Bart Millard

“As long as our heart's beating, there's a chance for us, or whoever that person is in our life, and I don't know how the story turns out, but I do know that no one is out of the reach of God, and that anybody's capable of change.”

“When I was a kid, my dad would let me stay up and watch 'Cheers' each week. Granted it's not the most 'kid friendly' show, but I could've cared less. I was getting to stay up past my bedtime!”

“I'm all into Jazz; I'm into New Orleans type music. There is country, there is southern gospel. I'm a huge southern gospel fan.”

“At some point, I talked about how I had never graduated college. I dropped out my sophomore year to start MercyMe 21 years ago. Part of the reason was I felt like I was treading water.”

“12 years ago all I wanted to do was sing the right songs and get emotionally wound up, but now I realize my job is to make Christ the center of attention each night.”

“God was always a refuge for me growing up.”

“Then, when my dad was diagnosed with cancer, I started to notice this crazy transformation, where he fell desperately in love with Jesus.”

“Writing Christian or worship music is just because I love Jesus, so everything I do is going to be an overflow of that.”

“I've never met an artist who was at a certain level of spirituality offstage and then lowered it onstage.”

“I think everybody's got someone in their life that they think is out of the reach of God, or unchangeable, unreachable, if you will, and maybe we think that way of ourselves sometimes.”

“It's kind of scary making a faith-based film.”

“The song 'Even If' is incredibly special to me.”

“Good songwriters write about what consumes their heart, and ours is about our relationship with God.”

“Whether you have an abusive father or the most amazing dad ever, every son is trying to find their way out from under the shadow of their dad.”

“I'm not trying to shove anything down anybody's throat.”

“I think everyone, especially after the passing of a loved one, starts to hope that maybe there will be something better on the other side.”

“The only time I actually got mad at God is when my dad completely changed and was my closest friend, and then he was taken from me too soon.”

“The popularity's got its pluses and minuses, and there are many days that I would rather just be a Christian and not known at all, but that's not what God has called me to do.”

“Basically, there's not a single circumstance, I pray, that can derail me from what Christ is to me and who I am because of Christ.”

“We started making independent records. We started in '94 until about 2000 when just kind of just did it ourselves... We'd write our own songs. No one cared... At some point, we decided to try and write our own original stuff and one of the last independent records is when we wrote the song 'I Can Only Imagine.'”