Podcast Transcript
Ryan Loche: Welcome to the Church Collective Podcast. In this episode, myself and Chris had the opportunity to talk to Josh and Jariel from Saddleback Worship. Yep, that Saddleback. It was an incredible conversation just hearing about their new album. Awesome to talk to them about how they actually managed to do 20 or so campuses, and I think you’re going to really enjoy this. So here we go with the Church Collective Podcast.
Josh Miller: Yeah. Jariel and I get to serve with Saddleback Worship and our global worship pastor, John Cassetto in this season, we’ve, our church as a whole has been leaning into Saddleback. What does it mean to grow in prayer culture and Okay, and in our wor in our worship culture.
And so like in this current season, what’s been really special is to just see what the Lord is doing in those spaces. Like we have a prayer meeting every week and we have. The times of worship at our weekend services, it’s feels like new and fresh wind blowing through our church. And so with that comes new songs.
Jariel Navarro: Like I felt like anytime the Lord starts to send new wind, oftentimes like new melodies and new lyrics start to come that are tethered to the vision of the house in the church and Jariel can speak into that too, but I don’t know, don’t you think like the last 18 months we had a big pastoral transition This little pastor named Rick Warren passed the baton to Andy and Stacey Wood.
And it’s just building off of all the things God has been doing to Saddleback Church.
Josh Miller: And we find ourselves in a really sweet season.
Jariel Navarro: Yeah. And I think, um, it’s been really sweet to see the change in many different areas. And just when we look back and see how many good things have come out. Of this church and we love this church and just understanding that the Lord’s always doing something new and with Andy’s leadership, there was an emphasis of Jesus being the hero of the story.
He’s always been the hero. He will continue to be. the hero. And in his teaching to us, the worship leaders, worship teams at Saddleback, he’s just been emphasizing how important it is to keep him in the center of our songs and our worship. And I remember even having conversations with Josh maybe, A couple of years ago, dreaming about what the future is how about worship was.
And I always, I used to tell him, we need to make music that we sing at church.
We need to record something at our church. So I think that was part of the dream of this new album.
Josh Miller: Yeah, it’s actually the first live album we’ve ever done. And so just capturing the sound of our church and the people of our church, it’s been really special.
Jariel Navarro: Yeah.
Ryan Loche: Yeah. I’d love to hear, I’m sure someone, a bunch of people that are listening are resonating with the idea of we have to write music for our churches in our churches. So can you maybe speak to, how did that get going? What was that culture like? Like you said, this is the first live recording.
So what kind of stirred to move you guys into? Putting this together in a way and in the midst of it keeping it pointed at your church versus we got to make an album And then distribute it everywhere because that’s always where things end up going But how do you stay grounded kind of what advice would you give that local worship leader?
Josh Miller: Yeah,
Ryan Loche: I love that. I
Josh Miller: think Jarrell mentioned it But when Andy so our goal is always to be tethered to our lead pastor.
Jariel Navarro: What is our lead pastor saying? What’s coming out of the sermons? What’s the vision? And we never want to go ahead. And we also don’t want to be too far behind. We want to be in lockstep with what the Spirit is saying to our lead pastor.
And I remember, because we have 20 campuses, just to give some context, we have 20 campuses. And We want every campus to be unified in saying these are the words, these are the melodies that God is giving our house collectively.
Josh Miller: And when Andy said, we want Jesus is going to be the hero of the Saddleback story, songs of surrender started to be written because we really believed that we were entering a season where we were going to put it on the altar as a church, as a community.
As our church, we’re going to say, we’re surrendering our preferences and our maybe personal goals, and we’re just going to give it to you, Lord, and see what you do when we surrender all to you. And so that was the theme of this project is saying, Lord, you can do way more with our surrender than you can do with our surrender.
Selfish ambition or because we can do you know at churches as ministers We can do a lot on our own strength Like we’re in positions because we have a we have talent and we have skill
Jariel Navarro: But at the end of the day the Lord really blesses and puts his favor on something that surrendered to him and what he wants to do through that church and for that church and I feel like albums are always markers for churches.
I don’t, I think churches release albums to mark the season they’re in. And this one was no different. We just want to be surrendered to the Lord and saying, we’re yours, Lord. We have open hands to do whatever you want to do.
