Podcast Transcript
Summer: We are Chris and Summer Sheely. Sheila Worship. Sheely Worship. We’re currently located in Atlanta, Georgia. Hot Atlanta, they call it. Yes. We’ve lived here for about two years now. It’s been the most interesting part of our journey in our story so far. So we can maybe get into that. Yeah.
In a little bit. But basically in a nutshell, we have been leading worship together for. Probably about 12 years now. I’ve had worship my whole life. Yeah. But together, yeah. It’s been about 12 years. We are we’ve been married for 18 years. Okay. We have 14. They are, our oldest is a boy, he is 11, and then we have three girls.
Nine, seven, and two. There you go. Yeah. We worked in the corporate world in our twenties. We went to college. I worked in the hospital. Chris was a free broker, had his own business and we led worship and did music stuff on the side. Yeah. Then when we started approaching 30, we just felt the Lord pulling on our hearts asking us how much did we trust him?
Would we be willing to go all in for worship and music? And not be dependent necessarily on our degrees. Yeah. I don’t know. Do
Chris: you wanna Yeah, that’s come in. That’s that’s a fun story to tell. We’ll get into that. I hope. Yeah. We’ve just been making music like our whole life. I grew up in the church.
Summers mom and dad were worship pastors for 35 years and. Most people don’t make it that long. So that really speaks to the kind of folks that they are. And how we were raised up in this really solid family. Really knew how to get into the presence of God. So we cut our teeth by serving her mom and dad on their worship team.
Now I played drums, our bass, and she would sing and play keys and then after college we started leading together. So it wasn’t a normal thing for us to sing together, but I was a musician, like a higher gun around town. It’s just been a really cool journey. We’ve been doing this a while and really love to offer our insights to the younger worship leaders to maybe help ’em avoid some of the pitfalls that lead to burnout, so they can have longevity.
And we’re really passionate think biblically, the levies worked until they were 50. They did the job of worship until they were 50 years old. So it’s just really cool to see people making it, running the race for the length of top. Sure,
Ryan: I could, it’s a little bit, you said like it’s a fun story on how you got to Atlanta.
Maybe try talk how the Lord worked that through.
Chris: Yeah can you start in Dallas? We’ll start back in Dallas. We lived in Dallas Fort Worth for 10 years and 2018 ish we, the Lord spoke to me and said us to say, go all in on music full-time into ministry. We’re only part-time or. We were like contract musicians up until that point we were part-time on staff.
Yeah. So he said, I want you to sell your business. And I said, oh no. It was very, it was comfortable. And she had already quit working at the hospital cuz we had our third child. So life was getting busy and more expensive. And the Lord said, sell your business, which was our bread and butter on income.
And I wrestled with him. But the next morning, literally there was somebody in my email inbox wanting to buy my book of business from. Okay, so we said yes and walked away from that stream of income.
Summer: We knew it was the Lord. Yeah. Because we hadn’t even, Yeah. Advertised or, had conversations about it, about selling it just completely random time.
The Lord totally sent someone to buy it. So we were like, this is 100% the Lord. We’ve gotta walk on water and Yeah. And do this journey with the
Chris: Lord. So we knew, we had about a year to figure out what life post business and c. So
Summer: at the time we were helping run a record label. We had just gotten with the
Chris: organization we were with, yeah, we had just gotten hired on, we were with an organization called Catch the Fire, and we were just really coming into our position there as record label directors for them.
And we were serving on a local church, and it just started making sense that we would move out to North Carolina, which is where they’re headquartered between Toronto and Raleigh, North Carolina. So we made that transition got out there two, we were there for two years, but not long after we got there, things shifted and changed and decisions were made that were not necessarily in alignment with why they invited us in the first place.
And they just went a different direction. So we knew. Where they were headed wasn’t compatible with what God has asked us to do. So we were like, it’s time for us to move on and everything’s great. We love everyone there. And it was just time for us to move on. And we were like, so what do we do now?
Because we really had a passion for the record, that industry and helping people get projects out and serving our local church in that capacity. And we laid that all down. We had just moved our family across the. We were pregnant with our fourth child at that point, and I had come to Atlanta to be a part of a, it was for a recording Mav was doing here in Atlanta.
