Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the Church Collective Podcast. In this episode, I had the opportunity to talk with Chris from Lake Point Worship, and I think you are going to be absolutely edified by this. If you haven’t heard anything from them, you make sure to go check the music out. But Chris has a ton of wisdom on being able to do things with multi campuses, to do songwriting to Foster the heart of your worship team members like how to actually develop the people on your team I think you’re gonna be really blessed by this whether you’re in a big church or a small church Whatever your context is there’s so many great principles that Chris talks on this So here we go with the Church Collective podcast
Chris Kuti: our team here at Lakepointe Church, Lakepointe Music is really just the collection of worship pastors from our house here at Lakepointe Church in Dallas, and we’ve got six locations and we’re in two languages, so Spanish is also a big heartbeat of who we are from a language perspective and just how we’re reaching the people in Dallas and the surrounding areas.
And really we started Lakepointe Music with The hope that if just one person’s faith was lifted off of their circumstance and on to heaven that it, this would all be worth it. I liken what we’re responsible for as songwriters and worship pastors to a couple of things. I always tell my team, number one, we’re pastors first, musicians second.
We just happen to shepherd. the people that God has put in our care, and then we put melody to their stories, to the prayers that they need to maybe be praying that they don’t even know they need to be praying to the Lord yet. And we’ve got so many amazing stories of that. And then on, on top of that, I’ve really tried to drill in this concept to our team that we are the Old Testament scribes of Lakepointe.
That we would constantly be accounting for the work of God in our midst, and putting melody to our work. to what he has done, because like the people, like the Israelites in the Old Testament do, we are quick to forget that God has brought us through so much, or we’re quick to forget the stories of redemption and marriages, the life change through salvation and that we would Put these monuments or Ebeneezer’s kind of out there in melody for in song form that we would be a people who wouldn’t be quick to forget, but we’d go back and say, man, God has done amazing things.
So we recorded our first live album in August. I’m thankful for amazing songwriters and friends who have helped us put to melody what God’s been doing in our midst. And these songs on this new album are really just a collection of what God’s doing at Lakepointe. And if one person at Lakepointe, their faith is increased, this was all worth it.
And if one person listening to this conversation their faith is encouraged off of their circumstance onto God, this is worth it.
Ryan Loche: I love the idea that you guys are the scribes and you’re getting, you’re gathering the things, or the moves of God. Could you maybe share kind of a story on one of those?
Chris Kuti: There’s a really close family to us who is experiencing some really dark and hard things in the life of their daughter.
And some truth and some things that she had been wrapped up in, and I would even say a victim of came to light on Friday morning at 6 in the morning. And this family was as anybody who in a family may experience some difficulty, that it just weighs heavy on you. The mom had gone to Facebook and the literal first post was our song, Fear No Evil, which is simply stating that In Jesus Christ, the victory is already won.
There is no thing that could come up against us that he hasn’t already defeated. It really is a battle cry for people in the midst of their darkest days and their brightest days to remind us that there is no thing that we should fear. David said, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil because he’s with me.
And literally this mom, Here’s this song in the midst of facing and looking at darkness in their family’s life. And when I lead that song again, I will see their faces in the room, and I will sing this prayer over them and invite them to pray this prayer to God. In light of that story. And those stories are all around us.
I tell our worship pastors, it’s easy to sit in a writer’s room and crank out some melodies and some songs based on words from the scriptures, and that’s powerful. It’s another thing. When you know the story of somebody who needs at this very moment to pray this prayer, listen, we wrote Fear No Evil in April of 2023.
We recorded Fear No Evil in August of 2023. And it happened to come out on March 22nd of 2024, the morning that this family needed to pray that prayer. And He doesn’t do anything by accident and that we would be pastors who have our ear to the pulse of and the sound of the stories coming from our church.
We will be informed in how to, I believe like the prophets, speak the truth over people in their darkest and their brightest days.
Ryan Loche: Yeah, that’s killer. How do you I think just like practically, how would you, how do you foster keeping ears to the ground? Because I think it like, especially as we’re talking here, it’s Easter prep week.
God bless you when you’re listening to this. It’ll be after Easter. So I hope Easter was great at your church. But how do you in the midst of all that, give yourself the chance to poise in a way to hear these things, to talk to people, to do the past pastoring, right?
Chris Kuti: Yeah, there’s a couple ways I’ll put on my leader of a team hat because you’re listening and part of a team I’ll put your that hat on and just really a follower of christ.