Yeah. And in the process of doing that and writing these songs, we just actually starting, started singing the songs at all the campuses before the songs were released, before the recording happened, we just started Opening these declarations of faith of surrender just to see if they resonated with our people and us, and we realized that they did, and it was really encouraging to see what the Lord was doing through these songs, putting in the lips of our people.
Ryan Loche: Yeah, I’d love to hear your guys thoughts, like you’ve said multiple times, like the music that’s pointed towards Jesus, and that’s a modern criticism often of worship music, is it tends to be very me centric. There’s a, maybe not a modern criticism that’s been going on since hymns, right? There’s always Oh, this is too much about me and not enough about Jesus.
Speak, speak to that tension.
Josh Miller: Yeah, that’s a good question that I think we’re still wrestling with like I think Before we be like after we were after we captured the album We have still been on this journey of what’s the ratio between like songs? that have me language and what I’ve called throne room songs or songs that are like your holy lord, your worthy songs about the cross resurrection and return.
Like what’s the ratio between all the songs? And I think it’s hard. I don’t really have a, like a for sure answer. I know the Psalms have a lot of verbiage around me Lord, I’m in despair rescue me. There’s a lot of that language in the Psalms, but I do find it that something shifts in the room when a bulk of our songs are centered around, this is who the Lord is, vertical songs straight to him.
Like the room shifts because the attention becomes on the Lord. And we’ve been saying recently,
Jariel Navarro: our worship pastor and Pastor Andy has been saying the first step in our worship leading is to bless the Lord. That’s our first and primary goal is to bless the Lord. And out of the overflow of that, people will be ministered to.
Yeah. And I think understanding that different songs have different purposes. I’m a firm believer that the assembly of the people is for the purpose of worshiping God. We focus on the Lord and from that blessings flow. Um, there’s other songs that, might have more of a me language.
And those are the songs that maybe. Awaken the faith in the people or even the songs that declare our need of him because of my condition right now, that kind of songs and the Lord can and will use anything. I also believe that, so if if a whole room is singing a song, that’s not this, let’s say it’s a me song, but then faith arises from that the Lord will use it.
He, that’s what he wants from us.
Josh Miller: Yeah. That’s great. Sorry. And some of those me songs might be good for the drive to drop your kids off school and like your devotional time. And then maybe you don’t put that in your weekend set. Maybe the weekend set has a bigger bulk of like declaration songs or vertical songs, but yeah.
And when you
Jariel Navarro: see even in revelations, when you see the throne room and what the elders and the angels are singing, and even the jars filled with the oil, that is the prayers of the people, it’s all of it is about the lamb, the one that is worthy to break the seals. And, so even when Jesus gave his body, his life for us, he became the master, the priest, the ultimate sacrifice.
And he gave us all priesthood, right? So that means that every person in church, every Christian everyone who said yes to him. It’s supposed to bring their offering to the Lord because we don’t depend on, I can’t bring an offering for Josh and Josh can’t bring an offering for me. And the offering is only to the Lord.
So I think that’s why the focus on him from that everything flows.
Chris Bellamy: Talk about the like the timeline, like when did you decide you’re going to do a live album? And then what was pre production like just the entire process for I guess to encourage other churches that may be thinking they have no clue what goes into making an album,
Josh Miller: yeah. Yeah, and it’s, I feel like every church will probably do it different because it’s always You always have to think through like the rhythm of your church and especially at Saddleback.
I don’t know of a slow month at Saddleback. We’re doing stuff all year round, but basically from beginning is we were always typically writing. And then we also do what we call like writing retreats as team and bringing in collaborators along the way that, that help us along the way.
Partners people like Mitch Wong and Kyle Lee and Lucas and Evelyn Cortazio, different people who come alongside and say, Hey, we want to help build Saddleback. Like we want to help give new language and melodies for your church. We spent several months writing, and then Jariel said, we just identified, hey, these are the songs that need to be on the lips of our people.
And maybe we introduce it at a staff meeting or a midweek service. Maybe we, it then gets to a place where we want to lead on a weekend. And we’re just testing songs to see which ones are resonating and which ones are going to push the vision forward. And then once we’ve decided, okay. These are the songs that we want to record.
Then it’s the hard part of deciding who’s going to carry these songs. Which worship leaders from our church need to carry these songs? And, That’s always hard, right? Because there’s so many people that can sing the songs, but just being prayerful in this season, which ones need to carry the songs.