It was random. I was just in the room. It was a Righton camp. I flew here when summer we were like a day away from having our fourth child, and I called her on the phone after being here, being around everyone in Atlanta. I was like, I feel like God is asking us to move to, She was less than 24 hours from having given birth.
And she was like, let’s talk about this after the baby comes, sure. Long story short, it’s cuz it’s a very long story, and I don’t wanna bore your listeners, but we felt like the Lord said to move to Atlanta and the only word we had was move there, sing over the city, sing over the.
Summer: And we had felt like too, that God had spoken and said it’s not that our season for necessarily working on staff for a local church was coming to a close, at least for this season of our life. Yeah, maybe not forever, but we just lived day to day with him, yeah. So we moved here.
We didn’t have a staff job. We actually were gonna go back to work in just some corporate. Settings. Yeah. Real estate and different things. And then still at that point we were itinerating quite a bit, worship leading and we were gonna continue doing that and just really as the Lord leads, with worship stuff.
And not long after we moved here. Yeah. Just the whole job scenario that we thought we were moving here for. Did not exist. Yeah. And so we were like, oh no. Have we missed the Lord? This is wild. We have four kids. What are we doing? Yeah. Yeah. And I’m instantly, in my spirit, I felt the Lord say, you did not miss me.
There are windows that you are given, and it involves decisions on all parties. And so you gave your Yes. Yeah. And not necessarily all parties made the same decision. And so Windows open. And Windows closed. And it was like, that was a revelation moment for me because I feel like in our walk with the Lord, it’s so easy to get stuck in your mind thinking that you’ve missed the Lord or that you didn’t hear him clearly.
Yeah. That things don’t work out because it doesn’t look like you thought. And so for that moment in my life, for him to say, you did not miss me. Your job was to obey. You were obedient. And it requires because of, hu just will, we’re all created with a will to say yes or to make other decisions.
And so the window closed and that job no longer existed and we had a choice to make. Yeah. Of do we run home or do we sit here and walk on water and trust the Lord? Yeah. And we had a supernatural call from a prophet here in town, like we had never met. He called us on the phone and just completely read like our story, exactly what was happening verbatim.
No one knew this stuff, but Chris and I, so we knew that it was a divine moment with the Lord and he basically said, This job scenario is gonna be a repeat scenario for you guys like Jonah and the whale. You guys are called to the ministry. You are called to serve the Lord with your life, and every time you pursue something else, it’s gonna spit you out like the whale.
So we are like, sweet. Here we are again. Okay? We’re supposed to go back full-time into worship and trust ministry and just trust the.
Chris: Yeah. So ever since that word we went back in, this has almost been a year and a half now, 18 months ago. 18 months ago, we went back to what God said, and the thing he asked us to do was sing over the city of Atlanta.
And I was like, man, Lord, can it really be that simple? Is that’s what you want me to do with my life and everything else falls into place because I do the one thing you’ve asked me to do. Yeah. Provision falls into play. Alignment’s fall into. Housing falls into place. And so our story in Atlanta has been one of the lowest lows where we thought we had missed God.
And he has been restoring all of it back to us. E even we can elaborate on this later, but even to the point of now, we have a record label and our music is funded and we’re helping other worship leaders get their projects out. And so it’s like a full circle thing, but we had to walk through.
Valley of where he is. Everything or he, yeah. He was our only option. Jesus is word. We met him as daily bread. Yeah. Like for provision. And that’s been a word
Summer: here. Yeah. Over our life is coming to know him as daily bread. We grew up both of us grew up in like the charismatic, non-denominational kind of circles.
Yeah. And so getting prophetic words. A normal thing. Yeah. In our life and the Lord in this season, the Lord came to me and he. Summer, you’ve spent your whole life focused on all these words that you’ve received and where you think these words are taking you, that you’ve never really come to know me as your daily bread.
Yeah. And it’s not enough for you on the day-to-day as your daily bread, then I’m not gonna be enough for you when you get to the fulfillment of these words. Yeah. Yeah. He has to be enough right now. So this has really been, for us, it has been a journey of coming to know him in 24 hour. He is enough. Yeah.
