As any good storyteller may tell you, some great stories exist because everything around you is falling apart.
For Jason and Rhonda Halbert, the bestselling Goodpasture Chronicles trilogy was never part of the plan. Neither of them set out to become novelists. Jason was already living a career that most musicians would envy, from his early days with DC Talk and Sonicflood to decades as a key creative force behind Kelly Clarkson. Rhonda was building her career behind the scenes in television production and raising her family in Nashville.
Books weren’t on the roadmap. Then life happened. A lot of life.
When I sat down with the Halberts to discuss ARCHITECT, the newly released final installment of The Goodpasture Chronicles, it became clear that these books aren’t simply supernatural thrillers. They are the product of grief, healing, faith, and an extraordinary season of personal upheaval.
I think before we get there, we need to take a step back in time. To a time that our CCM Magazine audience loves.
“I always say we grew up in the heyday of Christian music. I mean, 80s into the 90s, from Wayne Watson to Sandi Patty to 4Him to Petra to White Heart.”
Like so many Nashville stories, his began with a dream and an internship.
The Halberts moved to Nashville in 1993 because it was the city listed on the back of all those Christian music CDs. Jason landed an internship at Sparrow Records, while Rhonda interned at True Artist Management. Then a seemingly random opportunity changed everything.
DC Talk was looking for their first keyboard player. “I was 19 years old,” Jason recalled. “I’d actually never heard DC Talk. I was a huge Michael W. Smith fan.”
He got the gig. His first concert was in front of 16,000 people. That experience became his education.
“I called DC Talk my college years,” he said. “The things I use on The Kelly Clarkson Show today, like the minutia down to the order of my outputs from my rig are all the exact same thing we did on the Free at Last tour.”
His time with Sonicflood followed. Then years of production work. Then television.
But the story that eventually became The Goodpasture Chronicles wasn’t born from creative success. It was born from personal loss. Rhonda described a season that would overwhelm most families.
“We experienced an enormous amount of trauma in our lives, of losing both of our mothers, losing over 12 people during Covid… from all kinds of illnesses.”
Those losses came on top of a battle with stage-four cancer that their daughter had already endured.
Then came the flood.
Their home was destroyed.
“It was complete devastation, having to tear it down and then completely rebuild from the foundation up.” Standing inside the ruined house, Jason cried out to God.
“God, if we take on the rebuilding of the foundation of our home, would you take on the rebuilding of the foundation of our family?’”
Rhonda immediately sensed something had changed.
“I snapped up and I went, ‘Did you feel that?’ And it felt like a significant moment of coming in alignment with what was supposed to happen.”
That moment became the seed for the entire series. Rather than writing a memoir, the Halberts chose fiction. The trilogy explores a fascinating question: if physical actions in our world could impact the spiritual world, what would that look like?
For Jason, the creative process mirrored another pivotal season of his life.
“The transition was very similar to it mirrors the Ouroboros,” he explained, referencing the serpent symbol that appears throughout the books. “I feel like where we’re at now mirrors the Sonicflood era of our life.”
The comparison is telling.
Sonicflood emerged from a powerful spiritual encounter and helped launch modern worship music into a new era. Decades later, another encounter with God would spark a completely different creative chapter.
“This creativity came out of this trauma and another encounter with God.”
Ironically, music couldn’t help him process what he was experiencing.
“After producing so long, I actually started trying to do that, and I couldn’t separate the craft of what I do from what I was trying to work through.”
The breakthrough came through a familiar source.
Amy Grant.
The Halberts were in the middle of their darkest season when Amy appeared as a guest on The Kelly Clarkson Show. A lunch conversation led her to recommend Cereset, a therapy program that would ultimately help their family heal. Jason credits that experience with helping unlock the story that would become The Goodpasture Chronicles.
The two wrote the trilogy while often living on opposite sides of the country. Jason was based primarily in Los Angeles for television production while Rhonda remained in Nashville. Soon he was calling Rhonda during his commute, pitching ideas that flowed directly from the spiritual question born inside their flooded home. “I voice memo’d the entire 3.5 hour conversation,” Rhonda said. “And that 3.5 hours turned into the entire trilogy.”
At first, Jason worried they were simply escaping reality by inventing a fantasy world.
A therapist friend offered a different perspective.
“This is a form of processing your trauma through external stories because your brain can’t handle it.” The fictional characters faced situations inspired by real emotions, but processed them differently than the Halberts themselves. “It was a form of therapy for us,” Jason said.
“It’s not our story,” Rhonda says. “But it’s enough of our emotions that we were going through in our grief that we were going through to make these characters actually come alive.”
Now the trilogy reaches its conclusion with ARCHITECT.
The timing feels significant. As the book series wraps, so does another major chapter of Jason’s life. After seven years with The Kelly Clarkson Show, that season is coming to a close, Jason will still be sharing the stage with his longtime collaborator as Clarkson’s Vegas residency continues this summer.
And while ARCHITECT may close the book trilogy, it isn’t the end of the story. The Halberts are already developing The Goodpasture Chronicles for television. For creators who spent decades helping tell other people’s stories, they now find themselves shepherding their own.
As Rhonda put it, “It came to us in a place of brokenness and it healed us. And so the intent is for the masses to be able to receive that same healing.”
ARCHITECT and the entire The Goodpasture Chronicles Trilogy is available now wherever books are sold.