And then the producer, we have a producer on staff, Mike Coppolis. He’s thinking through, production and texture and the arc of the album. Just how many songs that you can clap to, how many mid tempo songs. We’re also thinking about the arc language wise. How do we, what’s the journey we want to bring people on?
And then in pre production, we’re, we’ve selected the band, we’ve selected the vocals, and we’re ironing out parts. Guitar parts. They’re getting in the room and they’re figuring out, okay, what’s electric guitar one playing, what’s electric guitar two playing bass parts, drum parts, and we’re actually we have a little makeshift studio space and we’re recording all the parts to figure out which parts sound good together as a whole, or we’re singing the songs together in rehearsal.
And then we recorded. I think it was June 15 June 15, we invited our church family. We packed out the worship center and we just sang the songs and the church came and sang so loud. It was so beautiful. That was like the highlight of the whole experience is seeing our church family sing the songs.
And immediately after that, we just go into listening to. The takes and starting the mixing process and figuring out what’s the right mix for each song. And then through the whole time, and this was like a huge learning for us is
Jariel Navarro: I don’t think it’s ever too early to invite. People to the table that are good with like visuals.
Just what’s the story of the album? What are the visuals? Like the cover art is an altar in front of an infinity mirror. And like people who have that eye I don’t know how they do it. That they can just see things that I can’t see. And it’s like that. passage of scripture where like the different parts of the body coming together to, to be the body of Christ.
Josh Miller: Like they were at the table and there was, they were just thinking this is what we see. This is how the visuals will pair with the audio. And we just went through the mixing process and get it mixed and mastered. And we released the whole album in February. And yeah, that’s it in a nutshell.
It’s it’s like a year long process. writing the songs to when it’s released, but it took so many people to make it happen.
Chris Bellamy: Did you film the footage at your church, at the main campus?
Josh Miller: Yeah. So it was at the Lake Forest campus, which is the original campus. And we just invited all of our campuses to be part of it.
So you had like, all the campuses, production people, volunteers coming together to help with the stage setup The camera set up all the things we had worship leaders from all campuses be part of the night Serving on platform serving off platform. It was really a cool like all church like opportunity
Chris Bellamy: Yeah, I was thinking cuz the last time I’ve been to Saddleback like I mean I swear the entire stage was like half of them had played with Michael Jackson She was like, able to boil junior was on, I was just like, what is, what kind of worship is this, and so like, how can you even with that many like heavy hitter musicians and creatives, like how do you even, like most churches are just dying for people. And I feel like you guys, it’s like, how do you even decide who is going to participate?
Josh Miller: I would say like Saddleback has taken very many forms of like different seasons of Saddleback.
And what the thing I’ve always said is like, what we have now, what we do is stands on the foundation and the shoulders of the legends who’ve come before. So I remember like Rick Machow used to be the worship pastor. He transitioned out. John Cassetto came in and Rick Machow. Stayed such a solid mentor and friend to Saddleback and was so gracious with the new wave of worship leaders coming in.
And there was a day at Saddleback where, like you said, those type of musicians were on every weekend. And it’s, I think we just find ourselves in a different season of. of different volunteers, different people who are just coming in to try to build the church. We have 20 campuses and there’s a lot of different sizes.
Lake Forest is our biggest campus, but we have lots of set up, tear down campuses where you just have people with normal nine to five jobs coming in and volunteering their Sunday to play guitar. And that’s just how they serve the church. And so it’s taken different shapes And
Jariel Navarro: yeah, it definitely looks different.
And it’s been a sweet season. I remember coming I came to Saddleback right during COVID and I remember Pastor John talking about this new value of empowering volunteers. It’s our volunteers who build a church. It’s our volunteers who are ministers. And back then, because we were coming out of COVID, it felt very overwhelming because everyone was scared of the virus and, churches were starting to open again and.
A lot of churches, lost people, all these kinds of variables, but everyone stacked hands on that. And we seen such beautiful fruit of just volunteers. Again, like you said, that have nine to fives, but on the weekends, they just give it all to the church and to the Lord with their gifts. It’s been really cool.
Really cool. Yeah.
