There’s an axiom that should apply in so many areas where we live our lives, be it classroom or boardroom or family room.

“There’s no such thing as a dumb question.”

But there’s one place where this idea tends not to apply. So many -- young and old, male and female, seeker and believer alike -- run into opposition of asking the tough questions in the one place they should feel most free, the church.

Todd Agnew wants to help put a stop to that. Through his travels as a recording artist and performer, he has seen it start to happen on its own.

“I’m just finding more and more people who aren’t fooled by the ‘everything’s fine’ version of Christianity,” the Texas-bred Memphis resident says. “I’m just trying to just get some of those questions out there, the questions people are afraid to ask in church, but also to get the questions asked sincerely and without anger.”

Which brings Agnew to this place in time and art, using his platform and talent to get to the core of who we are as humans, to get to that moment where we’re able to ask the Better Questions:

 

What happens when you die?

Why do we define people by their mistakes?

How does God still care for us when we keep messing things up?

Todd Agnew’s willingness to stand up and provide perspective and voice to this and more doesn’t come from a place of anger or defiance, but rather from the experiences of a man continuing to wrestle with the very questions he poses.

From his debut Ardent release Grace Like Rain to the sophomore explorations of Reflection of Something to the epic nature of last year’s seasonal effort Do You See What I See? to the present-day realities of Better Questions, there is a deepening lyrical maturity displaying confidence while still maintaining power and edge.

This set of songs came to Todd with a clarity with which even he was surprised.

“We had planned to do a live worship record next after the Christmas record,” Todd says. “But after taking some time off, I’d written a bunch of new songs. I went into the management office and said, ‘Um, I need to tell you about some things.’

“I went in with my pitch that I needed to do a studio record, to be called ‘Better Questions,’ here’s the reasoning behind it, and here are the songs, all of it,” he continues. “They said, ‘Well, we were going to tell you we thought you needed to do a studio record, too,’ So I thought, ‘Wait, then, I didn’t need to do all this work leading up to this?’”

“We started with the idea of doing a real simple record, musically. I’d just finished the Christmas record and it was so big; there was orchestra on every single song, and it’s just this epic thing,” Todd notes. “So my thought was, ‘Let’s do a record with a drummer, a guitar player, a bass player and some keyboards.’ So that’s how we started...but we definitely strayed from that. As we started meshing the creativity and the simplicity together, sometimes the simplicity fell away.”