Interview with Lacey Mosley of Flyleaf

Pat Seals describes what the band are hoping to achieve with their music. "The point of doing this band," he says, "is to communicate Jesus' love through what we do and just be who we are. And actually try and flesh it out and point to God in the midst of our shortcomings. Which are many!" Lacey adds, "Obviously we can do that in anything we do. It's not just the band that we want to do that with, it's everything. Because obviously we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow and if it was all over tomorrow we'd still want to do that. Just like Pat said, we want to be who we are. I think what's cool about being in this band is that it's not really in the Christian world so much. It's in the world and not of the world. It's a light in a dark place. Just by being who we are and not being ashamed of it no matter what the controversy is. No matter who we're gonna upset. We seek to be loving and we want to tell the Good News. We understand as a band what it's like to not believe in God. We understand what it's like because we play with people who are offended by Christianity all the time and we understand that. We don't push our beliefs on people. We are who we are in front of them. We just show love as much as we can. Because personally I know what it feels like to be offended by Christianity because I was. Normally it's not the Gospel messages that we reject, it's the 'religion' that they've seen."

So how was Lacey offended by Christianity when she was younger? "Like everybody else, I think I saw a lot of hypocrisy." She pauses to think, "It's not Christianity, if you're defining Christianity as what Jesus taught. It's the traditions that WE teach. It's the attitude that WE put ourselves in. The holier-than-thou attitude. Like, we take on our convictions for ourselves. Like, let's just take drinking. For me, it's a conviction for me that I can't drink at all. I know about abusing it. I know about it destroying relationships and I've seen it. But I'm not gonna push that on someone else and I'm not gonna look down on them if they drink. I'm not gonna say that they need to not drink either. That's my conviction. For me, I know I'd abuse it because I've done it in the past. So I know it's wrong for me. So if I see somebody else doing that, that's their thing and they have their own thing. So that's how we approach everything. The Bible says if you know something is a sin and you go ahead and do it then for you it is a sin. And maybe my faith is weak in some things where I can't do certain things that other people can do. The main thing, which I love, Saint Augustine, in Confessions said, 'Love, and then do whatever you wish.' Because if it really is loving, as the Bible describes loving: 'Love is patient, love is kind, it's not jealous or rude or proud. It keeps no record of wrong, it's not self-centred, it's not boastful.' If you test it all that way then you are being loving and you can do whatever you want so long as it's in love."