Chris Bellamy: Talk about like, for instance, like Ryan has left California and moved to Nashville. And. Half the people that I do gigs with have moved from California to Nashville. What is like the atmosphere in California? Because there’s like a stigma that there’s like a hiatus from people leaving California, right?
But I have a bunch of family there and I know for a fact that there’s You know, Christianity is alive and there. But like, how do you navigate that, that like transitional period that it seems like the whole country’s in?
Josh Miller: Yeah, I mean there’s probably a lot of layers to it.
I love Nashville. I was just there last week, and it’s just such a beautiful place. People, creatives. I think some of the beautiful parts of Nashville is like you’re around people who do what you do, and there’s a camaraderie around Being around like minded people. Um, it’s expensive in California.
I’ll say that. I think though,
Jariel Navarro: I think for me and the friends that I’ve known that have moved out, I think it always has to come down to calling. Like where’s the intersection of calling and assignment, like God called you to do something, but your assignment is where God called you to do it. And I think.
I think the people I’ve known, the assignment changed and given all of the variables of their situation, their assignment became Nashville. But I’m just of the belief that the Lord wants, there needs to be a great awakening in both locations, Nashville and California for different reasons.
Josh Miller: I think
Jariel Navarro: every culture, every state, every county needs to be awakened in some way.
And I think for us here in California, we just feel like our assignment is to be the hands and feet of Jesus and saying, you want to do another great awakening on this earth. And we believe that you’re going to do it here in California. We believe that you’re sending something fresh and new here and the same for our friends in Nashville.
God wants to do something extraordinary in Nashville and the people that are there, God’s going to do it through them.
Josh Miller: God’s going to equip them to be the hands and feet for that as well.
Jariel Navarro: Yeah.
Chris Bellamy: Sorry, Brandon. Sorry you’re under the bus.
Ryan Loche: It’s a tangible step. Think there’s a, there’s an individual, as being one of those refugees or whatever, there’s a story behind every one of them.
Yeah, there’s a calling that the Lord uses. But as I’m hearing everything you’re talking about, and it’s still just reeling thinking about how on earth do you manage so many campuses all the time? And it does come down to treating your volunteers.
right and and not even just treating them well and bringing them donuts and all like we can do all that, but spiritually fostering what they’re doing and helping them come to their calling. Could you maybe give us some tangible stuff? Because obviously you’re doing something right to be able to even field a team like that.
Someone’s listening saying, I don’t even have a drummer this weekend. What are you, what on earth are you guys doing? What are you doing to get so much engagement out of them? How are you empowering them? Just give us a little glimpse into your volunteer discipleship process, I guess.
Josh Miller: I definitely want Jariel to speak on this because, so Jariel was part of one of our regional campuses and now he’s at Lake Forest, which is our original campus. If you want to call it like the flagship campus, it’s where things are broadcasted from. I think one of the most fundamental things, and this is from top down communicated from John, is the passage, let love be your highest goal.
And what we mean by that is there’s gotta be this bedrock and foundation of love and respect towards each other in the sense that how we communicate how we train volunteers. If things are feeling weird from camp, we call it central. Which is like the team that helps support 20 campuses. If things aren’t feeling right, regional campus leads need to have the freedom to call me up or call someone else up from central and saying, Hey, that email didn’t feel good, like the way you said that.
And then the way that it was resourced, it didn’t feel great. And on central, I need to have the posture of say of saying. Okay, I respect that. That’s great feedback. I’m going to try to do better next time. The way we communicate to each other, the way we love and respect one another, because we can get into systems and processes.
It’s always going to be different for every church. Like we try to resource all of our campuses with, with charts, tracks band vocal ISOs. We try to make that as clean and great as possible on planning center. But at the bedrock, we have to have a culture of love. We have to be able to say, Hey, I didn’t hit that the way I wanted to.
I’m going to do better next time. And recently with new leadership. We’ve talked a lot about a culture of feedback. Like we not only want to say, yeah, you can give feedback. We like want to we want to like champion it and say. We need to have consistent feedback because if it’s not working for campuses, the way we resource, the way we develop, the way we ask for people, then if it’s not working, then it’s not working.
We need to change it. We dial it in. What is your you have a good perspective cause you were at a campus.
Jariel Navarro: Yeah. Yeah. I loved. I still love my people. I, it’s very recent that I moved. But I remember coming in Turbine South. Like I said, it was all online and I got a list of like 30 volunteers.