What is his provision for the day and being fully satisfied in
Chris: that. Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan: Could you give a little advice to amazing story, but I can imagine there’s a lot of listeners that are like, I don’t get these words. I don’t like, God’s not because it sounds like God has very carefully work your way through, and like you said, it’s a daily relationship with the Lord.
Chris: Kind of gives him the space to be able to communicate with us like that.
Ryan: So maybe, and speak to how would someone listening cultivate a heart that’s sensitive
Chris: to God giving this kind of direction? Yeah. It’s, it really, it’s just time spent with him in his presence. And, my sheep know my voice, right?
Like it’s cultivating the intimacy. And closeness to the friend of Jesus and his presence where he’s always speaking to us. And it might not be through a random PR prophetic word from a prophet from around the world, babe. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s the still small voice. But either way it comes out of connection with him, and what is about the intimacy sustaining,
Summer: One of our. Best friends in the uk. He, we did a teach with him one time on intimacy and worship, and he said, Your ability to state at the feet of Jesus and live a life in adoration of him is everything. And he said it like this, he said, your adoration will sustain your assignment, which will sustain your anointing.
Is that Yeah. Do I say it backwards? No, I think that’s it. So it’s, I’m gonna say it again in case you need to cut it. I got I’ll, I know how this works. I think you got it. Yeah. Your adoration of Jesus, being able to just behold him and fix your eyes on him will sustain your anointing. When your anointing is sustained, then it sustains the assignment and you never face burnout.
When you have burnout or if you get tired and you don’t understand what you’re doing anymore, it’s because you’ve moved your place from just sitting at his feet. Yeah. Being able to just, Do everything from that place of being with him. Everything else comes out of that. So what that looks like, if you’re not familiar with that, is time.
Yeah. It’s so simple. It is. There is no checklist that you have to go through. Sometimes it might look like sitting down with a devotional book and spending 45 minutes. Sometimes it might look like turning on a worship song in the. And pouring out your heart to him for five minutes. But time is time.
So when you are best friends with someone, sometimes you get to go spend a weekend away and really connect. Sometimes you get a 20 minute phone call, but it is the day-today connection that builds this sustaining relationship of trust. Yeah. This sustaining relationship of, okay, when this person says something to me, I’m gonna do it because I trust them.
Yeah. Why do you trust? Because you’ve had time with them. So it’s the same with Jesus. It’s, I feel like sometimes in the Christian world, we overcomplicate it. It is just time spent with him. And it doesn’t have to look the same every day. Cuz we’re all in different places in life. Some of us have kids, some of us might be in college, some of us might be dealing with a sick parent or a relative and everyone’s life looks different.
You’re in a different. But what can it look like for you to set aside undivided time and attention for Jesus? And when you give him that space, he will speak to you. Yeah. It’s just giving the space to him. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah. How did you, so
Ryan: talk a little bit about like vocational ministry. How did you guys get into serving at a church?
Like way Yeah, way back. Yeah.
Chris: We actually tried to not do that. That was our, yeah. That was our, to be honest with your listeners is we went to college and university with the idea in mind we don’t want to be on staff at a church. Yeah. And that might have been rebellion. That might have actually just been because of, ministry’s hard.
We had, we were very close to it. Watching her mom and dad navigate the ups and the downs and the bad times and good times and the people can be difficult and it’s just a, it’s such a nuanced thing and it’s not easy to be in ministry. So I think watching them live their life that way made us think.
I wonder if there’s a way we can just serve the church. Cuz we love the church. We love, love, love serving and always will. But how do we. Provide for ourselves so that we’re not like attaching this to money. It’s, that was
Summer: the thing. That was the thing it made it feel for me. It made it feel like I don’t want my drive to have money to live, make this worship and music less pure because I connected it to money.
So that was really the moment.
Chris: Yeah. So for years we, we went and worked other jobs and so I think we did that all of our twenties and we did like volunteer work or contract work. But at 30 years old, it was like the first staff job we took and it was a final realization for us of God calls some people to do this and it’s okay that you’re compensated to do it.
Like it’s a very biblical thing. It’s a very honorable thing to do, and we had to wrestle that out with God in our hearts and ourselves before we were, comfortable enough to even say yes to a staff job. So that journey was a long one where we were in corporate America and doing our thing and he started speaking to our hearts and our mid twenties and we started having kids and.
