Sleeping Giant | In Hopecore’s Hometown
lways ready and willing to share his heart, Sleeping Giant’s Tommy Green sat down with us outside The Venue in Boise, Idaho on just their fifth stop on the current tour with Bleeding Through and Born of Osiris. Speaking with Green is always an experience. His rapid speech coupled with his evident fire for his ministry are just some of the traits that draw people to the front man. I always feel like taking notes while this guy talks to me. His genuine grin and obvious heart for this scene is something so rarely displayed these days. I cannot give this guy enough praise and introduction. Tommy Green is someone who we will look back on and remember as an artist who God truly worked through to accomplish His goals of changing hearts for Him. You can see Green’s eyes light up when you hit a topic of his interest and once you do, look out and pay attention.
What is the feeling like spiritually going out on these tours compared to maybe an all Facedown tour? How have you been received?
Tommy Green: It’s like night and day. It’s not as fun as playing to a whole audience of people that believe what you believe and are there for you, it’s such a weird synergy. California is such an odd duck too because you have this Christian scene but that’s not necessarily reality. We’ve had pretty good reception which is cool because it’s a totally different group of people so we feel kind of feel brand new again.
How does a tour like this differ spiritually? How do you prepare for it?
TG: We kick our own butts a lot and not in the traditional way. We pray and all that but we really want to connect. There’s the general Christian answers of we get into the Word and pray together, and we do that but why? We are really trying to be wise about the spiritual climate in a different place, what people are okay with hearing and what they aren’t. We have love, I swear we do, we definitely have love for the Lord but if we don’t love the crowd then don’t talk, but I’m a talker so it’s weird. You don’t want to be a clanging cymbal. I don’t want to be another voice that goes down in history as another jerk Christian. I get that enough when I’m not being that and I know I’m not being that. Its hard enough doing that at a Christian show, that’s the reception. The different crowds have been pretty cool. The more metal head kids who have been annoyed and think that religion is stupid, when they realize we kind of agree with them in thinking that the organized formulaic ridiculous rule based theology that most people walk under is counterproductive and idiotic.
When we get to share that we really believe in a relationship with God and just sharing our lives, that’s when you get a handful of people that say “Ok yeah”. I will say this, the shows have sucked. In the meantime, God has been doing crazy stuff, crazy miracle things. The show was just alright. Maybe we talked too much or didn’t say enough but in the mean time God is really hanging out with us. We really try to kick our own butts a lot because we don’t want to waste our time. Really, we believe in the ministry more than the band even, and we want to play good music so when I think about how receptive the crowd has been each night, that’s been the biggest question every night.
Whether or not people like our music we are going to try and have fun and connect with the Lord in worship and maybe that’ll help show people the beauty of who Jesus is. Is the veil getting lifted from the people who can’t see or hear Jesus? I think maybe, but I don’t know. The other bands are awesome dudes, some of them have just violently opposed views but we’re their favorite people, its like cool favor to be a part of people’s lives, not in judgment or to condemn them but to just be there for them and love them. The shows have been fun. God says judgment begins in the house of the Lord so a lot of it is God saying okay guys you’re not allowed to be prideful or arrogant so you better tread lightly when dealing with my people because God’s people are in those rooms. Most people wouldn’t consider themselves His kids but they are.
Personally, I’ve only seen you guys headline shows or play at festivals. So when you have such a shorter set time, do you still preach? How does this work?