And I remember within 30 days, I had 30 coffees with people, with my, whoever was down or Zooms for the people that wanted to do Zooms. And then, from that into starting in person services again, and getting to know them in person, getting to know them, how they served and seeing some of my volunteers because they were moving out of state and, the struggle of, Having to use the same volunteer over and over again, because we’re short on a drummer or But from that, always focused on building relationships.
I would, once I noticed natural groups of people, how it’s, they make friends or there’s inclinations on this group. And then in this group, I started identifying those and just having them over for dinner at my house and just having, relationship with them.
So he was like deeply relational and deeply developmental. I would do 30 minute singing lessons on zoom with whoever was interested in just, we’re going to go over this song that I want you to lead and I’m a get you there. And from that, just like making personal asks on the weekend in the patio and doing vocal workshops on Tuesday nights and starting a choir and, doing band workshops.
And from there, I feel like God put in my heart, you gotta, you need leaders. You need to develop these people to become leaders. So all of, one step after the other, I feel like it was all about building from the bottom and for them to take the ministry into their own hands. And I think that’s effective when, what is it you buy into what you, I can’t remember the phrase, but it’s when you have something that you can contribute to, that makes you excited.
Yeah, there’s a buy in
Josh Miller: there. Yeah. And I think, just to be honest too you don’t have to have, 20 campuses to, to have the struggle of at the end of the day, we’re creatives, so we’re not always the best in things like admin and organization. Like I’ll be the first student, I’m terrible at it, but I think as long as you have the posture of a servant, like I want to do the best I can to make sure communication is done as best as possible so that production volunteers, everyone.
is getting good communication. Cause I think in our space between worship production, leadership, good communication might be one of the best ways to showcase your love for each other. Yeah. Whether that’s like cleaning up your processes and your documents and how far out you think about things on planning center and flow and program.
If you can communicate effectively. That might be one of the best ways you showcase your love for you. And
Jariel Navarro: when you do that, when you create a good record of good communication and being responsible and organized, when something comes up and you have to throw a curve ball to one of your volunteers, they’ll take it like nothing because they’re used to you being a good steward of what the Lord’s given you and the leadership that you have in your hands.
Ryan Loche: Yeah, that’s good. From the Oh, go ahead, Ryan. I was, like, from your perspective, I’m moving to the volunteer side. I’d love to hear what do you look for when you’re identifying people? You’re going to start a choir, so that takes a lot of people. Are you inviting anybody and everybody and letting it sift itself out?
What is it that draws you to somebody? This is coming from even the volunteer worship leader or somebody at the church. It’s I want to get involved in worship ministry. What would you look for in them? What should they be working for if they want to get involved in their church?
Jariel Navarro: I think different seasons call for different strategies and, if you’re in a season where you’re really needed, I feel like you’re probably gonna lower your standards a little bit, but there’s always, you, let’s say we always do auditions before we onboard anyone in our teams and, when they, you gotta, if it’s a vocalist, you gotta, You got to see that they can sing in tune even if they have a little bit of pitch problems that they have an ear for music, and maybe you identify, can they sing a harmony or can they not?
Cause can this musician get through a whole song without stumbling? And if they stumble, how bad was it? Can they get, get them themselves back up? So I also think it will depend on how much work you’re willing to put or how much capacity you, you have to work on them, because if you’re in a season where this is all you have and your only goal is to develop the people, then you can, give yourself room for a bit.
To be more flexible.
Josh Miller: Yeah, one of the things we talked about at a worship summit a few years ago, we do this worship summit for all of our worship staff at our campuses. We get away for three days and pray and figure out what the vision is for the new year. One of the things we talked about one year was identifying for, in our teams the crawl, walk, run.
Like method like in our team who’s crawling so you’re super beginners Who’s walking that intermediate musician singer, they can get through a song It’s bumpy at times, but they’re pretty solid and then our run Who’s running, who are the they’re super ahead of the pack. And how do we invite the people who are running to help those who are crawling?
That’s really good.
Jariel Navarro: Yeah.
Josh Miller: So like, how are we duplicate, like multiplying ourselves? Cause I think about
Jariel Navarro: I grew up in a church of. 70 people growing up and I’m a small church guy, like that’s just who I am. And I, when I was leading worship in a church that size I didn’t have a staff with me.