There’s just a couple hats I would love to come at this question. I think as a leader I have to be constantly putting in front of our people and inviting them to put in front of our staff team stories. When we stop speaking the stories of what God is doing, we quickly forget. I, my wife says this all the time, how could the Israelites have forgotten that the journey they took out of Egypt had them cross a sea that parted right before them and it was as if they forgot.
And somewhere along the way, I think stories stopped being told. Yeah. And so we’ve got to constantly be telling those stories. They’re all around us. And how do I get to those stories? I can’t get to every story happening, but I can be ready to listen to those stories if I’m in the lobby. And so to any worship pastor out there, listen, I understand getting in the green room and getting ready to step on a stage.
If you’ve got multiple services, you’re leading and you need to gather and recharge and reset. But if you’re a leader who is living in the green room. You will never hear the stories of the people that you have been called to pastor. And I am pushing my team constantly just to be vit Like, sometimes I’ll hold a door, and just because I was on a stage that was brighter and on a microphone that was louder than everybody else, I am looked to as a leader.
And like a magnet, theypeople will come to me. And tell me and if I’m there they have the opportunity to do that. Oh my gosh. I’m glad I’ve heard this so many times I’m glad I saw I didn’t think i’d ever see you and I want to tell you that song you sang two weeks ago Did this in my life? And I say tell me more and just because i’m there I have my ears to the ground of those stories And so you can The more you do this, the more you programmatically work through the things a worship pastor has to do, the more desensitized you can get to the things that even are the engine and the motor to why we even do this.
And so I try to disconnect myself from, I’m a systems guy. And so I try to disconnect, Hey, if I’m not ready for the weekend by Sunday, I, what am I doing? And so I try to get my stuff done during the week so I can be present on the weekend where people are to hear those stories. And so those are just a couple quick I wouldn’t even say hacks, to be honest.
They need to be basics. To a worship pastor to say, hey, you are a pastor before you are an artist. You are a shepherd before you are a creative. Those two things do work in tandem, but do not get it twisted. And so to shepherd, you have to smell like sheep. And get out of the green room and be a leader who is constantly fueling the stories being, start every meeting that way.
Every huddle. Every huddle, if I can connect what we’re about to do this weekend to something God did in somebody else’s life last weekend, that’s a win.
Ryan Loche: That’s great. What I’m just trying to think like what would be some tangible ways that somebody’s okay, you’re right. I’m gonna get my team. My team’s always in the green room all the time.
I’m ready. What kind of I can hear the argument being like we’re doing three services. I’m tired. I’m like, this is my chance to relax between things. How do you, how would you coach the leader that’s trying to get the team to come along with them?
Chris Kuti: Yeah, I, listen, I’ve been a part of cultures I, our last church, we had eight services on a weekend, okay?
And over two days, I can empathize with the weight of carrying the physical and emotional ask of being on a stage that many times. And like a marathon runner I think you have to find your moments when you need to jog. And your moments when you need to sprint and you need to be really obvious with those like I will not be out in the lobby within 10 minutes of the countdown starting.
So what that means is as soon as I, I’m out of a huddle, I’m in the lobby. As soon as a service is letting out, I’m leaving the stage and walking that way. And I know that my energy management requires me to be able to sprint and then I have some kind of safeguards of what time I need to be watching for so I’m not in a hurry or not in a rush to carry that and then I know too the environments where it’s hard for me just some practical things like I don’t ever lose my voice singing on a stage.
I will get fatigued talking in a lobby that’s louder than my talking voice.
Ryan Loche: There you go i’ll
Chris Kuti: forget all the mechanics and i’ll speak from shallow breath instead of like good diaphragmatic breathing Even when you’re talking yes, so know that about yourself too and just say hey What part of the lobby am I going to be in that allows me the ability to be visible?
But also be able to have a nice speaking conversation with somebody because i’ve got all this coming And so I think it’s really You Learning yourself, understanding the pace and the season that you’re in and understanding this is not a sprint, this is a marathon. And if you look at your weekend in a way where you can truly be off when you’re supposed to be off, and you know those moments when you need to be sprinting, exerting energy, and when you can replenish, set those things into, I don’t know, alarms, or try to measure and see how did I feel at the end of that weekend managing that.
Again, it’s, I think it’s the most important thing, but I can’t help every person manage their energy load. You have to be responsible for that, know what it is, and try to protect those guardrails. I think the other thing too, man, with teams is creatives tend to be high introverts. And putting you in a lobby, with 1, 500 people coming and going is the, is some, is that bass player on your team’s worst nightmare.
Don’t send him alone. Hey dude, would you come with me? And carry the conversation. But let him hear with his own ears the stories. And invite people in. I, it, I’ve found that it’s better to not create a mandate, but to model it. And when you model it and celebrate it, it will be repeated.
