Benjamin William Hastings has never been especially interested in keeping things tidy, whether the subject is theology, creativity or the strange vocational middle ground he has occupied for most of his career.
He first rose to wider prominence through his work with Hillsong Worship, including co-writing the global worship anthem “So Will I (100 Billion X),” a song that cemented his reputation as a writer capable of pairing scale with sincerity. Even as his work reached churches around the world, Hastings’ own faith journey refused to settle into something clean or predictable.
His career has unfolded in overlapping arcs of conviction, frustration, beauty, doubt and reconstruction, often existing at the same time and rarely resolving on cue. If his music occasionally sounds like it is circling a question instead of answering it, that is because Hastings has learned to trust the circling.
For years, he has lived inside one of the most complicated lanes in modern Christian music, deeply embedded in worship culture while remaining keenly aware of the machinery that sustains it. His songs are sung weekly in churches around the world, yet his private faith has often been marked by tension and skepticism, shaped by the reality that belief behaves differently when it is also a job. He has seen how the system can form people and how it can quietly flatten them, sometimes in the same breath.
“There’s something strange about doing faith as a job,” Hastings says. “The whole thing is a bizarre place to live, especially when you’re really struggling and wrestling through doubts and big questions about God.”
That unease did not arrive all at once. Early in his career, Hastings followed the familiar rhythm of the worship world, saying yes often, writing constantly and learning as he went because momentum rarely allows for long pauses. The pace was intense, and the expectations, while rarely spoken aloud, shaped everything from productivity to posture. Worship became spiritual formation braided tightly with professional responsibility, and over time, that braid grew harder to untangle. When belief comes attached to deadlines and deliverables, it has a way of demanding answers before the questions have finished forming.
Eventually, that pressure forced Hastings into a season of reckoning.
“The first record was really written in the middle of trying to find myself again,” he says. “I was openly wrestling with faith and God and my position in all of this.”
What followed was a slow exposure rather than a dramatic collapse. Hastings bristles at the idea that deconstruction is something people pursue casually or destructively, because in his experience, belief systems are dismantled only after they begin failing under the weight of lived reality.
“No one’s willingly knocking down a perfectly good house,” he says. “If something is working, we tend not to change it. The bricks are already crumbling by the time you notice.”
For Hastings, the fractures were rooted in frameworks rather than faith itself. Certain interpretations had functioned as structural pillars until life exposed how fragile they were, and once those cracks appeared, they demanded attention. The work that followed required patience, honesty and a willingness to rebuild without rushing toward certainty.
“Once you start tearing it down, it’s really hard to build it back up,” Hastings says. “It takes time. It takes effort. And it’s tempting to either rebuild it the exact same way or just walk away.”
Many people choose to walk away, and Hastings understands the impulse, especially when the scaffolding of belief collapses so completely that it feels indistinguishable from the structure itself. His own journey bent in a different direction, shaped less by resolution than by attention. Rather than attempting to solve every tension at once, he began focusing on what still felt compelling and credible in the midst of uncertainty.
That focal point was Jesus.
“When I stepped back and looked at Jesus,” Hastings says, “there was this inherent good in following Him. Even just the life lessons in His teachings and the example of sacrifice.”
That decision did not quiet every doubt, nor did it answer every theological question, yet Hastings found that faith did not require complete clarity in order to remain honest. What it required was growth and the humility to accept that growth rarely arrives without discomfort.
“I think we miss something if we’re not willing to grow in our faith, even when that growth comes with pain.”
That posture reshaped how Hastings viewed the church as well. For a time, his vision had narrowed to the institutional layers of church life, including platforms, production, economics and power dynamics, and those realities felt impossible to unsee. Distance and time softened that focus, allowing him to remember the people he had overlooked while fixating on the system, including volunteers, servants and ordinary congregants whose faithfulness rarely attracts attention.
“That’s what church actually is,” he says. “It’s the grandma in the kitchen. It’s the people who keep showing up. I got so caught up in the machine that I lost sight of the beauty.”
Even now, Hastings does not pretend the tension between worship and industry has disappeared, nor does he believe it should. Worship music generates income, churches sell products and artists build platforms, and that collision carries real ethical weight. Hastings believes faithfulness requires naming that reality rather than smoothing it over for comfort.
“If I’m not feeling tension around making worship music for a living, there’s a problem,” he says.
That awareness has reshaped how he thinks about integrity and longevity, particularly in an industry that often rewards certainty over honesty. Hastings speaks openly about the danger of leveraging God’s name for personal gain, as well as the quieter erosion that happens when success makes compromises feel reasonable.
“I never want to pretend like I’m not wrestling with it,” he says. “That feels worse than the tension itself.”
Hastings does not frame his journey as a comeback or a resolution, and he shows little interest in presenting his faith as settled or complete. What he has instead is a framework sturdy enough to keep moving forward, shaped by examination rather than avoidance and by commitment rather than certainty. He remains still here, still writing, still paying attention. In a space that often confuses confidence with depth, that posture may be the most honest form of faith he knows how to offer.
