We Are Messengers frontman's journey of redemption

Heidi Mulligan and her three young children sat in the garden, picking peas and eating them out of the pod. It was a sunny May day in Ireland, and she was trying to keep them quiet. Inside their home, her husband, Darren, was Skyping with a Nashville music executive.

There — surrounded by the Irish countryside where they had rebuilt their lives after years of drinking, debauchery and depression — Tennessee felt a million miles away.

Two years later, the Mulligans live in the Nashville area in an apartment over a garage as Darren tries to make it as an artist in the Christian music industry. His group, We Are Messengers, just charted its first top 10 hit on Christian radio with “Everything Comes Alive.” The success is validating, but the family still yearns for its Irish home with its expansive gardens, nearby river and plenty of places for the children to play.

“That’s what hurts me the most,” Darren said. “I don’t have a space for them. At home they have a trampoline. … I don’t remember when the last time was that I bounced on the trampoline with my kids.”

The jarring move — just like every other decision they’ve made in the past four years — was a leap of faith.

The couple said they followed what they believed was God’s directive to move 4,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. Though they’re relativity new to Christianity, both believe the religion saved their lives.

Darren tearfully testifies during many performances: “I was a bad, bad man.” We Are Messengers is on tour with Winter Jam, a multi-artist Christian music arena tour headlined by Grammy-winning duo For King & Country. It’s been a long road back from years of alcohol abuse and infidelities that threatened his career and his relationship.

“Darren’s depth, his honesty and his realism is something that I think that music is in desperate need of,” said Luke Smallbone of For King & Country. “I think what he has to say and who he is as a person — he needs to be seen and he needs to be heard.”

Tumultuous beginnings

Darren Mulligan met Heidi Dresing in 1999 when they were teenagers. Heidi, who was 17 at the time, lived in Scotland and was on vacation with friends in Galway when she met Mulligan, then 19. He approached her in the street with “some cheesy chat-up line,” but she was underage and needed his help to get into a club.

“I knew this was the woman,” Darren said, seated beside Heidi at their kitchen table in their Williamson County apartment. The glass-top table wobbles when it’s leaned on, and the couple said all of their furniture was donated to them. “When you know this story, it’s like I did everything I could to get rid of her.”

For four years, the young couple endured a long-distance relationship before Heidi dropped out of university in Scotland to move to Ireland to be with Darren. He was living in Dublin and was trying to have a career in music.

While attending classes, Heidi had developed anorexia and suffered from depression. Darren didn’t want her to move to be with him.

“Bottom line was I was just selfish,” Darren said, looking through the table at the paper they had jammed under the leg to keep it steady. “I didn’t want her.”

Heidi’s anorexia was peaking. Darren was with her when she couldn’t get out of bed, when she cried herself to sleep at night and when she didn’t eat for weeks. He knew her pain was tremendous and helped her get into an inpatient program, not out of compassion but driven by annoyance.

“Our connection was both of us were miserable,” Heidi said

In the months that followed, Darren was on tour with his hard rock band in the United States, where life on the road became increasingly reckless. He drank to excess and had sex with strangers.

Back in Ireland, a co-worker invited Heidi to a gathering at her church. It was there Heidi recognized something was absent from her life — joy. She started attending church with her co-worker, and each Sunday when the minister spoke about sinners she thought of Darren instead of herself.

When she called Darren to tell him she had been saved on Easter 2006, he was drunk in a park in Texas.

“I was so angry at her,” he said. “Now when I look back, I know I was angry because, for the first time in years, she was happy. She was the only person who understood how I felt, and then she was gone.”

Darren recalled spending the next several months trying to make Heidi feel like “filth.” Yet when Darren returned to Ireland, he proposed.

“She was the only thing I had left,” he explained. “When I asked her to marry me, I don’t think I loved her because I didn’t love anyone.”

Darren decided to move back to his hometown of Monaghan and, once again, Heidi followed. He told her that if they could find a church he could tolerate, he would attend services with her.

“God was starting to put little seeds of compassion in me,” Darren said. “I was an atheist. I didn’t believe any of it.”

They found a tiny church with a lively pastor that Darren thought was entertaining. The couple attended service together for four or five months, listening to what the singer remembers as the same sermons over and over again. And for a long time he felt nothing. Then, he did.

“I believed completely that I was wretched to the core,” Darren recalled from the night he was saved. “Everything I had ever done came floating back into my mind. I felt so dirty. I remember thinking that God, right then, seemed so clean.”

In Monaghan the singer worked his way up to the management level at his dream job — running a facility for troubled children. The position afforded them their Irish home with their beloved gardens near the river.

But again the couple’s faith intervened. One night during a church conference, Heidi became convinced Darren was meant to leave his job and devote his life to ministering.

“I was like, ‘No, I’m providing,’ ” Darren said.

Six months later, Darren was playing a show in the United Kingdom when a message flashed on the screen: “Life is too short to do what you don’t believe in.”

“I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” Darren recalled. “That was what God had told me already through Heidi.”

On the day Darren quit his job, Heidi was laid off from a human resources position. They didn’t know what they were supposed to do, but the couple spent the next 12 months ministering through music and worship in small towns. They also opened a food bank.

Darren recalls saying a prayer outside his son’s school a year later in 2014, asking God if he could go back to work.

“The next day I heard from Josh Bailey at Word, and I was headed to Nashville a matter of weeks later,” Darren said.

Bailey, senior vice president of A&R at Nashville-based Christian music label Word Entertainment, had seen a video of Darren’s Christian music band, The Remission Flow. He was taken by the uniqueness of his phrasing and his voice. More importantly, Bailey recognized his authenticity, he said.

“You could tell there was something about the heart in all of it that came from a very real place,” Bailey said. “I think whenever you’re looking for an artist, you’re looking for something extra special. But especially in our world, there has to be something bigger than themselves that people can connect with. This guy has gone through something, and he’s doing something he’s passionate about.”

By the end of 2015, Darren had moved Heidi and their three children Elijah, 6; Emmanuelle, 4; and Caleb, 3, from their home in Ireland to Nashville. They slept on air mattresses in a temporary apartment before they settled in their apartment over a garage. He spent all of 2015 working on We Are Messengers’ self-titled debut album that will be in stores April 22.

Heidi dreams of Darren making enough money to have a tour bus so the family can travel with him. Darren’s dreams are bigger: “I really believe that God is going to use me, Heidi, our little kids and the music to change the culture in American Christianity.”

But if God takes his career away, that’s OK, too. Darren believes God would put something else in its place.

“That’s why I love being married to Heidi,” said the singer. “As tough as it is, we’re on this big journey together. When we’re lying on our death beds, we will have walked it together and that will be enough. Our story is the story of redemption.”

Reach Cindy Watts at 615-664-2227 or ciwatts@tennessean.com.

'Everything Comes Alive'

Darren Mulligan is lead singer for the Christian music group We Are Messengers. Mulligan moved to the Nashville area from Ireland with his family in 2014 after getting signed to a record deal with locally based Word Entertainment. We Are Messengers' debut single, “Everything Comes Alive,” is a top 10 hit on the Christian music radio airplay charts and is from the band’s self-titled debut album that will be in stores April 22.