Chris Tomlin Portland Concert — Next Date & Ticket Alerts

Chris Tomlin in Portland — FAQ

About Chris Tomlin

Christopher Dwayne Tomlin was born May 4, 1972 in Grand Saline, a small town in East Texas about ninety miles east of Dallas, the oldest of three brothers raised in a churchgoing family by Donna and Donnie Tomlin. He learned guitar from his father starting at age nine, was leading congregational worship at a local Methodist congregation by his early teens, and ended up at Texas A&M University in College Station for college, where the on-campus and Bryan-area church networks gave him a wider audience for the songs he was beginning to write. The break came not through a record deal but through Louie Giglio's Passion Conferences movement. Giglio had launched Passion in 1995 as a college-student worship gathering aimed at the 18-to-25-year-old demographic Christian music had under-served for years, and Tomlin was on the platform from the very early events as a worship leader rather than as a featured artist. The Passion live albums — Better Is One Day in 1999, the Road to OneDay compilations in 2000, OneDay Live in 2001, Hymns Ancient and Modern in 2004 — captured Tomlin's compositions in the room they were written for, and the songs spread out from those recordings into the wider church-music ecosystem rather than the radio chart. His solo studio catalogue runs alongside the Passion live releases without ever fully separating from them. The Noise We Make arrived in 2001 as his debut on Six Steps Records, the Giglio-founded label, with Sparrow handling distribution. Not to Us followed in 2002. Arriving, released in 2004, contained Indescribable and How Great Is Our God — two of the songs that became permanent fixtures of the global English-language worship songbook — and went gold in the US. See the Morning followed in 2006 with Made to Worship and Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone), the rewritten contemporary version of the John Newton hymn that has since become the dominant version sung in most evangelical churches. Hello Love in 2008 and And If Our God Is for Us... in 2010 added Jesus Messiah, I Will Rise, Our God and Whom Shall I Fear (God of Angel Armies) to the canon. Burning Lights, released in January 2013, debuted at No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard 200 — the first Christian and gospel album to do so since Bob Carlisle in 1997 and only the fourth ever to reach the top of the all-genre chart from the Christian format — and produced Whom Shall I Fear, Lay Me Down and the title track. Love Ran Red followed in 2014 with Waterfall and Jesus Loves Me, Never Lose Sight in 2016, Holy Roar in 2018, and a series of collaboration records under the Chris Tomlin & Friends banner starting in 2020 that paired him with country and Americana artists including Lady A, Florida Georgia Line, Russell Dickerson, Cassadee Pope and Brett Young in a deliberate crossover with Nashville's country and folk-pop scenes. Always arrived in 2022 and Wholehearted followed in 2024. Across the catalogue, the awards tally has stacked: two Grammy Awards (Best Contemporary Christian Music Album for And If Our God Is for Us... in 2012, and a Best Pop/Contemporary Gospel Album), more than twenty Dove Awards from the Gospel Music Association, three ASCAP Songwriter of the Year honors, the BMI President's Award, multiple Billboard Music Awards for Christian Artist of the Year, and a 2017 induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame as the youngest Christian artist ever inducted. He lives in Franklin, Tennessee with his wife Lauren Bricken and their three daughters, and the family-centric public posture is structural to how the tour is positioned — Chris Tomlin shows are squarely family-friendly, with the rooms full of parents and kids alongside the college-age and young-adult Passion-aligned core audience.

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