Excellence in Small Churches w/ Jason Houtsma

Alex |

Welcome to the Worship Ministry Training Podcast, a monthly podcast for worship leaders who are serious about growing in their craft and calling. My name is Alex, fellow worship leader. Super stoked you’re here. And if you’re new listener, I’m going to encourage you to hit that subscribe button because every single month I’m going to give you helpful practical guidance that you can immediately implement into your ministry. Hit that subscribe button and then go back through the past nine years of episodes and binge listen your way to a healthier ministry. If you’re someone who is really serious about growing as a worship leader, I want to point you to the Worship Ministry Training Academy. What is the Academy? It’s an online training platform that will give you everything you need to build a thriving worship ministry. You’ll get ten indepth courses on topics like set building, team building, musical excellence, vocal techniques, and more. You’ll get live monthly training workshops on topics that are relevant to you. You’ll get exclusive expert interviews with some of the best worship leaders in the world. You’ll get done for you ministry admin systems and audition process, onboarding documents, team training materials, and even team discipleship materials.

 

Alex |

We will take care of you so you can focus on leading your team. If that sounds like something that would be of help to you, you can try the Worship Ministry Training Academy for just $1 by going to worshipministrytraining.com. Sign up today for your $1 trial and I hope to see you inside of the academy. All right, let’s get into today’s episode. Hello, beautiful worship Ministry training family. Hello to those of you who are watching live in the Academy and welcome anyone who is a new podcast or YouTube viewer listener. I’m not sure how to say that quite yet, but welcome. I’m so glad to be back on the podcast with a really great friend and amazing person, mr. Jason Hausma from Worship Artistry. So let’s welcome Jason to the screen. Hello, Jason Rocket. Applause, applause. What’s up, dude?

 

Jason |

How’s it going, man? A lot, yes, always.

 

Alex |

Yes. We’ve been spending a lot of time together, which has been fun. And I do just want to welcome some of the people viewing that I see online in the academy. Sherry is here. Two sherrys are here. And who else is here? Let me see. Samantha is here. So welcome, guys. Jason, thanks for being on again. I had you back on. It was literally like probably 2015. We were still young babes in our prime, and you were one of the first well known names that I had on the podcast back then.

 

Jason |

That’s sad for you, but okay, hey.

 

Alex |

You got to start somewhere. But look at us now. Eight, nine years later. Eight years later. But Jason the reason why I want to have you on. And by the way, for everyone listening or watching, I’ll link Jason’s old episode in the podcast show Notes and the YouTube show Notes. But the reason I want to have you on is because, one, you’re excellent at what you do. You’re an excellent pastor, you’re an excellent musician, but also, you don’t just lead worship artistry, but you actually serve as a small church worship pastor. And the average church in America is 80 people, and the vast majority of churches in the US. Are under 200 people. And so most people listening or watching operate in that smaller context. And I don’t even want to call it a small context because it’s actually a normal context. It’s actually the normal context. Like what we see on Instagram and YouTube of the big auditoriums is the abnormal context.

 

Jason |

Right?

 

Alex |

So tell us a little bit about your church, your context, your church size. We’ll talk about worship artistry, obviously, throughout and at the end, but just in terms of your church size and context.

 

Jason |

Sure. So about 15 years ago, I was working at a larger church with a couple of guys, a pastor, and the worship pastor there. I was like an assistant, and our hearts were just really stirred that we wanted to do something different. We had all kind of grown up in, like, kind of big church culture. Like, my pastor was the pastor at Vineyard Church when Langley Vineyard, when Brian Durkson, Andy Ruiz, all the big guys that were in the Vineyard back in the 90s were there. So he’d seen a lot of big things there. Here in Bellingham, we were at a church and same kind of thing. It’s about 20 people run four services on a Sunday. And we found that our hearts were disturbed that we wanted to do something different, not like something crazy radical or anything, but we just kind of having grown up in church culture, we live in a very unchurched area, and so we really wanted to look at it and go, okay, well, what does it look like to orient our lives around Jesus here in Bellingham, Washington? And we went and we started a church we called a Mosaic that was I don’t know if the big mosaic was out yet, but it’s not that one.