Started really burning to do it more and it was a very long, maybe a 10 year process, honestly, before we were in ministry. Fulltime what
Summer: like opened the door though was when we started having kids, we thought, yeah, okay, we really wanna establish ourselves in a home church. Yeah. With a set community.
Because before that we had just based on who we were playing or singing for, we had lots of like multiple different church communities. Then when. Decided to start a family. I was like, okay, this was a huge part of my life. Church community. Yeah. Community is roots. You, right? You can do bible studies and watch podcasts and live streams and stuff at home, but the community aspect is what will ground you in your relationship with Jesus.
So we were talking like, okay, we’re having kids. Let’s find a home community. We felt like the Lord led us to this church plant. To be a part of, just from some friendships, honestly, relationships that we had in the city and we went to not even we weren’t gonna lead at any capacity. We just wanted to be a part of the community and it only took a few weeks.
And the board. Opened the door, they were like, Hey, we would love to have you guys serve and be a part. So for the first year, we were not paid staff at all. We were just put on a rotation and we served the body established ourselves in the community and the church grew. And then after the first year of doing that, it transitioned into a part-time role.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Killer. So I don’t think it was never really like the, like full-time vocational ministry was never really like the goal, like the end goal. Yeah. Sure. And we let God open those doors. We trusted him and we’ve never really looked for it. We’ve never applied for a job at any church. It, we just let him open the doors really through relationship, because that seems to work out better, when it’s that way.
Yeah, sure. That’s our journey. Yeah. You guys talk a lot about
Ryan: like purity and worship. Could practically what would us as worship leaders at our churches, like how do we foster, like purity in our worship in a corporate side. We can start corporate and we’ll get deprived to too and all that, but yeah, let’s start corporate.
How do we get, how do we foster that in
Chris: our churches? Yeah. I think for us, we both have different things to say about it. Yeah, I think purity starts with protecting the why. That why we lead worship is because we love Jesus and we want to minister to him his. Why we write songs is because we love to worship Jesus and minister to his heart, and we love to serve our church body with the song.
So I think for us, we get many opportunities to say yes to a whole lot of things and doors open sometimes, and it’s Everything for us has to be filtered through. Is this in alignment with the why? That I do what I do. Otherwise it could get me like a little bit off and I could look up in a few years and be heading in a completely different direction than I ever intended to go.
And I know that now because I’ve done that. You know what I mean? There’s industry, there’s songs, there’s CDs, and now all this stuff, like most people don’t say CDs anymore. Albums me. And all of this stuff that can get our attention and it can quickly become the why that motivates why we even do what we do in the first place.
And it just gets so murky that way. Yeah. So I think just protect the why we love to do it, why we burn to do it. We love to sing a song over our city. It helps us stay pure. It’s not, purity isn’t perfection, it’s just a right heart. It’s a right motive, a right agenda behind everything that we do.
Yeah. Yeah.
Summer: It’s really good. I think the only thing I would add is like a real practical application if you’re a worship leader with the people that you are stewarding. Something that we have always done as like a core thing for our department is we frequently have our team over in our home.
And we dive into just a place of what we call intimate worship. And the reason for that is, is we le, we teach our people that you will never lead any group of people farther than you will lead yourself. So if you cannot lead yourself into this place, into a place of worship with no other agenda, you’re not leading a group of people.
And it doesn’t matter it. You know whether your setting is weekly, you lead 50 people or you’re leading 5,000, it makes no difference cuz at the end we’re all just gonna stand before the Lord. It’s just new and him, yeah. The amount equal that you’re leading, it doesn’t matter at all. It’s how are you able to lead them to a place that you.
Which is hopefully to his feet every single time. It’s like Chris said, it’s the motive. It’s the why. Why? Because we love him. We worship because we get to, not because we have to. So we just always try to create this culture within our people of this is an honor. We get to do this, and we want to do this as a team before we ever try to lead another group of
Chris: people to do it seriously and.
Always encourage, don’t compare yourself. To anybody that you see like online. Just because somebody’s leading worship in arenas doesn’t mean that they’re a more faithful worship leader than the person who’s in the prayer room where there’s four people. It’s consistency and faithfulness and doing the job unto the Lord.
