It’s a muggy Sunday afternoon on Marco Island, Florida, and Matt Papa is devouring a plate of poke nachos at a tiki restaurant overlooking Angler’s Cove. The well-known singer/songwriter leads worship at Marco Island Presbyterian just across the road, and is still wearing a jacket, despite the 90-degree heat. I plop down across the high-top table and dig into the nachos while pulling out my notepad.
A warm breeze provides some relief as I launch in with my first question: “So, how did you end up here?”
The Road to Modern Hymnwriting
An avid musician who came to faith as a teenager at a Baptist church in the northern Atlanta suburbs, Papa found any excuse to play the guitar in youth group and beyond.
“It became a very powerful force in my life,” Papa explains. He enrolled at Truett McConnell University to study classical guitar, despite not knowing how to read music. During these college days, he “frantically” played for as many Christian groups and Bible studies as he could.
“Music was always an escape for me, a place I could go,” he said. He sees now it was also the zeal of being a new believer in an “intense phase of life.”
But all that playing was more than striving for success. Underneath was a budding desire to edify the church through God-honoring music. After college, Papa accepted a worship director position at Summit Church in Raleigh, North Carolina, and began finding his way into songwriting, releasing his first album, “You Are Good,” in 2006.
Early on in his songwriting journey, he had a songwriting session with Matt Boswell, a worship leader at The Trails Church in Celina, Texas, and the two began what has turned into a songwriting partnership spanning more than two decades. From the beginning the songs the two Matts composed tended to be hymn-like, even though Papa at that time preferred to write songs that were more mainstream Christian contemporary.
In 2013, “Come Behold the Wondrous Mystery”—co-written with Boswell and Michael Bleecker—began getting picked up by churches across the country who started adding it to their liturgical line-up. “His Mercy is More,” released in 2015, gained even more momentum, garnering the attention of Keith and Kristyn Getty.
In 2018, the Gettys invited both Matts to their home in Nashville to get a feel for their songwriting style and to see if they could be good songwriting partners. Around the same time, Papa and his wife Lauren moved their family back to Atlanta so that he could work as music director at Christ Covenant Church, all while he was writing more and more with Boswell.
“As time went on, the energy and the gas for the thing I was trying to do was slowly running out, but the energy and the gas for these [modern hymns] I was working on on the side started to form their own life force and energy,” he said
Since then, Papa has collaborated with the Gettys on at least 10 released modern hymns, including “Rise My Soul, The Lord is Risen,” “All My Boast is in Jesus,” and “How Great Is The Greatness of God.”
Crafting Treasures for the Church
As Papa’s hymns have gained popularity on Spotify, at worship conferences, and among congregations, Papa himself is learning to take the back seat.
“A lot of people, when I first meet them, will say, ‘I knew your song, but I didn’t know you.’ Initially that will ruffle my feathers … but it’s become meaningful to me to know that I’m a part of something way bigger than me,” he says.
“That’s the essence of what a hymn is,” he goes on. “It’s a piece of work or art that belongs to the church; in a real sense, [it] doesn’t belong to us.”
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t thoughtfulness and intentionality behind the hymnwriting process, however.
Papa explains that when he, Boswell, and the Gettys gather together to write a new song, they spend hours upon hours writing, re-writing, and recording. In order to know what type of hymn to write next, they ask themselves questions like, “What are the gaps [in congregational hymns]? What are the needs? Why are we not singing about X,Y,Z?”
Sometimes there are holes in types of hymns that carry a certain feel or mood.
“[Right now], there’s a need for opening songs that carry a sense of weightiness, gravity. A lot of opening songs carry a ton of excitement and joy, but they lack a sense of gravity and weight. You’ve got to have an arc.”
The hymns in a worship service should be like a meal, he says. You want a variety of flavors.
“There’s a longstanding tradition in the church in the liturgy of following God/sin/Christ’s response. There’s a longstanding argument for starting our services more with something that dislodges us from ourselves totally—to help us to be completely self-forgetful in a way that it’s not even about feeling excited, but it’s about the greatness of who God is and the re-orienting reality that is Him.”
Right now, the songwriting collaborative is working on a collection of hymns for a conference in Turkey in October that will celebrate the long-lasting impact of the Nicene Creed.
Outlasting
Back in the midday warmth of Marco Island, Papa explains that he arrived in this small retirement town south of Naples, with Lauren and their five kids in 2021. During Covid, he was invited a few times to visit and lead worship for Marco Island Presbyterian, a church made up mostly of snowbird retirees. After a few visits, Papa was invited to come on staff as an artist-in-residence, which meant leading worship on Sundays and then spending the rest of his time songwriting and touring.
His daily work is to tinker at the piano and come up with one or two melodies each day. Most get forgotten, a few stick.
“Come, Let Us Return to the Lord” is a new one that has stuck and was released on Spotify, June 27th.
At the end of our lunch together, Papa concludes, “I’m trying to create songs that outlast me and that unify the church and glorify God. I very much like Francis Schaeffer’s metaphor—it’s the job of each generation to polish or add a stone in the temple. We’re each called in a unique way to do that. I see myself as a part of that.”