TG: I think the Christian carnival would love me to keep saying the same thing over and over again but I believe that God, if He wanted to, could use someone like me to lead a million people into the kingdom and I would love that because I love Jesus a lot. I really haven’t been sure about sharing it, I feel like I don’t want to burn anyone. I don’t mean that about unbelievers, I mean this about Christians; I don’t want to throw my pearls to swine. It seems like some Christians who show up to hardcore shows are looking for a reason to be Christian out loud and it really pushes a lot of people further back. I went to talk about my story and I put it up to the dudes like “I don’t know if we’re going to play it anymore, I don’t want it to just be part of our set. It’s my life, its something that Jesus did and I want it to be real”. I pulled it out for a few dates and some of the dudes on tour were like “Really? You’re not going to play that anymore? It’s really powerful”. So it’s been a struggle. I want people to know Jesus and I want people to feel convicted, that’s the most important thing to me. We’re trying to essentially accomplish breakthrough in 30 minutes and there’s just not enough time so we kind of have to get out of heads a little bit and just play. I’ve literally been going to battle every night saying “Lord if you want me to just shut up and play, I will”. I don’t think that’s what He’s saying but I’d rather be prepared than not. I think there are a lot of passionate bands out there who preach the word of God like For Today, they are anointed dudes and I back them to the hilt. We’re creating a culture that could potentially be the standard or fall off. Being a preach core band then playing a worship song at the end of your set, that could be the new standard for what it is to be a successful Christian band. Or it could be another formula for religion so I’ve been asking God for what’s real, what’s authentic about this. So that’s where we’ve been.
So on previous tours where you haven’t given your story and it’s just the songs, do you still feel like kids come up to you after the show and are seeking something?
TG: Yeah! People say I’m an evangelist because I’m a talker but I don’t like that term because I don’t like most forms of it because if think they’re mostly fear based. If perfect love drives out all fear but we’re all trying to fear people into relationships. What kind of weird daddy issues do we have? I think the church’s battle, our battle, is to believe that He can do the work. So on nights when I don’t say something and we give room to the Holy Spirit to work and no one comes up to us, are we failing? No. Did we say too much? Maybe we’ve been saying the wrong things, maybe its time to shut up and just trust in His presence so that’s the battle we’ve been living in. In Psalms it says that our secret lives are exposed in the light of His presence and that He’ll fill us with joy in His presence. So if His presence is in the room, what can we accomplish that He can’t? He uses the foolishness of our ways to accomplish eternal ends. It’s crazy to me that He says to you “Okay, go make sounds come out of your mouth and someone is going to understand it and that will determine that person’s eternity.” That’s been the hardest battle, just trusting that He can get the job done. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it’s not about Tommy and Sleeping Giant standing there on stage. He’s going to work through whatever you guys do.
TG: I love that there is grace to sometimes stand on stage and go if you don’t know Jesus then I’ll say this prayer out loud and I want you guys to pray with me. We’ve done that on some Christian tours and there are hundreds and hundreds of kids who get saved, they make a decision but do they start a relationship with Him? That’s the real deal. Maybe. I want to see ten years from now people that are on fire. The church will settle for decisions. My heart is that people would love God and have deep conviction. We’ve only had five shows on this tour so far but at three of them people have been physically healed and people gotten saved. That’s cool, we just made it available. I was talking to my pastor about a great leader of faith that passed away some years ago and she just had a powerful healing ministry, just a passionate woman of the Lord. The majority of the stuff that took place happened on the outside of her ministry. It was like she was just so on fire where she was, people would come but really it wasn’t even her but all the people that would come and all this extra work would get done. We could get 8,000 kids at our shows but am I going to pray for 8,000 people? No, I want to go make out with my wife (laughs). But the reality is that I will do what God calls me to do but if the church gets together we are going to hear stories for years about things that happened at Tomfest and this show and that show.