Ryan Loche: That’s good. Yeah.
Chris Kuti: Talk to me a little
Ryan Loche: bit just tangibly, what does it look like for you guys to do six campuses and all the intricacies of what, like, how do you I just, yeah, technically, how does it work? And then even just pastorally, how do you disseminate all of that?
Chris Kuti: Yeah, and before I was at Lakepointe, I had the privilege and one of the greatest honors of my life to be a part of the Life Church team for 10 years.
I was at the broadcast location and then helped campuses navigate the creative of their weekend services at all 30, at the time I was there, 35, 36 of our locations. And so the idea of I’m going to apologize, but not apologize. People sometimes get offended when talking about very spiritual things using practical language like scaling.
They’re like, Oh, that’s a business word. Yeah. I do think Jesus ministry, like guys like Matthew, there was some logistics to, to make happen a part of that ministry. So I do think that is very spiritual as we’re stewarding the lives and the stories of people. So all that to say, I think that I’ve come with some bit of experience.
Thankfully, just for the years before I ever got to Life. Church of what was built there, and that helped open my eyes to the need for a couple things we’re working on, because this idea of Lakepointe being who it is in six different places while being what the people of that community need, that is a paradox.
How do we carry the same message, the same heart, from a worship perspective, the same sound, with six different, very different leaders and sounds? How do we do that? So a couple things that I would encourage anybody who’s navigating this idea of how do we be that in multiple places. You cannot leave things to memory.
You have to be very, we’re moving through this phase here at Lakepointe where we are moving from a very oral tradition to a written one. And so everything from systems and playbooks and who’s responsible for what and who gets the call in that situation and what are a team’s responsibilities at a campus versus is that a central or global responsibility?
Those things can’t be assumed. So they have to be clearly documented, and the smaller we are, the more we can rely on one person knowing all the information. But that will only get you so far. That person’s information or recollection of information will be the ceiling to your organization, right? And so we have to put things in writing.
And that’s what we’re really, literally next week, we were going off site to, to take the things that are the single points of failures in our culture that are assumed and put them on paper. Because then what happens if you leave things to oral tradition, your values, like the game of telephone, they get diluted down the line.
You onboard new team members and the thing that was the most important got tra Translated or communicated in a way that made it less important and so documenting some of those things. What are our values? What does a weekend need to feel like sound like look like? What are values of song decisions don’t assume that somebody knows those things and as a leader don’t assume that you should be the only One deciding that and don’t be a don’t be so Prideful in thinking that you can carry that by yourself if you would just translate it into writing and empower your team to lead that way I think another important thing is you were talking about your brother working at a radio station I’ve adopted at life church and here I adopted what we would just call our song bank.
Yeah I have to understand that The appetite for our people, no matter where they are in their attendance regularly, I could give you all the data of how frequent the, I would say the Christian attends church. Yeah. And my responsibility to not just sing songs that I connect with, this is not about my personal time with the Lord, this is an overflow of that.
I would like to create a moment, an encounter. with those that have been called to shepherd with the living God. And so I have to be thinking about the sound of our house, what things connect with our people, and have an ear to the ground on that. And then I have to commit to those types of songs, or I would say the vitamin or the diet of songs.
And so we quarterly go through what we would call, like a radio station, our current songs. Those would be songs that are emerging and becoming familiar prayers in our house. And I can only have, I would say, 10 to 12 of those that in a quarter are emerging as more familiar or being taught.
And then I Moving down our line, I have a list of songs that we would call recurrents. Like a, again, like a radio station, those are the songs that when inputted into the diet can make a new, fresh, unfamiliar song feel familiar because it’s surrounded with familiarity. So now I just went from spectate and learn the song and become familiar with it to engage with something that is familiar to me.
And so that list of recurrents would be much longer than our list of kind of those currents. And then being very clear on, as a culture, we’re going to commit at every location to these songs. Now, some at Life. Church, for us, it was every campus could make their weekend set list decisions based on that song bank.
Here at Lakepointe, where we are in the infancy stage of really kind of, building our heart of worship at Lakepointe and what we sound like and who we are. We’ve got a lot of young leaders in role as worship pastors. I’ve been more controlled in terms of, hey, these are the set lists we’re all doing collectively.
There may be a season where we all pick from the batch of songs like I did at Life. Church, and you decide on the weekend set. So that has really helped us Begin to have a sound that is Lakepointe, no matter what location you go to. Downline of that, I think music directing intentionality of resourcing and developing.
