We caught up with Kevin Huguley, guitarist and songwriter for Rush of Fools
What’s new with Rush of Fools?
A lot! God has kept us really busy this year on the road as well as in writing circles. Hopefully, by early next year — 2011 — we’ll have released our third record. In fact, our hope is to have a new single released to radio by the end of 2010. We’ve been playing a lot of the new music at our live events, and it’s been going over really well.
In this season of our lives, songs have come to us a little different. We have been writing extensively about where we are in life, as the past couple of years the Fools family has walked through a lot of heartache and tragedy. From our transportation falling apart to our gear being stolen, things have been pretty tough. Our drummer’s mom is going through breast cancer, and just yesterday Wes’s grandmother had a bad fall in the market, but praise God she’s okay. The cool thing is, some of … what my wife calls dark worship songs … have come out of it.
Yet at the same time there is so much excitement for us. We are currently in meetings with great new potential partners to help further our ministry. Lots of cool news is on the horizon.
The Lord has also blessed our individual families as well. He’s added kids to the Fools family. Wes’s little girl, Story, was born just nine days ago, and Jacob and his wife are expecting as well. The Lord really has opened up a lot of new opportunities for us, even parenting.
What do you hear God saying to the group these days?
Man, I think that God is teaching us and molding us to find joy — not happiness — joy in the understanding of the sovereignty of God — that’s what a lot of our new songs have been about. If people have heard our first two records, they know we weigh heavily on God’s sovereignty and God’s ruling over every molecule in existence, and we continue to have a lot of hope in that.
God has been teaching us to find joy and satisfaction in understanding life, and existence, under the umbrella of a very sovereign God — that means that events, both good and bad, have been ordained by a much bigger Creator than we can even understand or comprehend, and we believe that truly is the God we serve.
What refreshes you personally?
We’re out about 200 days a year, so what refreshes me is being with my family. And second to family is the Church.
I love reading old dead guys’ work, like Charles Spurgeon. The band reads the morning and evening devotions together at times as well. The beauty of technology is you can have Spurgeon’s app on your iPhone these days and read that when you get some free time.
But beyond that, we’re just really blessed to have such an incredible local body of believers in our little city. I’m literally getting chills thinking about the faith family that God has called us to serve and be a part of.
Yea, you guys are planting a church…
Christ City Church (Birmingham) (www.christcitybirmingham.com) is a brand new church start, still in the infancy stage. We don’t have a clue what we’re doing, but we know God has called us to our city (Birmingham). We’ve got an incredible family of people that God is bringing together to love one another, serve God, His Kingdom, and our city.
We utterly believe that our discipleship, our growth, will not just happen when we’re on the road. It’s going to be when our faith family has poured time and energy into our lives. For instance, when there are men that are willing to sit with us at 6 A.M. on Tuesdays and have breakfast together, we grow. It’s been such an encouragement.
It strikes me that you may be more passionate about ministry and church, than you are just music.
Absolutely. Don’t get me wrong, we LOVE what God has called us to as a band. But for us, our first ministry is our wives — three of us are married and our road manager is about to be married — so the first priority that God has given us is our wives and children. Family is the first institution ordained by God. Our second ministry is our local church. And third is this band called Rush Of Fools.
The reality is that this ministry would crumble in a heartbeat if we didn’t have the ministry of our local congregation. We look forward to getting back to our city. We believe that God has called us to both our city, and our itinerant ministry when we travel. We look forward to figuring out how we’re going to do both, but we believe God has called us to do so.
Tell me more about the church. What will be Rush Of Fools’ role in the church? Are you guys considered staff, volunteer staff, the worship band…?
We’re still so new that we don’t know exactly the roles that God has called us to be.
Spoken as a true church planter.
(laughs) We do feel that we will be some part of leadership with the teaching pastor, David (Nasser). At this point, we’re going to the Book of Acts and looking at what the Bible teaches about church leadership. We want to follow what the Bible says about church government. We feel like the Word is our authority as a church.