Like it was me and I was in college, so I wasn’t really, I wasn’t getting paid either. So I was like, who on my team can I trust? To develop the other people on the team. Like, how can I multiply myself so that, because you can’t do it all yourself.
Josh Miller: And that’s our culture as staff is we can’t do it all ourselves.
If we will burn out and we won’t be effective. So who are the core people on our team that are super solid? That’s good. They’re great musicians. They have great hearts. And how are we asking them to help develop those that are crawling? Yeah. And Jariel did, man, he was so good at it because there wasn’t a week that went by where he didn’t have people at his house.
Investing in them and empowering them to lead the ministry. ’cause we, that’s been a thing for Saddleback is empower the volunteers to lead the ministry. We’re as staff, we’re administrator, so we are administrating so that the volunteers carry the mantle of leadership of leading the ministry.
And we’re just helping them grow into their full potential as ministers. Love it.
Chris Bellamy: Going back to the album. Obviously you guys have tested these songs on your church. If say a church wants. They want one song from the album, and they don’t want to go through, try every single one of them.
What would be like the one song that you’d, hey, this could be really awesome at your church?
Josh Miller: I think it’s Christ Forever. I think there’s like a handful of songs that, man, I would be so stoked if the, if it was on the lips of The capital C church, but I think Christ forever. I don’t hear a lot of surrender songs.
Like there, there are out there and there’s some good ones. I there’s good surrender songs, but like anytime we can give fresh language around a posture of a posture, like surrender. I think of acts in him. We live and move and have our being like anytime we can put fresh melody and lyrics around that scriptural truth.
I think it’s always a win for the church. I’d probably say Christ forever.
Jariel Navarro: Definitely. It’s also very, it feels very corporate, very easy to sing, very easy to follow, very easy to learn. Yeah.
Chris Bellamy: So that’s the one with Mitch Wong on it, right? Yeah. How did you get connected?
Josh Miller: Yeah, so we we were in town and we were able to set up a write with him and I would say he’s I can go on and on about Mitch.
I think he’s just a wonderful person. But one of the things I love about Mitch is there’s a purity. to just who he is in Christ. And it felt like we just started talking and I immediately felt like we had been brothers for years. Like he has that gift of, like Paul, he could go into any environment and just build a relationship with people.
And I think being able to carry that song with him was such a there’s something on Mitch’s life that is just beautiful and it’s radiant. And he, that he knows the Lord and carry something special. And with that song in particular, it was with Mitch, Kyle, Lee, and Tim Maria Badgen, who used to be on staff and is now in Nashville.
But it really felt god was just downloaded that song for our church for such a time as this. Yeah, and it just it was totally God because God knew that Mitch needed to carry that song with us. And I always feel like that’s a capital C church opportunity when you know, Mitch is not a member of Saddleback, but he carried that song with us and it was an opportunity to say, Hey, it’s not about one church.
It’s not about the name on the building. It’s about Jesus. And that was an opportunity to carry that song together. It was really special.
Jariel Navarro: Really sweet.
Chris Bellamy: What was the hardest part about making this new album?
Jariel Navarro: Whoa,
Josh Miller: how much time do you have? I’m just kidding. Uh, I always think the song selection and leadership, like who’s leading the songs is the hardest part.
It’s my, it’s easily my least favorite part because there’s an army of songwriters at Saddleback that are submitting great songs. And honestly, it’s, I feel bad saying it, but there’s just a lot of great worship leaders in our house that it’s impossible to have every one of them on the album. And I know a lot of churches.
That’s a hard thing for them. But I think that was the hardest part is like saying are these the right songs? There’s a few others that didn’t make it that we really love too, but it just didn’t fit the, it didn’t fit where the package of songs, what the package of songs needed to be.
It’s long hours, like editing and production. I’m sure if we got Mikey on the podcast, he would probably have a different answer, but I think song selection and singers was probably the hardest.
Jariel Navarro: Yeah. I also think One interesting fact is that we recorded the English and the Spanish back to back.
I totally forgot. So we recorded English on a Tuesday night and Spanish on the Wednesday night. So we had to, the room had to turn around. And we did it in the same room. Yeah. Or the other way around Spanish. It was Spanish
Josh Miller: Tuesday night and then English Wednesday night, both. Live captures and yeah, that was my fault.