Not just people who can play and bring their tone, but people who are open handed with their gift. To be a better teammate than a better individual on the team that’s taken a lot of pain and hard Conversations with people who have maybe this is what I do for a living and you’re not gonna tell me to play With humbuckers or this, or why should we tune the snare that way?
Having casted with vision and then with practical application has really helped us Look up and say man. We got a lot more like one house in many locations. Yeah in a very fast way
Ryan Loche: Yeah, what are you? Love to hear what are you looking for? What how do you know someone’s? Even just from the musicians standpoint, how do you know they’re malleable and flexible and able to like move with that?
What kind of I don’t know if you got any stories or you don’t have to name anybody, but what should I be looking for? I’m recruiting for my team and I got a great guitar player wants to come in. Like what are you looking for in the early stages of that relationship?
Chris Kuti: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things that would be signals or the, The buzz phrase in our generation is the red flags, the emoji, the things that would pop up to me that would be a, hey, it’s not a disqualifying factor, but it is it is just a caution for me when I give somebody feedback, how they respond to that feedback.
tells me a lot. Sometimes we only listen to feedback through our ears, but we need to also watch it through our eyes and their body language and demeanor and their curiosity about that feedback or defensiveness will tell me a lot about where to start with somebody’s appetite for being open handed or closed handed.
And so I try to create those opportunities in the onboarding process. So one of the things that we have is. We pick the song that you need to audition to. Whether you’re a guy who’s touring with whoever, or you’re a high school student who just fell in love with playing guitar, you’re, everybody’s gonna play the same song, they’re gonna upload that video and that audio together, and that is gonna give me a great starting place, and then I am going to, before I ever onboard you based on that video, I wanna know your story.
How long have you been attending Lakepointe? Or are you here because you think the music’s awesome and you just need a place to play? Would you go here if you didn’t play here? Hey, I want to highlight something in your audition video, man. I thought your tone was amazing. Has any, have you ever, have you been working on your timing?
Cause I do think that’d be one place I would love to help you grow if you were to be on this team. Tell me about that.
Ryan Loche: Yeah.
Chris Kuti: And somebody’s, again, not just verbal response, but body language response will help me I think I’m pretty awesome. Okay. Or, man, you know what? I’ve actually been working on that and I would, I really haven’t been able to find good tools on how to get better at, drum tone or playing these specific parts or building a great bass foundation tone.
I would love help on that. Oh, man. Okay. That’s awesome. That tells me a lot, right? And then I think another Lynch pin on a team is I can’t lead through every individual on our roster But I can lead through six music directors who can funnel down Or coaches who can funnel down and be the filter to I’m not just gonna be the only eye on an audition You I want our team to believe in this person and believe that we can take them from where they are to where they need to be.
And so the more I can empower through a few, who can empower through many, the better off I’ll be because if I try to be everything for everybody, I don’t know that we’ll make as much ground up the old saying to get somewhere fast, go alone, to get somewhere far, bring people with you. For me in this whole thing of shaping a musical culture, a worship culture, I need music directors that I can literally look to and say with just a quick I’ve got music directors that I lead with that.
I just wave a hand in a certain direction and they know exactly what I want to do. And that, or I may look at them or say something to them. In a rehearsal, we’ve got a new bass player playing with us. Hey, can you work with him on that thing? And he knows exactly how to do it. I’ve got deep amount of trust.
I can’t get that with everybody on our team, if we’re going to be growing and scaling, but I can get it with a few very trained intelligent, talented, like Liam Neeson and taken very specific set of skills, music director. That’s great.
Ryan Loche: I’d love to maybe hear, it’s always It can be a buzzword to talk about putting together like core values for worship ministries or our church or whatever, but I’d love to hear, like you’ve talked about, like just one person, that’s what it’s all about.
You keep referencing like equipping others to equip others is a big piece of it, but what are some of the standout core things that you guys are seeing? Or I don’t know if you have that codified yet or maybe what you’re thinking about getting locked in.
Chris Kuti: Yeah, that’s great. I would call them kind of the axioms or the team values the team norms Yeah i’ll tell you where we are So maybe you can get down to maybe some things that if you’re a leader listening to this Don’t do everything I do because that’s not probably that’s not It’s not perfect for your context, and I’ve made some mistakes, but some line of thinkings that I’m thinking through, a little bit of history about Lakepointe, I came on the team with my wife as our official title is Global Worship Pastor.
We don’t have anything outside of America, but I’m global, okay, just in case, but what that means, what that, yeah, what that means is essentially overseeing who we are as a worship team across many locations. And centralization and campus model that was really new for us. Our senior pastor Josh Howerton took over for a founding senior pastor at the beginning of 2020.
