beyond our shores. We agreed that we would wait on God for this because we didn’t want to leap out ambitiously ahead of ourselves and God. Well, it didn’t take God long. The following night Stuart Briscoe invited us for a drink in the lobby of our hotel and asked us whether we would be interested in coming over to his church in America. And go we did. We headed over for a month to be musicians in residence at Elmbrook Church on the outskirts of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and in that month we played to more people than all of our previous gigs put together.

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