That really excites me and gets my intention I think you can stay pure and when you find yourself comparing, that’s really a sign. Like you gotta check like why you’re doing it in the first place, because
Summer: you’ve just probably pictured off of your walk. Yeah, a little bit. And it’s human nature.
We all do it all
Chris: seriously. I, we were talking to a friend who’s a worship leader, and he is been doing it for years and years, and some of the biggest like places you could imagine all around the world. And I was asking him this question I’m much younger than this guy and I.
What would you share with somebody like me? What was your one takeaway and his, it shocked me what he said. He’s the one thing I fear the most is that my generation have trained an entire younger generation that they have to do it our way, and that if it doesn’t look like what done that they’re not successful.
Yeah. I was like, oh that’s the biggest thing he wants to tell Gen Z. It’s don’t look at what we’ve all done, do you? Yeah. I was really encouraged. Yeah. No, that’s great. I’d love
Ryan: to hear your guys’ thoughts too, cuz that just like immediately spurred to mind the Asbury stuff that has been happening recently.
Chris: Like we have what story there? Yeah. What are your thoughts
Ryan: on that? And cuz that’s clearly, it seems like a group of young people going for something different than what we might be used to seeing all over YouTube and all that. But yeah let’s hear it.
Chris: The unpolished and the unperfected.
Yeah. Go. No,
Summer: I was, I think Chris is gonna share on it, but I was just gonna say really quick, my favorite my favorite thing about Asbury, I think is it has restored the foundational piece of simplicity. Oh yeah. It is so simple. Everything that we have available to us now in 2023 is absolutely amazing, the zooms, the streams, the, you can watch anything from anywhere at any time, however many times you want. It’s amazing and it’s a gift, but what this has done for me is just reignite that piece in my spirit of it is that simple, 16 kids. Stayed late after a regular chapel. There was nothing special going on.
Nobody told him to do it. It was just, I think I wanna worship a little bit longer today. And God always shows up for the hungry. Yeah. And it was 16 people with, no public names that people know, and they had no agenda. They had no idea that was gonna happen. And so I think what it does is it resets if you allow.
It can reset this sting and you like, oh, this could be anywhere at any time. Yeah. We can have
Chris: this
Summer: anywhere at any time. There is the opportunity for an outpouring of
heaven.
Chris: Come on. Yes. Oh, it’s exciting, man. Like I our, I wanna tell a story about our babysitter actually. She’s a worship leader.
She’s, how old is she? She’s 20.
Summer: 20. Or 21.
Chris: 21. Yeah. Her name is Seren. And she just moved here to work at a satellite church. So she’s very new in the, in, in that job and really doing great. Yeah, but she she, so she asks us for advice on how to, worship, leading and all this stuff cuz we’re probably 17.
We won’t say how much. We’re a good bit older than her. And so she’s asking us for insight and I just love what God did in my heart. She and her friends drove up to Asbury and I know I’ve seen like all the all the worship leaders that have gone up there and I’ve even heard stories of the big names Operan to help and all this stuff.
And I don’t have anything against big name famous worship leaders. It is what it is. Like it, I love them. I have a lot of friends, but I just love that Serena goes up there randomly. She’s in college. And happened to be walking in the right spot and one of the students from Asbury say, Hey, we don’t have anybody to lead this next worship set.
We need some help. And so she gets up on stage and leads worship for four hours at the Asbury Revival. Somebody that had been asking us for like wisdom, God uses, Til Lee worship at a, an outpouring, I was humbled by that. I’m like, man, it’s just God can do what he wants to do with who he wants to do it with, and it’s really not up to us to decide.
Yeah, sure. Any of it. It’s really like a weight off the shoulders and super refreshing.
Summer: Our job is just the obedience. You just are obedient to what you feel like he’s asking you to do. Yeah. And that’s it.
Chris: That’s great. What,
Ryan: So advice for younger worship leaders, like I, I’m in education.
We got a lot of worship majors at the college I’m at, they’re intending to get into full-time vocational worship ministry and just learning all the foundations. Like what? Your journey. You guys didn’t start out saying, I wanted, like you, if anything, you were trying to push away from getting into full-time ministry.