I will never do that again. I’ll own that one. That was a crazy week. It was a crazy week. Because you had rehearsals, pre production. You had two capture nights back to back. Two teams. Two teams. Some people
Jariel Navarro: overlapping. Oh, Jario. Scheduling was really Yeah, I think scheduling was also You’re
Josh Miller: bringing it all back.
You’re bringing it all back. That was different players.
Say that again.
Chris Bellamy: It was just different players. The whole team was different.
Jariel Navarro: Yeah, different band. Some of the vocalists crossed over because we have God has just blessed us with a rich Spanish speaking community of just beautiful people who songwriters artists that lead bilingual and we have like three Venues where it’s spanish speaking services So there was like two or three that did both and jarrell is one of them jarrell is on both albums so he probably felt it in a different way for sure But yeah, two different Two different producers for the night, like a live producer for flow, two different bands, two different vocal teams with a few crossing over production team did both.
Josh Miller: We also had project managers for the two different albums spread the load, but it was a lot. It was a lot. I don’t think we’ll ever do that again. Yeah,
Jariel Navarro: it was a lot, but it was fun. Yeah. We got it done.
Chris Bellamy: I’ve always wondered, like when you do like a whole like a duplicated album in Spanish, And you’re translating it.
How much like word crafting do you have to do? Cause obviously do you, are you focused more on being true to the original lyrics or are you focused on like phrasing cadence and rhyme scheme? Like how do you do that?
Jariel Navarro: Yeah I’ve, yeah, I’ve had the privilege of doing some translations and it’s always fun.
The answer is both. So you fight for both until you have to give up and choose one. So if there’s some songs that just comes very naturally and it’s very easy to do both. But then if that’s not the case, you ask yourself what is, why are these two lines trying to say and how do we make it happen in Spanish that maybe it’s not exactly the same.
We still. Says the same message. It doesn’t necessarily need to be word by word, but just a song with, I think we tried to stay true to the melodies and stay true to the overall message of each verse or each, if you can do it line by line, but if not every two lines or,
Josh Miller: yeah. But this wasn’t
Jariel Navarro: a duplicate.
Josh Miller: No. Yeah, that’s the cool thing is on the Spanish album. was translated into Spanish and that’s on the album, but the other seven songs on the Spanish record were written in Spanish. So we’ve had different songs over the years be translated. And Jareo has been part of that Andres, people from our Buenos Aires campus, volunteers who love to translate.
We’ve translated songs throughout the years, but this project, the reason why it was so special is because it was all written in Spanish besides that one song, Christ Forever. So yeah, it was, I can’t wait for that to get released.
Chris Bellamy: Are you saying that the songs on Christ Forever, the English version, are you saying Were originally written in Spanish?
No, I’m saying
Josh Miller: for the Spanish album, those songs were written in Spanish, rather than taking different songs. Got it. The only song that was first in English and then translated to Spanish was Christ Forever. Got it.
Jariel Navarro: But the other seven songs on the Spanish album were written and produced for that project, yeah.
Okay, that, that seemed a little less complicated than doing the whole album exactly in Spanish. It still seems hard, but man, that’s crazy. So when is the, when is that album release?
I believe that’s, I think we’re still sorting that out. I think it’s late summer, early fall. And there’s one song on that Spanish album that we want to translate it to English.
Josh Miller: It’s really cool. It’s just who’s on our team and who’s in our church. We’re just trying to be obedient to who God’s blessed us with. And
Jariel Navarro: even, even though Christ Forever, the album was not translated fully into Spanish, we have translated most songs because our Spanish speaking campuses want to sing these songs.
So we’ve, put on the work and translate it. So they are being sung in Spanish, which is really cool as well.
Josh Miller: Are you guys going to tour this album at all? That’s not the plan. I think our commission just currently is, a lot of us are, all of us are neck deep in the ministry, like the day to day ministry of empowering and developing volunteers.
And we’re just, our current season is we just, we’re serving this house and we’re building this church. And, but yeah not currently. That’s not. Our goal or our mission.
Chris Bellamy: That’s interesting. Cause I know, a lot of like Elevation, for instance, like they, they make an album and then they tour that, so that’s interesting concept that, so your album was for your church is what you’re saying
Josh Miller: For the church.