It wasn’t because we did anything; it was because God was working through his people. We don’t need rock star Christians, we don’t need people looking to me or Mattie Montgomery or Andy from Plea, and we don’t need people putting one dude in that position. The amount of judgment and the amount of character that we need in order to stand is so intense. We could be setting ourselves up for falls without realizing it. I’m not trying to stand under judgment because people gave you this but now God has to judge me because of all these expectations put on you. We don’t need a point man to do all the work. I wish that we would just have power with all the saints. We all have
different talents and abilities and some of us have fought for different breakthrough. I can say this honestly that I have different gifts and anointing than other people. Eric, our guitarist, is my best friend and the level of revelation and power that I’ve seen God visit him with in the past couple years blew me out of the water. I feel like I went from trying to pull people with me to now chasing my dudes, its like “Wow, look how far you guys have gone!” I feel like I’m at the back of the line now learning from them. We need to honor the talents and gifts that He has given people but not lose sight of who we are and who Jesus is in the midst of it. If people think of bands like Sleeping Giant or For Today maybe we’re radical, maybe we’re fanatics, maybe we’re idiots but if Christians say that we are the healing people, no no no. God has used us to heal people and that’s awesome and we back it and we’re going to continue to break through until we see cancer run away when we walk into a room, we are not giving up. But everyone partakes in the same spirit, the spirit of Jesus moving in his people. Tommy doesn’t heal people, its God moving in us. We all have access to that; we all have access to the throne of grace. It’s weird with happening in music, in our stupid little broken metal scene, the rock star thing, its ridiculous. Christian kids can’t buy into that.
The two of you started a church in SLC. Talk to us a bit about how this idea came about and what it is doing now?
TG: We started it a couple years ago. When we started the band I was a pastor in Southern California and I was just doing church stuff and helping out. I moved to Salt Lake and I knew I had an individual call and partially a call with this band that anywhere that I went with my wife we were going to sew into people’s lives. We wanted people to give everything they could.
Awhile back we had you write a section for us on healing. How did this become such an integral part of the Sleeping Giant ministry?
TG: It started with Eric and his church in Redlands. I was a freak weirdo to Eric, JR and the kids in Redlands. I was out there because I wanted to see the supernatural. I don’t care about the charismatic stuff, I don’t care if people fall over, shake and bark like a dog. That is not going to get in the way of my love for Jesus. All of us had been used in praying for people for healing. Different dudes were going through different stages of battling through it. We started as a Christian band that just talked about it. When we moved to Salt Lake, radical stuff started breaking out for JR and Eric. They started walking in this level of understanding and determination and breakthrough that everything just opened up. That was when we started declaring enough is enough, I’d rather stand on what the principals of what Jesus has shown me in the Bible than any of my old theology. That’s where we’re going to fight and die until God changes our minds. This is what we’re being shown, he’s the image of the father on earth and we’re going after His standard. That’s when we started throwing it out there at shows and saying that we’re not going to believe that God got you sick to teach you a lesson, you don’t see that in the gospels, that is not going to be allowed at our shows. If you’re sick then we’re going to pray for you because something is wrong. The one thing that kind of sealed it for me was in Salt Lake, where my wife and I started a Bible study; a deaf girl got healed the first week in front of everybody. That settled for me a certain measure of thinking that this is how the gospel got started in lots of different places. I then had my own testimony. People need to experience God in our generation because they are starved to death for the supernatural and if that was the dimension of God that was missing before then that’s what we want to bring. We want to teach Biblically balanced truths, balanced on what Jesus said and not on what Mr. Sunday school teacher said.
What would you say to the Christian who is still skeptical of healings?
TG: God is so out to prove Himself faithful. If we are unfaithful, He will remain faithful because he can’t deny himself. The big battle is over the knowledge of who He is. The minute Christians who have the same spirit come into the remotest agreement with Him, He’ll began to break those things through. Next time someone gets a headache, instead of taking a pill, pray first. Begin to give God the first chance. Sometimes there are instant miraculous healings and other things take time. In your own personal life, give God the first opportunity, stop going to the doctor first or thinking you have to take a pill first, go to church first and ask the elders to anoint you and pray over you. In James it says “If someone is among you sick, have the elders anoint him with oil and pray for him and a prayer offered in faith will heal him.” The church just has to start believing in the Bible and we have to do that individually because we are the church. Just declare it “I am healed”. The more you do that the more God is your first option, not the fear, not the unbelief. Just begin to believe that He heals, it is what He does.