But as far as our definite involvement, it’s our church family and it’s going to be a church family that supports us, that gets behind us — despite the amount of records that we sell or don’t sell. There is a lot of security in that, that we don’t have to be on stage and in our show clothes and holding guitars, but we can be in our gym shorts and T-shirts on a boat somewhere fishing and have some of the men in our church loving on us. There is a tremendous blessing in that.
What’s important to you and your wife?
Communication and trying to deliver honest expectations is vital. When expectations aren’t met, that’s when fights start.
For instance, the expectation of when I’m coming home is an important expectation for my wife. If I think we’ll be home at 10 P.M. I’ll say to her, Baby, I look forward to seeing you about midnight. I’m not lying to my wife, I’m setting realistic expectations. The reality is, if we stop for gas or food and miss the 10pm expectation, I’m coming home to a broken situation. I try to set expectations that are attainable.
We encourage family devotion time. I am not the star of that by any means; it’s very difficult, especially on the road. Sometimes we need to have prayer time on the phone, or read over the phone to one another. It’s hard enough to have a good marriage when you’re with each other every day. Try doing it when you’re with each other about half the year. It’s really, really difficult. But, by the beauty of God’s grace — and video chat (laughs) — we have a fighting chance. I remember a story from our bud Mac (Third Day) explaining how different life on the road used to be before technology kicked in. When he was traveling 15 years ago, before the iPhone, he had to walk to a phone, and insert money, once a day just to talk his wife, Amie.
I often say that the natural progression of marriage — if you don’t intentionally build your marriage — is failure.
Yes. Spiritual warfare is trying to break the bonds and the beauty of the marriage relationship. Our spouse should be the one we’re able to be most spiritually intimate with, yet sometimes it feels as though it’s the hardest. Nonetheless, God has called us as men to lead out in this area, no matter our discomfort level.
That’s why I want to challenge the men reading or listening to this. Ask God to help you be a good husband … No, a great husband. We are called to a very high calling: to love our wives as Christ loved the Church. As married men, we need to be godly husbands that glorify the Lord in the ways that we treat and tend to our wife. You and I are called, by God, to be her sustainer, her rock, and her leader. First Timothy and Ephesians 5 teach clearly about this. If you don’t have men that are older and wiser than you pouring into your life and caring for your spiritual maturity, pray that God directs you to that man, or men. We need godly men as our examples for biblical leadership, giving us direction on how to do married life well.
We learn by example. If your parents are that example, great! If not, then find a married couple that can be that for you. If you’re 20- or 30-something couple, find a family that has been living life together for 30 years of marriage. They should know how to do it, man. We have so much to learn from our elders. Follow what they do.
On parenting …
I’m looking forward to the day that God lets me be a dad. But those of you who are fathers, earnestly work to love your children well. Make your mistakes in front of them, with vulnerability. When you and your wife have a bad argument in front of your kids, seek forgiveness and repent before your kids. They need to see that.
It’s very difficult in general for us to walk humbly before men, and I think it’s far more difficult to walk humbly before our families. So I challenge those of us as men, to be men of God by reading the Word daily. It is a sad day in our church culture to see that women and mothers are trying to hold positions and roles that God has not even called them to hold. As a complementarian (men and women are created by God very equal, but very different, complementing one another), I believe we have a very high calling from God as men, to be good leaders, in our families, and in our church. I pray that we find ourselves daily on our knees begging our Father for the grace and wisdom to live out this calling well, for the glory of God and God alone.
Copyright © 2010 by Jim Mueller, President and co-founder of Growthtrac Ministries.
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Jim Mueller
Jim is the founder, with wife, Sheri, of Growthtrac Ministries as well as Program Director of GrowthtracRadio and the architect behind marriagetrac.com. Jim holds a B.S. in business management and is a facilitator for PREPARE/ENRICH, the most widely used customized couple assessment tool. He has authored numerous articles, interviewed leading relationship experts, and Christian artists, and has contributed to Dr. Les Parrott’s book, The Complete Guide to Marriage Mentoring. Jim has worked for more than 15 years to help premarital couples and married couples build and maintain healthy relationships.