But I, what I’ve loved about what I’ve, what I, and we lead a lot of Elevation songs, we are, we love their songs. We love their songs so much. I think it is first and foremost for our church, but with how With technology now, social media, CCLI, like any church can lead these songs and they have access to these songs.
And
Jariel Navarro: We’re not putting any restrictions on what the Holy Spirit might do in the capital C church with these songs. But I think for our day to day, like what we’re setting our hands to, yeah, we’re just building our church currently. That’s super cool.
I would love to hear you you briefly mentioned cause the last time I was at Saddleback, Rick Warren was the pastor and Rick was still there with us.
Yeah, no you said that they did a great job of like handing over the reins and a lot of our listeners and subscribers talk about having really hard transitions of leadership.
Chris Bellamy: And so could you just talk about what a healthy transition looks like?
Josh Miller: Yeah I will say so I’ve been on staff 10 years and.
Jariel Navarro: I’ve been very fortunate to be in a healthy church, healthy environment. And my dad was a pastor when he was still alive. He was senior pastor at my home church. And I’ve just always been blessed with healthy leaders above me. But I think I always come back to the church is still made up of people.
And anytime there are people involved, there’s going to be imperfection. There’s going to be. problems and dysfunction to some level.
Josh Miller: And it, I’m not going to say it’s been perfect. Cause there have been moments where it feels a bit bumpy. We’re trying to get our bearings. We’re trying to go in a new direction, but what’s healthy about it is an open line of communication.
And this realization of being honest, Hey, we’re probably not going to fully figure this out for a couple of years and just being as a staff, being honest, there’s some growing pains with transition there. There are new people coming into roles. They’ve never been in. There are people who have been here a long time that are focusing on different things.
And so I think
Jariel Navarro: it’s grace. And I think grace from the top down, like having grace for transition.
Josh Miller: Yeah.
Yeah. And it’s also been, it’s,
Jariel Navarro: it is a huge transition. It’s nothing small. It’s like one of the biggest churches, and Pastor Rick was here for 40 plus years and I loved it because he was announcing his leave for a long time.
Yeah. He’s got you guys, I’m going soon. I’m not gone because I haven’t found the one God hasn’t told me,
Josh Miller: And he was, I think he was preparing.
Jariel Navarro: And I remember when Pastor Andy said yes to the calling to come Saddleback. We had a Probably a whole month celebrating Pastor Rick, obviously every service we had a different element one service we had Stickers and the other one we had big, yeah, giant Pastor Riggs and, so I feel like he walked us through all of it very gracefully, very, in a very funny celebratory way, but that was helpful, I think.
Josh Miller: And what we were saying earlier when Andy said
Jariel Navarro: it’s always been about Jesus and it always will be about Jesus. It’s never been about a lead pastor or a structure or it’s always been about what Jesus can do through his church. And I think, not to over spiritualize it, but I think what’s helped at Saddleback is if it gets if it gets hard, it’s, we always just remember who we’re doing it for.
And we’re doing it under the banner of Jesus and I will say it’s been it’s been healthy. It’s been God honoring.
Josh Miller: And I’m proud of that. As a staff member of Saddleback, it’s been a healthy transition. Not perfect, but I’m reminded of who’s the leader. Jesus is the leader of this church.
He’s the. that we’re under. And so open communication, grace for everyone and remembering why we’re in ministry to begin with.
Jariel Navarro: Yeah. And I think in the midst of the bumpiness and maybe there’s sometimes You’re like, what’s, what’s going to happen next? We don’t know exactly.
I feel like the Lord’s dropped in us a deeper dependence on him and on prayer and on the spirit. And again, I feel you said it at the beginning Josh, how we can do so much. We’re skilled, we are trained, we’ve studied, but nothing. Yeah, will be more effective than a prayerful church and a prayerful team, a team that depends on the Holy Spirit.
And I think this season has brought that
right
on our staff, which has been really cool.
Ryan Loche: Thank you so much for being a part of this week’s episode. As always, if you head over to Instagram, shoot us a dm. We have some really cool stuff that we want to send your way. If you happen to be watching this on YouTube too, you can go ahead and hit that and subscribe and all that. That’s what we say on YouTube, right? Anyway, we’re happy to be here for you. We wanna be an encouragement for you and we have some amazing stuff for you. So make sure you shoot us to dm. See ya.