We come on to the team in September of 2020. And so there’s a lot of organizational kind of futuristic thinking and therefore foundational org chart people processes. Thinking and so I’m inserted into that newness. with some history of understanding it on a bigger scale. And so coming in, the thing that I could have done as a leader is drive a foundational culture for worship on an island or separate from what Pastor Josh was trying to do as a whole of the church.
Because a new foundational leader coming in for the whole church is going to have that, what are our vision and values? And the worst thing I could have done was got to work at what needs to eventually happen on a worship team, and that is, how do we as a team contribute to the greater vision and mission of the church, right?
And so I put a pause on some of that nuanced language and specifics for our team, and all I was pushing was the behavioral values of our team. Hey, anybody who’s going to be a high level leader or leader at Lakepointe, You’re going to have a couple behavioral value norms. We do whatever it takes. We reject good for great.
We love and follow Jesus. Sounds elementary, but sometimes we can be more about the work than the one who we work for, right? Most of the time, right? Most of the time.
Yeah.
And so I didn’t create language or celebrate language apart from those things. As a church, Lakepointe is a movement for all people to know God, find freedom, discover their calling, make a difference.
And as a worship ministry, I was celebrating the trajectory of anybody on our team, any attender who is walking through those things. That became, and has become over the last almost four years, the filter by which we will then inform, actually this year, what we’re really calling, how do we do those things?
What are the standard by which we as a team operate? Listen every ministry has to do what they have to do on a weekend. The way I talk about it as a sports team, they all work out, they all lift. But the thing that sets apart a championship winning team and a team that’s just mediocre, Is how they do what everybody does, right?
So when we go to the gym, we lift. I love the Tennessee Volunteers Women’s Basketball Team. They all have to go to class in college. But that team, they have a standard. Everybody on that team sits in the first two rows of every class they’re in. I love that. And for us as a team, we’re all gonna embody whatever it takes.
Reject good for great, love Lakepointe make it fun. Those are some of our norms, and we’re all gonna be about the mission of Lakepointe Church together, collectively. Now what we have to do is, as a worship team, how will we do those things? For example we will submit Planning Center and all the resources to our teams by this date on the calendar every week.
Every song we send out will have a bank of tools that allows our team to prepare. Our stages will sound like this. So how we do what everybody has to do and just increase the standard. We will be a team who is open to feedback. You want to reject good for great. You got to be open. So how do we do that?
We watch game film, we watch back tape from every weekend and I’m coaching and I’m talking and I’m urgent about feedback, not just in the negative or the constructive, but in the positive. So I, that’s a long way around your question, Ryan, of like how I think it’s really this. Maybe not adopting values or language disconnected from that of the entire church, but really upping and clarifying the standard by which we do those things has been really the nuance that I’m trying to bring into our team.
Ryan Loche: That’s great. Love to hear too, just what is the multilingual aspect of doing church look like for you guys?
Chris Kuti: It is, the multilingual thing for us is the most. There’s a lot of things that are fun about what I get to do every day, but that is to me one of the most fun things. We, I’ll just tell you a quick story, we, we were praying about what God had next for us my wife and I and our family, and we had through some relationships, gotten connected with Pastor Josh and my boss, Chris Berkley, and we were praying about God’s Lakepointe and the future of that church where you want us planted, where you want us to be in this next season.
And I had watched some things worship in English, and it was encouraging, and I felt like the team that God had put there was ripe for the future. But there was something that was happening in our Spanish ministry, which is Lakepointe and Español, that was the future if where we were in English was foundational but we needed to grow.
I believe that Lakepointe in Espanol was where we need the style, the team, the heart, the engagement, even just down to the sound was where we needed to be. And so for me I think a lot of churches, what we’ve learned, and there’s, I don’t know that there’s a right or wrong way, I would challenge anybody who is trying to operate.
Listen, Texas is, especially Dallas is 50%, over 50%. Bilingual or Spanish speaking and so we as a church if we’re gonna say we’re gonna reach this area We got to come to the table with something, right? Yeah, because there’s a lot of people to reach who that is their native heart language And so we what I did my first week is the guy that was leading Worship in Espanol.
I said Jose you don’t have to report to me on an org chart, but we are working together You’re gonna come office with us I want to know everybody, and Jose would tell you this. I ended up hiring a lot of people that were on his team as volunteers or contractors because there was something about the health of that team that I wanted infused into the English side of what we do because there was just a lot of great decisions.