But what advice would you have for those young people that are like, this is what God’s calling me to do, and I’m gonna equip myself and I’m gonna go to it. What kind of advice do you got for ’em?
Chris: Yeah. I think a lot of what we said would be applicable. Don’t compare, serve. Yeah. Surround yourself with people that you know are like-minded like they’re like spirit that you’re going after the same things.
Make sure that if you say yes to a job at a church, that you fully know their vision, their mission, their state, like what they’re about. Yeah. Because that’ll protect your relationship like 10 years in, if all of a sudden things aren’t what you thought they were. You can always point back to okay, who got off?
Was it me or what did the church change? And you can just navigate it easier. Inevitably, I hate to say it cuz it sounds hard. Things are gonna happen. You’re gonna get disappointed. It might even be betrayed. Church or not, it’s life. It’s gonna happen. Yeah. It’s anywhere it, you’re gonna get hurt and you’re gonna have the opportunity to navigate that with Jesus.
And the good news is Jesus will always be there to navigate it with you and you might have to leave where you’re at and go find another job elsewhere. Yeah. I would just say on the front side. Proper conversations. Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions so that you can understand fully what you’re saying yes to, and then go for it and serve and be consistent and be faithful.
Don’t worry about becoming famous. Be faithful, and you’ll have a great career. Yeah. Good.
Summer: I think I would have two, two things. Looking back at this point in our journey, the first thing we’ve already touched on a bit. Don’t ever remove yourself from living a life at his feet. That is gotta be your grounding spot.
Yeah. Whether you’re on the highest mountain top or the darkest valley. You gotta stay at his feet because there is no better seat. Yeah. And you can reground. If you considered his feet, then you know his voice. And no matter what you’re navigating in life, if you can hear his voice, yeah. You can navigate it.
It’s, that’s like my one goal as a parent for my children, is that when they leave my house, they know how to hear the voice of the Lord, because I can’t protect and prevent all the things in. But if they can hear his voice, they can reset and re-anchor. Yeah. And I think my second piece of advice would be surround yourself with people.
The caliber of people that are going in the direction that you wanna go. Yeah. Because. Chris said, stuff happens and where nobody’s above it, like you will just make decisions and they’re not the best decision. And when you’re in the middle of it, you are unable to see it sometimes, but it’s those people around you, they can help that can come in and speak in and help pull you out and you will not be stuck and you won’t have the feeling of being stuck.
We are called to be. People who live in community, which I know we touched on already, but it’s so important. You can’t isolate. You gotta lean in. Yeah. Because inevitably when the seasons and the journeys of life are going, having that community will pull you through. You’re never meant to do it on your own.
Seriously. Yeah. So if you’re feeling that pool to isolate, you just got to put that head down and go the opposite direction, because that is such. Such a ploy of the enemy is I just need to buckle down and get through this on my own. Yeah, no, if you’re feeling that dive into the people that you’ve surrounded yourself with and they will pull you
Chris: through.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think one last thing I’ll say on it is treat it like a job. Work hard, like if you’re a musician and you’re a worship leader, work really hard at your craft, practice your instrument, get really excellent at it, biblically, right? Levi? They were the most skilled, most annoying, super professional.
They were hired by a king to do a job. Those guys didn’t mess around with their craft. They took it serious. So I would say dive in and get serious. If it’s learning Ableton or pro tools or whatever you need to do to mix, if. If you’re wanting to do something you know, in ministry and last a long time, be disciplined and diligent in your craft and hone your skills.
Yeah, sure. So you I’d love
Ryan: to hear your guys’ thoughts too. The other side of this, like worship, leading, vocational thing is often there’s a pressure and it’s easy for us to release. There’s a pressure to release music and singles and every Friday I wanna get my thing out. Could you maybe speak to I’m gonna serve my church and I wanna write songs for my church.
And you guys have navigated now I want my songs to be able to reach others. What is that? Speak to that tension a little bit. And how do you know when is it time to push into that?
Chris: Oh man, that is a big one. I I don’t think that every church necessarily needs to be releasing albums.