 

Jason |

I’ll be clear about it. So I was like, yeah, I’m the worship pastor at Mosaic Church. Not that one. We started in backyards, and we just started with barbecues, and then eventually we were able to meet in, like, a school, and we kind of fluctuated, you know, there’s a lot of people checking it out, you know, a lot of people. It’s a really unique community, and community has changed a lot over the years. But anyway, I’ll have to say, one of the big things about it was nobody is on staff full time, not even the senior pastor. The desire was really to look at our vocations as ministry as well and being in the community and so be less gathering oriented and like, hey, come and do this thing, because what we found was we were like, we’re always in church instead of out in the community, how do we get out in the community? And so we tried to build it around that and that presents some really unique challenges when nobody is full time. From my end, I wasn’t on staff, I was volunteering for a long time. Eventually one guy left and I basically wasn’t charged, but I wasn’t paid at all.

 

Jason |

I was like, I just want to be able to do it volunteer and also working, creating worship forestry from the ground up. So I was doing that for free as well. And so eventually it was like, okay, I have to be here every Sunday. So I have like a small stipend essentially that does that. But I really am very intentional about I am the worship pastor. I’m not a worship leader. It’s like I’m pastoring, I’m pastoring my people. And so where we are at now, that was probably about, probably about eight years ago. Well, no, yes, maybe about eight years ago. I’ve been doing that and we have been through all kinds of ups and downs and now I was down to two people post COVID team and doing everything myself there. And so we made a lot of changes. I’ve been pretty aggressive because I realized we couldn’t do that anymore. And now we’ve got 13 people on our worship team. So I run worship artistry most of the time and then now I hold a bunch of rehearsals and building this team that volunteers that we have.

 

Alex |

Wow, okay, so postcode two people all the way up to 13 people two years later. That’s quite phenomenal. Like recruiting, that’s like six months later. We’re definitely going to talk about how to recruit in a small church setting today and just your overall church size so everybody is aware.

 

Jason |

If everybody showed up there would probably be 100 people.

 

Alex |

Okay. Yeah. My first church was 120 person Baptist church. It was actually my wife and my favorite church to serve in and just the friendliness in the community people. By the way, we’re getting some comments. Someone is saying amazing dedication from you, Jason. Thank you. Which I agree here. And even I was talking to Matt from Luke community and he’s leading at 100 person church right now, church plant and it’s just him and like one other person as well. And so I definitely know that like we said at the intro, small church context is the norm. This is the norm. This is the reality for almost every worship leader listening is they have to build teams in very small contexts. And so what would you say? Have you found work moving from two to 13 people in recruiting? Where did you find these people?

 

Jason |

Well, first of all, I prayed. I actually really came to a point in my life where I really felt God speaking to me in a way that because I was running the thing. I was teaching a a class in Yuan I’m in Norway, which was like the coolest opportunity. But my pastor is 9 hours behind me and I’m trying to tell him how to set up the video because we didn’t have anybody to play music. And so I shot a video. I’m like, this is just crazy. We can’t do this anymore. So I kind of had this moment where and I use this moment a lot when I talk about worshiping or really anything that you have to press through is when my son Asher was learning to ski. Took him up on chair five and he wiped out and he kind of lost his mind and his skis fell off. And he sitting there, he’s like, I hate this. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want it. You know, like and so I sit down with him and I’m like, hey, listen, where do you want to go? I want to go down to the lodge.