And so I think modeling that for our team, that we are not separate. It’s not us and them. It’s not, that really has helped us. I believe C Sure, the numerical growth that we’re having, but it’s really out of a, it’s a byproduct of a healthy mindset that we are in this together. And so from a musical standpoint, the other thing I did learn, man, and we do this really well as well with messages.
Some people are calling themselves one church in two languages, but all they’re doing is translating the message of a senior pastor into Spanish. And as I’ve done some discovery, I do not speak Spanish. I can sing pretty good in Spanish, but I do not speak Spanish, right? I’ll read whatever’s on the prompter and I’ll pronounce it pretty good.
What I’ve realized is there are some things that in English do not translate well in the language to Spanish. And so when we try to make a carbon copy of everything, we actually end up losing the power of the language. And so there’s a great amount of trust from our senior pastor, Josh Howerton to our pastor in Spanish, Paul Lewis to say, Hey, here’s the kind of preaching, structure where I’m going topically what we’re teaching the church.
You take that and make it your own. Yeah. And there’s freedom to not speak on that topic because maybe there’s not a cultural connection. Same with our song bank. There are some songs that we will translate into Spanish. When it comes to songwriting, there’s some songs that we may do a Spanish translation of an English release.
But like earlier last year, as we started Lakepointe Music, we released an EP of five songs in English, and we released an EP Lakepointe Musica, four songs in Spanish that are not the same as the five songs that were released in English because in the language there wasn’t a good translation. And so we truly are trying to meet people where they are.
We just happen to be under the same house, the same values, but we’re able to contextualize some things where needed.
Yeah, that’s killer. And it just speaks to, again, discipling others to disciple others it’s not just a cookie cutter thing hey, go execute what we’ve put together, but you need some autonomy and some room to grow.
I think, as we talk right now, whether you’re listening to this after Easter, but we’re literally days away from our first Easter services happening, and Easter is a perfect picture. We all planned the creative set and services around our Easter together in English and Spanish.
Ryan Loche: Yeah.
Chris Kuti: But then we were able to look and say, hey, that song’s not going to translate or is not familiar in Spanish or doesn’t have a translation and we shouldn’t even try.
And so we are pooling resources in lighting design and video. Both in English and Spanish, and we’re doing those together and we’re utilizing what we can that would translate. For example, our opener is able to be bilingual, so we designed it to be that. It can, it’s going to work great in English, it’s going to work great in Spanish.
But the third song in the set is going to be a completely different one in Spanish than it is for English. And so we’re working together the same thing. person programming lights for English is going to be programming lights for Spanish.
Ryan Loche: Yeah.
Chris Kuti: And there’s some symmetry there in how we function and operate while also having autonomy.
Ryan Loche: Yeah. I’d love to hear on your guys side too, just with as much as you’ve got going on. It’s like the prevailing face that any worship leader creative makes. Like, how’s Easter week going? And everyone’s just like just tired. What does it look like? And we’ve touched on a lot of it, but what’s this week look like?
How are you keeping morale up? In the midst of just having to do a lot , how do you keep it to where that’s an exciting thing and not a Oh, great. 14 hour days all week.
Chris Kuti: Yeah. I’ve, I can’t take full credit for this. Our, we’ve got an amazing team who has helped really drill this into what we do. There’s a couple mindsets.
Number one, every weekend is somebody’s first weekend. And sure, Easter is a big deal. There will be more people who will be open to an invitation to a church service now, this time of year, more than ever. And so that does come with a mantle and a stewardship of the clarity of the gospel. But that, that our team would have a high standard to how we do every weekend, that helps dissipate.
This oh my gosh, we got a sprint in Easter and we got to really go for it And it’s got to be the best thing ever. Okay, so Bringing that expectation to every weekend really just then says man. Let’s be who we are on Easter, right? There’s some things that we will elevate. I’ll talk about that in a moment.
Another thing that has really helped in Lowering the anxiety level this week Is we did it for the first time this year, and I think it really helped. This is, and I hope not to get, called a blasphemer for saying this, but Easter in March is my least favorite thing. Thank you, Lord, for dying on the cross and raising from the dead, but why we follow the moon and not a date on the calendar?
Because Easter in March is hard. You just came off a busy Christmas, vacations, you’re kicking into the new year, prayer and fasting and all the things, and then, oh, boom, you got to be ready for. For Easter in March, right? That’s hard. So knowing that, I think we designed a play that’s really going to help us moving into the future.
