Local worship leader responds to call from God to start music ministry

After years of working towards answering a call from God, local artist Nathan Keys is anticipating the release of his first single to bring together church members in worship.

Nathan Keys grew up in a small town called Enniskillen, in Northern Ireland. He moved to Canada in 2007 when he was 14 years old.

For the past 16 years, he's been regularly attending a church in Winnipeg as part of the youth worship teams and now for the past 10 years, as a worship leader.

Keys has always had a passion for music, but it wasn't until he felt God place a calling in his heart in 2018, a calling to start writing music for his church.

After working collaboratively with Jaylene Johnson, Keys is proud to announce the release of his first song called "Faithful One," which is set to release on June 9.

The inspiration behind his music career debut comes from the Book of Psalms, and for this particular song, Keys looked to Psalm 107 which starts off like this, "Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever."

That is the message Keys wants to portray with his music, that Christians serve a loving and caring God who will look after his people.

Although he's excited for the release of his song, Keys says that past couple of months have been stressful because of final details and making sure the song is the way he envisioned it.

"It's been stressful but at the same time it's been a joy to go through the process," says Keys. "Ever since I started writing the song back in October, November, I've played it a couple of time at church and go some really good feedback from the church members there so it's been really encouraging to hear maybe I'm on the right track with writing this song and really wanting to, as a ministry, write songs for the church so that we can proclaim that together."

Keys has already begun working on other projects, more than a dozen in the past five years, and hopes to release another single later this year in the fall and another either this year or early next year.

To listen to Nathan Keys' new song "Faithful One," it is available on June 9 wherever music can be found—Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, etc.