 

Jason |

Okay, well, we’re not getting back on the ski lift. We can’t do that. And we’re not going to hike back down because that’s going to take forever. So the only way for us to get down to the ski lodge is for us to ski down. So you need to put your skis on and you need to get to the lodge. So let’s go. And he was able to do it, and I think he learned something from it. But I felt that way very much with my worship team. I was like, I’m going to have to put in more time than I have been able to in a long time and dedicate myself to being willing to do that to get to the other side of where I’m at now. Because the reason why my team is so small and the reason why so much was on my shoulders was because I was taking it all on. Because I didn’t have the bandwidth to train anybody. I have a website that trains teams how to play music, and I didn’t even have the bandwidth to sit down and tell people, here are the songs that we’re going to be doing.

 

Jason |

Because I was so working on worship artistry. And so for me, having the skills already come. Like I was joking around. Like, that’s why I get paid the big bucks is because I can grab my guitar and walk out there and do a great job. Not as like a bag or anything, but that’s just kind of what it is, right? So I just know how to do this. I’ve been doing it for a long time. And so I realized, okay, I have to put way more time in. I have to figure out how we’re going to build this thing out. I was like, okay, I was just in Norway teaching all about worship and arrangement and all these things about building a team. I need to just invest that time in my church as well. And so I prayed. I was like, God, you need to create hours and show me where to cut hours. I just kind of figure out where I’m going to be able to do this. Knew I had to commit to realizing I’m going to be the one that has to train people into this. And God, just bring me the people.

 

Jason |

And so in a small church, you kind of know everybody. And I had so many times on the mic, been like, hey, see, I’m by myself here. If you would like to play music with me, just come up and talk to me. Let’s figure it out. And one person was like, I’d like to do that. And then she texted me a week later and was like, I’m too busy. I can’t. And so I literally just started going around to people in my church and asking if they played an instrument or sing or sang. And it was shocking to me how many people were like one person was like, oh, yeah, I play keyboard. I used to lead worship in college. And I’m like, what?

 

Alex |

Have you not heard? Yes.

 

Jason |

What is going on? And I just started doing that and I knew that, okay, I’m going to have to build this from the ground up. So I ended up just through that, I ended up violin player. I recruited some folks in that didn’t know how they were going to be able to sing. Let’s figure it out. Guy that plays bass, somebody’s like, yeah, I could play some drums. Maybe it was like that, right? And then I had a meeting with everybody, and I thought in advance, like, how am I going to build this? So I had a meeting after church, and then I was like, okay, here’s what’s going to happen. First of all, I want to talk to you about we’re starting from scratch here, like, why we do this, what we care about, and the values that we have in place for worship, right? And for leading worship here and what we actually do here. And then I was like, and if you want to be on the team, what it’s going to look like is we’re going to start having practices at my office. So we actually meet at the worship artistry office and just practice acoustically in here.

 

Jason |

We’re going to meet every week, whoever’s on. I’m going to commit to being more organized. I’m going to put some tools together. Everyone gets a worship artistry account. Everyone’s going to be on our worship planning, and we are going to start building this thing and going like I said, God provided that kind of launched us. There was a few folks that kind of stepped into it and weren’t really a great fit and kind of self selected. Like, I encourage them, but also recognized, like, you know what, if you’re going to be doing this, let’s do it. This way, so kind of recognizing where everybody was, we ended up don’t do this. I’ll tell you what not to do. We ended up having the first rehearsal. Sorry, this is a really long answer. No, anytime. We had a first rehearsal and I was like, everybody come. We’re just going to start kind of playing together and see what happens. So I had everybody in my office, and it was chaos. It was just like, okay, some of you have never sang with other people. Some of you have no rhythm. All right, we got to write this on the ground.

 

Jason |

So what I did was kind of out of that time, though, was like, okay, we’re not going to do this every week, but I organized teams in a way that there’s somebody on every team that could lead if I needed them to. So I was like, okay, you’re a good enough singer, and I can pair you with this musician, and if I can’t be there, you can still do it as long as I kind of coach you up and kind of practice with you and walk you through that thing. And so putting strong players together with weaker players, being very present, mentoring, practicing. So we practice on Monday night, and sometimes those practices are an hour and a half, sometimes they’re like two and a half hours. It just depends on the team who’s there. You have to be there if you want to play on Sunday. So we kind of set that out. I’m a pretty loose musician. I wanted people to not only learn how, I don’t come in and be like, here’s the songs. I come in and I go, so what’s been on everybody’s heart lately? What do you think our community needs right now?