And that’s what a lot of developers and creatives do. It was called our Easter Sprint Week. And so instead of like in the past, even with Christmas, we would get started conceptually with some things about Easter. Let’s just say on a calendar we were to start working on Easter in October of last year because we knew it was coming in March and then Christmas is getting finished and we ideated, but then we would all go our separate ways.
And then the video team would be waiting on some demos from the worship team. And then once the demos were sent, video created on an island, graphics was, were being made, and all these things came together. And then one team was waiting on an approval from another person. And it was just this long, drawn out, arduous process that sometimes got us into crunch time when it was like, everything’s due to the campuses.
What we decided to do in early February was, hey, for five days. Every creative team involved with the execution of the weekend will literally be hunkered down in this studio that I’m in right now, in our worship offices. And we are going to, the only thing we’re going to be doing Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, is Easter 2024.
That’s it. So we’re gonna have, The ideation together with the right people about the opener and then a producer is going to go across the hall and start working on the skeleton of that and then the visuals are going to start being formed and we’re going to put that together. Nobody’s waiting on an approval and base camp, right?
We’re all together.
And what also happens is, when you spread it out like that and don’t sprint together, you get caught up in the whirlwind and something really important pops up. But because we sequestered our calendar and our days that week to say, I’m not working on the set list for next weekend during this week.
Easter is all I’m doing. I was able to have intense focus for a short amount of time on that. That really helped take the edge off of everybody trying to run at what we needed to get done this week. And then I think the other thing from a philosophical standpoint is we have prescribed that Easter will not be a time we do anything new.
I think sometimes we overcomplicate it out of a desire to be the flashiest thing and outdo what we did last year. The good news of the cross of Jesus Christ and the empty grave is good news. It doesn’t need much help, and so I’m not deciding new songs to, I’m teaching maybe new songs that I know I anticipate wanting to be a part of our weekend services on Easter.
I’m teaching those weeks and months in advance so that they’re familiar by the time that we get to Easter. Yeah. But I think I see a lot of churches doing one of two things or both. Teaching. We’re expecting to teach a lot of new, so therefore your teams have to learn new arrangements or new songs all together.
And then, you’re also giving them a false perception of what church is like at your church the weekend after Easter. One time at Life Church we made this mistake, like there’s one campus that decided to do like a folky Easter. So it was like, it was the Mumford and Sons era. So it was like banjo and kick drum.
And if you came to church on Easter and you connect with that kind of musical genre and then come back next week, you’re mad, bro. You’re like, that’s not even the same thing, right? Sometimes the same is true with the technical. You go all out and you create this massive scenic thing and you put all your eggs.
Pun intended into that basket. And then they come back and it’s not at that excellence value. Be who you are in a way that does feel like you are ready to steward a larger amount of people, but that shouldn’t change who you are, the DNA of how you execute every weekend. Those are the first few quick things that we’re really trying to infuse into our team to help take the pressure off.
And then again, energy management’s really important. We’re gonna, because Easter’s so early, we’re sprinting to Easter. And then because of the additional services and days and rehearsal times and all that, we’re going to allow our people some breathing room in the upcoming week to be able to reset and recalibrate.
Ryan Loche: Yeah, that’s killer. So we’re wrapping up here. You and I were talking a little bit about just the future of, younger worship leaders. I’d love to maybe just riff a little bit on that and what are you seeing with your teams? What are you hoping is happening? What’s, what do you think that the worship ministries we’re putting together are going to look like here in the years to come?
Chris Kuti: This is a half baked idea, and I say that to say I hopefully have the right to maybe change my mind on this. Yeah. I’m just gonna say it this way. I’m reverse engineering how I want to help the next generation come up. I’m 40. I turned 40 this year. I’m reverse engineering how I want to help the next generation lead well for the long haul by what I’m seeing guys my age do.
And it goes like this. If I were to post on Instagram or do a podcast, the title of podcast would be The world doesn’t need more Realtors. Now let me explain. For a period of about three to four months, I’d keep scrolling on Instagram and I would have worship pastor friends who were uploading their posts about their new real estate job.
And if you’re a Realtor and you were a worship pastor, I’m not saying that every story goes this way. But when I started anecdotally digging into dude, what is happening? Why aren’t guys going the distance? Some common trends came to mind and again I’m just off the top of the dome just like from maybe from the heart too like I just get this sense that we need to get ahead of this.
Guys my age came in And I do think that there was a genera I don’t think, I know, because I was one of them. There was a generation of worship leaders who got on a stage to get a bigger one. They got behind a microphone to get a record deal. And when it didn’t happen, The foundation of why they fell in love with worship through song literally crumbled.