Sure. I don’t think I don’t think that every worship leader is called to make records. I, I. But you’ll know when it’s time. So the tension is this only God. So if we start off and our mindset is to, I wanna write a song that every church in the world sings. We’re already way out, out of line, like we’ve seen it over and over again. Only God. Can blow his blessing and wind behind somebody’s song and make it go around the world. Even in the systems that we’ve built in the worship industry. When you think about how many people are writing songs, how like some of these writers are writing three or four songs a day, all all your round, and there’s only a few songs that.
The C CLI top 100 is only 100, right? It’s like right of all the, hundreds of thousands of songs. These are the ones God’s really chosen to minister. And some of those
Summer: have been the same song for years. For years.
Chris: I was gonna say,
Ryan: there’s some sitting on top. Pull it up. There’s probably 10,000 reasons be right there.
It’s been there for a
Chris: right there. i bill, my life is gonna be there for a minute cuz it’s such, God chooses what he wants his body to. I would say don’t start with that as your why, cuz it’ll lead you down the road at disappointment. Trust us from experience. Cause like we thought that had to be the thing we pursued, years and years ago.
But write, if you feel the call to write, like what is your church’s song? What’s going on in your body? Focus in on that. That’s really worth finding out. What is our tribe called to release over our city? Because that’s where we can be immediately impactful and there’s, and it seems ethereal or whatever, a nebulous I wanna sing over my city.
But we know, just read the Bible about how important that is. Sing your church’s song over your city and if God asks you to record it, then record it and give it your. Try to be excellent, but don’t ever do it with the pressures of making money off of it and that it would go around the world. I think that’s really dangerous.
Sure, and I hope I answered your question.
Ryan: Yeah, I think so. That’s great.
Summer: I do think though, I’ll add really quick, it’s it is really important to steward the writing in your own. Church body though. Yeah. There’s nothing wrong with doing covers and doing the songs that are new and fresh or even old and you just love ’em cuz you, you had an encounter with the Lord during it.
We personally, we lead with a combination style. So by that I mean we will lead brand new. We will lead hymns, we will lead songs that came out 20, 30 years ago. Yes. And then we’ll lead originals songs that we’ve written, and we are super intentional that everywhere we go it’s usually a combination of all those.
And our thought process is, We want to give opportunity for whoever is in the room to have a moment to connect with the heart of the father. Yeah. And you just do a wide array, of songs you don’t wanna get stuck on only doing songs that you’ve written. Cuz that can get really difficult for people to connect to.
Yeah. You don’t wanna necessarily just do all the brand new stuff because there is something about. Holiness on some of the stuff that is out from 30, 40 years ago when God did amazing outpourings from then, yeah. Yeah. So we do a combination style, but cultivating a riding within your own body is so important because we, yeah.
We believe in part of what we do when we teach is every region has a. And part of our prayer, whenever we’re praying and crying out into the Lord and we’re traveling and leading is God, give me the ears to hear your song over this region right now. Yeah. So if you’re in a region and you have a worship leading job, And you’re leading there every single week.
God can give you the ability to hear the songs and the sounds of that region and cultivating that opportunity within your group of people to write and connect with that and release songs is so powerful. Yeah. Because it connects with what he’s already doing in that land. Does that make. Yeah, totally.
Ryan: You, you touched on a little bit like giving, getting people to like an intimate moment with the Lord, and that kind of touches on, I think what you guys call throne room worship. Could you maybe explain like practically how do you set up, not a set up, but like how do you foster that kind of a posture?
Posture that posture and rhyming Anyway, you got it.
Chris: Oh yeah, your picture. Oh, yeah. Simplest. This is a, it’s a, the simplest that we’ve brought it down to it’s a big theological conversation. I’m not sure I’m equipped to handle alone, but throne room worship, there’s worship around us Throne 24 7 and.
And these guys are casting their crowns and everyone’s singing Holy, holy. Like every, and we always imagine, it’s every time he reveals a new side of his face, there’s just this new response of, oh my goodness. Holy. You know what I mean? Yeah I just, we lead people where we go. So we do this at home.
And I wish we could do it more but because it’s so fun, we just we get into this pockets in worship. Where, and some people may know exactly what I’m talking about. This is where it gets a bit out there. We get into these pockets of worship and you can feel the room responding to God and we sing these corporate songs like that, like 10,000 Reasons everybody knows the words.