 

Jason |

What’s God doing in your life?

 

Alex |

Cool.

 

Jason |

Well, let’s, like, let’s start with this song. Let’s just kind of worship with this for a while, and we start building that out so that they’re kind of learning how I put together worship sets, and then we start arranging and putting it all together. And then Sunday comes along and it’s actually been really fun and really life giving.

 

Alex |

Yeah.

 

Jason |

Real long answer.

 

Alex |

No, I love it. I love it. I think there’s a few things to highlight there. One, you said, yes, Lord, I’m ready. I need to step into my role. I need to step into this. And then you prayed. And then three, you embraced the messy middle of like, okay, these people aren’t quite ready, but we’re going to just work through this, right? And then the fourth thing was, like, you actually went out and just got to talk to people in your church. I think a lot of worship leaders, they lead worship, they get off stage, they hide in the back, and then they go back on next service. I don’t know if that’s how most worship leaders operate, but that’s how I’ve seen it in bigger churches, and you’ll never, ever first of all, that’s not what God wants. And second, I mean, I understand needing to rest in between services. I’m not saying don’t rest, but like, relationship trish is about relationship, right? And so getting out and actually talking to the people in the hallways, you’ll be surprised how many people actually do play. They just felt like you didn’t need them on stage or they weren’t good enough or whatever, but you grab them, you take them where they are, and you start to put together something that helps them grow.

 

Alex |

And so I think you’re doing a phenomenal job. You’re a great worship pastor.

 

Jason |

That was actually the number one thing that I heard, because I would find out somebody played something or wanted something, and I’d be like, Why didn’t you come up and talk? We’re a small church. We meet it. We all sit at tables. We’re all sitting in the round. It’s very personal. You can’t walk into Mosaic and, like, hide. There is no place to hide. It’s kind of like, come on in. There is no backstage. We don’t even have a stage. So I’ve had a relationship with all these people, but then the number one thing I heard was, well, it just seemed like you had it under control. You came up and you let us, and we were like, okay, being led by it. There was no, like, all right, this guy really needs some help right now.

 

Alex |

Yeah.

 

Jason |

So that was like one of the biggest things, was like, we have to, as worship pastors, communicate, hey, we actually want your help, even if it means that it’s like the music quality dips for a while. I’d rather have that than have to keep doing it all by myself.

 

Alex |

Yeah. And the other thing that I noticed was it takes sacrifice to get a result. Like, you had to put in extra effort and extra time and extra energy and extra focus on this one thing in order to get a result. And I see too many people want results without sacrifice. And so for any worship readers out there listening, just realize you have to put in the work if you want more musicians. All right, this is my focus for the next three months. I’m going to do these five activities every week without fail. Right? That’s kind of how you get results.

 

Jason |

And the thing is, I would say the joy level and the value that you get out of that with worship artistry, we very much we’re trying to equip musicians because it’s more fun to play great music well than it is to play music poorly. Right. Like, it’s better to lead worship with a team of people than it is to lead it by yourself. It’s better, like, that level that I feel like so many people never even get to because we aren’t willing to put in that effort. And it’s like, whatever that effort is, it’s so worth it. And God will give you the grace to put in that effort if that’s something that he’s calling you to do, you know?

 

Alex |

Yeah. That’s so good. So now you’ve built your team. You started to talk about kind of how you approach your arrangements. One of the things that I love about Worship Artistry is you guys build arrangements of popular worship songs to be played by five musicians, and you make them sound very full and very rich. And so if everybody listening, whether live or after the fact or watching hasn’t checked out, worship Artistry, go check it out. I think it’s free to try for 21 days. And you can see how Jason trains your musicians to play full sounding songs with few people. But I would love to hear what you’ve learned about that. Over the years. You’ve put together all these songs as just five instruments and made them sound huge. What are the tips? What are the secrets? Teach us how to sound huge without tracks.

