Matt Redman Makes the Case for a Disruptive Christmas

By the time Christmas arrives each year, most of us already know how it’s supposed to feel. Familiar songs. Familiar images. A familiar story that asks very little of us beyond participation. It’s a comforting, albeit polished holiday that fits neatly into the calendar.

Matt Redman isn’t especially interested in that version of Christmas.

Redman has spent more than two decades shaping the sound of modern worship, writing songs that have become fixtures in churches across the world. “10,000 Reasons,” arguably his most enduring song, has been translated into dozens of languages and sung by millions of people who will never know his name. That kind of reach tends to produce certainty. Patterns. A sense of mastery.

Instead, Redman has found himself drawn back toward the parts of the faith that resist being smoothed out.

“Sometimes we get so familiar with the story that it stops feeling wondrous,” he says. “And when that happens, we lose something important.”

For Redman, Christmas isn’t compelling because it’s sentimental or reassuring. It’s compelling because it’s strange. Because the central claim of the season refuses to behave. The infinite God arrives as an infant. Glory shows up quietly. Angels announce the most important news in history to people standing in a field that smelled like animals.

“It’s full of tension,” Redman says. “And that tension matters.”

He talks often about mystery, though not in vague or mystical terms. He means paradox. The kind that refuses to resolve cleanly. A God who is overwhelmingly powerful yet startlingly close. A king who rules everything and kneels in the dirt. A holiness that doesn’t keep its distance.

“He’s the God who thunders and whispers,” Redman says. “That’s not something to solve. It’s something to hold.”

That instinct runs against the grain of much of modern faith culture, which often gravitates toward clarity and explanation. Redman doesn’t dismiss those things. He just doesn’t think they’re sufficient.

“There’s a danger in only emphasizing one side of who God is,” he says. “If you only focus on closeness without greatness, the closeness stops feeling remarkable.”

Christmas, he believes, forces both realities into the same frame. The transcendent becomes imminent. The unreachable steps directly into human life, not from a distance but from inside it. Not as a concept but as a presence.

“That’s disruptive,” Redman says. “It should unsettle us a bit.”

That word — disrupt — isn’t meant as provocation. It’s descriptive. Christmas interrupts assumptions. It destabilizes the idea that God should be obvious or manageable. It resists the instinct to reduce faith to a set of answers.

Redman sees that instinct everywhere right now. In culture. In politics. In the Church.

“We live in a moment that really values certainty,” he says. “Strong opinions. Clear sides. Quick conclusions.”

Christmas doesn’t cooperate with that posture. It introduces contradiction instead. It refuses to explain itself fully. It asks people to linger.

Redman’s approach to worship has long reflected that tension. He often describes his songs as needing to function in two directions — to tell the story and then create space to respond. Not just explanation, but encounter.

“I don’t want a song to feel like a lecture,” he says. “I want it to feel like a place.”

That same instinct shapes how he thinks about Christmas music. Not as seasonal narration, but as an invitation back into awe. A way of reopening a story people think they already understand.

“The job isn’t to make it clearer,” Redman says. “It’s to help people see it again.”

The longer he’s written songs, the more he’s come to believe that wonder isn’t a side effect of faith. It’s a requirement. Without it, worship becomes functional. Familiar. Predictable.

Christmas, at its best, disrupts that rhythm. It reintroduces surprise. It refuses to stay tidy. It insists that something impossible happened and doesn’t rush to make it comfortable.

Redman pauses when asked what he hopes people actually do with that tension.

“I hope they don’t rush past it,” he says. “I hope they sit with it.”

Because if Christmas no longer unsettles us, if it no longer interrupts our assumptions or rearranges our expectations, then it hasn’t lost its mystery.

It’s lost its power.