Yeah. So they’re less like, they’re less in their head and they’re more engaged. Like vertically with him because they’re singing something. They know it’s a corporate beautiful sound. So I asked the Lord the question, okay, God, what is happening? Whenever we can feel the shift in the room or like we feel you in a greater way.
In a moment. Like where we always say, oh man, it feels like he just walked into the room. He was already there before, but now it’s there’s. His presence just got intensified. I was just processing with the Lord, like what is happening in that moment? And I feel like he showed me a picture where he was sat on the throne and he was breathing in the incense of worship coming from our local church.
And he was the, I could see the fragrance rising and I could see him breathing it in and receiving our worship and he was so blessed and he had a smile on his face and he was really loving what we were doing and. The shift happened when cuz I think this is part of our role as a worship leader, is to not only teach people how to sing songs that have been written, but how to sing their song.
The spontaneous praise that he inhabits. Yeah. Where everyone in the room is singing their own song. And we give space for that in our worship sets where I’ll encourage, all right, everybody, give him a song, sing him a song, sing your heart song back to him. And that would be the moment where I’d feel that shift oh, something just happened.
Maybe that’s him coming to life in the praises of his people. And I saw this picture of the father on the throne receiving worship, and then I saw as everyone in the room started singing their own. He put his hand behind his ear and he got to the edge of his seat and he was really listening and I felt like he was just saying that’s where that intensified like presence comes because he loves when people worship and in corporate, but he also loves it when everybody in the room is singing a spontaneous song of love to him.
Yeah, so I, we call that that’s the throne room. That’s that moment. Yeah, I think that’s as much as I
Summer: can, that’s a really good visual aid, I think to, what it, the difference of singing a corporate song versus just the intimate Yeah, sure. The intimate worship time with the Lord is It really draws him.
Draws him in.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ryan: That. Let’s hear a little bit about your album. Like what, what’s Scott doing with that? How do people get connected with you? How do they find all that? Oh, yeah.
Chris: Oh, we would love that. Yeah. We’re on, we’re Sheely worship on all the DSPs, all the platform, Spotify, apple, YouTube.
So we’ve got like almost two years worth of worshiping sets, like from right here in this room up on YouTube that are super intimate. But yeah, we’re releasing singles. We’ve just put out a song called Your Presence. Okay. And it went live, I think February 3rd. And we wrote that song in a really sweet songwriting session while our family was in Glasgow, Scotland last year.
Last year we spent the entire month of September over with our friends at Global Prophetic Alliance. We were working with them. Our family was there. We wrote this song, we were in a songwriting session and we were just getting nowhere and we paused and said, let’s just worship. So we started worshiping and that song came out of that.
So your presence just released? We are currently we just recorded our next single, that’ll be out in the month or so, but we’re putting
Summer: out several singles this year. Our last album that came out was last year.
Chris: She, yeah, Sheely Worship Live from Global Awakening. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Randy Clark and Dr.
Clark and Global Awakening. Yeah. We traveled a good bit with those guys and we recorded an album over the course of a year, I think, at different venues all around the country and Yeah, sure. Put that out. Yeah. Last August and it’s a 10 song album. Yep. Really cool. Lots of fun moments there. Our weekly
Summer: worship that Chris touched on is something very special to our heart the Lord asked us to do.
Yeah. We started no matter 20, right? Yeah. During Covid actually, yeah. No,
Ryan: I was gonna say two years. That sounds like a Covid project. That’s awesome.
Summer: Yeah. Cause, it started out just something for our local church at the time, cuz at that time we were on. And then when the mandates and stuff started lifting, we felt our, the Lord say, will you give me this offering every week?
Yeah. And so we’ve just been faithful to that. We release, it’s just prayer and worship about 30 to 40 minutes set every Tuesday night. But it’s we have a YouTube station, Sheila Worship. You can subscribe to that and that post every week. And then we also post. Live worship moments and that kind of stuff on our YouTube as well.
Chris: Yeah. Thanks
Ryan: for listening to this week’s episode. As always, shoot us a DM on Instagram. We would love to connect with you. God bless.