 

Jason |

Sure. Yeah. Okay. Couple of things. So, first of all, I will say when we create a song for Worship Artistry, we actually use the master recordings, and so we’re trying to make them sound like those records. And so that’s me taking six electric guitar parts and narrowing and combining and arranging to make them one that fits. Same thing with the keyboard. The other instruments, though, like, songs just have common things. Every instrument plays a role. You know, we have I do all the mixing at the end, so I grab everybody’s videos and we make rehearsal mixes so that everybody can, like, practice without hearing the instruments. So you only hear our arrangement. Right. And it’s shocking to me that as long as you have something holding the rhythm and something holding the chords and something holding the melody, those three things are what make up a song. And so even when the drums aren’t in there, but if the acoustic guitar is playing, like, very rhythmically, that’s enough. And if the little counter melodies and all those things, they add beauty. We have sections that are like every Lesson has a solo acoustic section where I kind of talk through.

 

Jason |

Let’s say you’re just a guitar player. How do you play this song? We bring in little melodic things and talk about dynamics and all those things to kind of make it more interesting. But ultimately it’s rhythm, it’s chord changes, and then somebody’s got to carry that melody, right? And so however you look at a song and you can keep going, you want songs to constantly change. So you’ve got those pieces, and then as songs move, you have to just think about dynamically, how they happen. I did a workshop at Worship Innovators about arranging songs, and we analyzed and I actually used a rock song. It’s funny. Bradford from Worship tutorials was there and I used lightning crashes by live and Bradford in the back and he goes, yeah. What worship song is this? Used it because they only use a five piece, the worship. It’s not genre, but the sound of worship music today in most bands is like, wall of sound, right? It’s like, we need all these things to build, so it’s like, epic, right?

 

Alex |

Yeah.

 

Jason |

And you don’t need to do that. We can all worship to smaller sounding songs. We want them to sound big. We want them to sound full. We want them to sound interesting and be interesting to play. But not every song needs to have a wall of guitars, like, screaming at you in, like, ten different effects, right? So just kind of analyzing the way songs are arranged and realizing there’s kind of a pattern to this. And so when I sit down with my team, then, and I’m arranging songs, like, sometimes we use worship, archery. I write a lot of the songs in our church, so a lot of times there aren’t even references. So it’s sitting down and going, okay, what is the rhythm of this part? Who’s holding the rhythm? Now? This week we’re doing all my teams are, like, really different layouts, so this week we’re doing a three piece. I’m leading on electric for the first time in forever. And then we have bass and drums and sitting down with those guys and going, okay, like, where do we start? What’s holding the rhythm? Okay, drums, we’re following you, so, like, stop looking at me.

 

Jason |

I’m following you. You’re the leader of this song. And then vice versa. Like, okay, I’m going to hold down the rhythm on this section because everyone’s going to drop out, so you follow me. Rhythm is so important. You need to identify who is doing the rhythm in each section, and then you just need to think about how to dynamically arrange them. And then the third thing I would say is to lean into the instruments that you have. So, like, I said, so for a three piece band, that’s what I’m doing there. I have one team that is like, a chamber choir vocalist, a violin player, and me on acoustic guitar. And I’m like, all right, we’re going to lean into things that you guys do. So that’s why I paired them together. And we go like and I really worked with the violinist and go like, okay, I’m going to hold the rhythm here. You’re going to play this counter melody here, then you’re going to drop, then you’re going to come back in, then you’re going to play something more rhythmic here, and then you’re going to hold a pad here, and then vocally, I’m going to support you by doubling what you’re doing, really kind of working with each of those instruments, recognize what they do well and do that.

