Sara Groves

Adding to the Beauty

With more than 300,000 albums sold and a half dozen charting Christian radio singles, Sara Groves’ music career is a family affair. Her husband Troy, first heard her music when they were in college together at Evangel University (MO), and decided then and there his goal would be to make her music available to the world. Today, he is her manager, and their two young sons accompany them on tours.

“We say no to ‘career opportunities’ that are not good family situations, and we strive to keep lines of communication open,” says Troy.  “Sara has rewarded me with employee of the month for eight straight years (92 months).”

However tongue-in-cheek the title may be, it’s an honor well-deserved, both for his part in her humble beginnings and her recent successes (including the release of her latest album, Add to the Beauty, Oct. 4 of this year). For her birthday years ago, Troy spent $15,000 to rent studio time for her, funded by donations from family and friends. The result, ultimately, was the independent release of her first album, Past the Wishing, in 1998. In 2001, she signed a recording contract with INO Records, the same company that produces CeCe Winans and Mercy Me. Since signing her contract, she has released five other albums and performed on tour across the country.

Her latest album, Add to the Beauty, marks a new stage in her own faith journey, and is a refreshing answer to her previous album, The Other Side of Something. “The Other Side was working through some things. I felt like I was coming out of a three or four year faith struggle. I had been choking on the ‘sovereignty pill,’ seeing bad things happening to good people, watching patterns I can’t get over, wondering how in the world does the Kingdom of God intersect here?” she explains.

“Something changed since then. I feel like the questions and the introspection have brought me to answers. In that way, God has been faithful. I haven’t asked one question that He hasn’t answered, although not always the way I thought He would. I don’t have to put a question mark at the end of everything, some things I can say with exclamation point. That’s my new season. I desire to be a leader.”

The title track, "Add to the Beauty," is intended to be a call to action to listeners. “We can’t just rock back and forth and sing worship songs all day,” Groves says. “We need to enter the world, we can’t be isolated in our faith. We need to inform life, to be salt and light.”

Groves serves as a representative for World Vision, promoting the sponsorship of AIDS-orphaned children in Africa, as well as partnering with Minnesota Teen Challenge and with Food for the Hungry. Sara and Troy are members of Cedar Valley Church in Bloomington, Minn.