When the dream didn’t come to fruition, I’m going to go make money doing something else somewhere else. Now I do think there’s some, this may be a taboo thing, I do think there are some top level leadership things that we do need to change philosophically about how we view worship pastors for a generation.
I, there, I’ve never been led by a senior pastor who had this, but I know a lot of people who were, and we’ve got to change this in this next generation of senior leaders. You’re the worship guy. Shut up. Just sing. And you’re going to come late to every meeting. You’re not going to be sitting at top tables.
You’re just the creative dude. And what we did was unintentionally create a species of leaders who just lived up to what you expected of them. And so when they Get to the place to where, what am I going to do next? I’ve got a growing family. Maybe I need to make more money. Or be a higher level leader.
There’s no bedrock of experience to fall back on. And yeah, I’m going to go sell houses cause I can make more than I’m making doing what I’m doing right now. So I think we do need to call up pastors to be more. And I think the other thing too, is that for a generation of leaders, Like myself, for some reason there’s this out there number or understanding that, Hey, what are you going to do when you hit this age?
The best leaders I know, there are guys that I know that are amazing, incredible worship pastors, and they’re 50, and they’re still incredible, and here’s why. They learned early on, sometimes the hard way, that seeing someone else get the win in a sports analogy, take the last shot and make the game winner, was more empowering and beneficial and fruitful than you being the one to take all the shots.
Totally. And if you cannot build a culture where you are open handed and okay with people younger, more talented than you, getting the wins, You will not survive past 40 because you will become what I call the Uncle Rico worship pastor. Napoleon Dynamite. Uncle Rico was stuck in high school. If coach would have put me in, we would have won states.
And there are a lot of worship pastors living in the past of what might’ve been, and they’re missing the future of the leader in front of them right now. That is one empowering decision away from being a future leader of tomorrow. The more you replicate yourself like that. In your 30s and in your early 40s, the more you will be valuable to an organization, a team for decades after that.
And so get to learn. So I say all that to say, that’s a backwards way into your question. If I can help a generation learn those things in their 20s, now, as what I’m seeing symptomatic of guys my age, I think we’ll be better off. I think we’ll have pastors who go the distance because they did it for the right reasons and they built the kind of disciplines they needed early.
I think another thing too is that Our pastor, Josh Howerton, talks about this really and maybe we can link out in show notes or whatever. He gave this message to our church at what we called an encounter night. It was three nights of just like prayer, worship the word, and he talks about these three concentric circles.
I don’t want to quote him, but I’ll summarize, and he does this way better than I did, but I do think it is a life message for him, and that is. He drew these three circles. You have the attractional model, and everybody, when I say that, could think of a church and a generation and pastors who would lead for this hey, it was the seeker sensitive movement in the 90s, and a missiological decision could be made in that direction.
Kind of that kind of church. That’s one circle. Then you have these word churches, right deep theologically rich We are not about the emotional experience We will preach the Word of God unequivocally and the inerrant infallible Word of God will be preached and we’re not about you know there’s this very kind of stale worship experience Because we’re singing, words and songs that people don’t even understand yet.
And then you have the, I think the best way to say it is that kind of charismatic, this powerful spirit churches who believe that the God of the Bible is the God of today and it can still move in miraculous ways. And he attributes, Each part of the trinity to each of those circles, right?
You have Jesus in those attractional churches. We’re just gonna preach Jesus and forgiveness and grace and then you’ve got the word church is God the Father and then the charismatic kind of churches would be Spirit and we can all think of churches in those circles. And then he says hey, where should Lakepointe be?
Where do we want to be? Yeah. And he put us right in the middle. And I do think that there is a day where we were, there was churches living in one of those three circles, and maybe we were missing parts of our missiological strategy and who we are as a church. And you can still be about the inerrant infallible word of God and be about the power of the spirit of the living God still moving in our midst.
And you can still be preaching. I had one pastor tell me one time the most evangelistic thing we could do is to create a worship experience where it’s undeniable that the living God is in our midst. I don’t have to put on a show for you. I don’t have to play a classic rock song that you heard in the 80s to open up the service to speak to you.
The power of the gospel has the power to change lives and we will preach it. Undeniably and will be considered the person that is in the room far from God And so I think all of that to summarize that’s the kind of I think paradoxical and philosophical things we need to be stepping into as leaders as we’re raising up a next generation to be mindful of and not just put it on autopilot.
Because I believe what got us here in past generations will not get us there in future generations of how we will need to speak to our world and lead them to Jesus.
Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode. As always, head over to Instagram and shoot us a DM. We love connecting with you personally and it’s an honor to be able to do ministry with you.