 

Jason |

Somebody asked me at the conference, like, well, you know, I’ve got a keyboard and it’s just me and, like, a cajon, like, shall I use tracks. And I’m like, no, just get rid of all the other crap and just make it a piano sound. You ever heard Ben Folds play by himself? The guy is unbelievable, and he’s just a piano player. So if you just have a piano, play it like a piano, but play rhythmically, play interesting ways and really just kind of lean into what you have. Rather than trying to make your electric guitar sound like a seven layered keyboard, lean into those instruments and think about the melodies and arrange those together. That’s kind of the way I love you.

 

Alex |

I love that. And I think even picking songs like you have a quiet you have a choral singer and a violin and acoustic like Be Thou My Vision or How Deep the Father’s Love for US probably is a home run with those three instruments. Right. So don’t try to play great. I am with those three instruments that’s.

 

Jason |

Totally super lame or really arrange into it. Some of the joy for me as a worship leader is I arrange all these songs all week for Worship Artistry. I don’t want to play them that way. Usually once I’m done, I’ve just done that. I’ve spent so much time on that. For me, the creative outlet is going, but what if we did it this way and then working with the team and it actually becomes I’m inspired by what I’ve learned and what I’ve arranged. And that’s why it’s called Worship Artistry and not like play it just like this. It’s like learn, get the information, recognize how the song is put together, and then you can create it amazingly that way, but then make it your own.

 

Alex |

Well, I think that’s so huge. What you’re saying is that we shouldn’t sound like everyone else. We should lean into the musicians we have. We should spend the time you spend every Monday with them figuring out how do we make this new and beautiful and work with what we have? And I hope that’s an encouragement to a lot of the worship leaders listening that it doesn’t have to sound like every other church. By the way, that’s kind of getting old. That’s old hat. That’s boring. Come on, can we just be ourselves? Even at my church? I’m getting sick of the same arrangement of Battle Belongs. Let’s we need to change things up. A rut is a bad place to be. And so I would encourage small churches to use your smallness to your advantage. Right. And I love your example for us, Jason, in that I think that’s huge. One area that really tends to be tricky for smaller churches is sound quality or like, instrument quality. What have you learned about bringing excellence out of the sound in your small gym setup? It’s a hard one.

 

Jason |

Very much still learning. So we have a really weird set up. I’m not saying everybody does this, but I think some things are going to really. Apply here. A, we do really value the sound skill will get you really, really far. Like, if I was like, Are you going to invest in the sound system? Are you going to invest in your skill? Outside of the fact that I’d run Worship Artistry, I’d say invest in the skill because I can play through any sound system and make it sound like enough, make it sound enough. And so the way that we have our system set up is we have two speakers on the front, these two MACD speakers. We really wanted to Destage things. And so the way that our room is set up is, like, there’s a table in the middle with a cross on it, and then we’re all gathered around that. So we’re not even in the front. We’re kind of at the side. We’re looking at the cross, and then the lyrics are over here on the left. And so we don’t even have monitors. Like, we’re actually hearing out of the speakers the actual name.

 

Jason |

And I’m running sound also, by the way. I have an iPad, a little Mackie iPad sound board.

 

Alex |

And you didn’t create your siphoned.

 

Jason |

And I said that, no, we need that money to buy stuff. We just bought a computer for the first time ever. Wait a minute. Let’s not all use our personal computers. It’s not working, dude. It’s crazy. Yes, small church, but we have this tiny little iPad board. And so I sit there and I just build. I sit down and I go, okay, when we first get there, I’m like, let’s build it from the ground up. We’ll start playing. Let’s set some levels. And then we just start going, like, okay, whoever’s holding percussion, okay, you’re there. And then if I have bass, I mix that in there where it’s like, okay, that sounds right. And then I do the same thing with guitar and the same thing with vocals. And away we go. And then I don’t really mess with it. I think the key is from the sound side is, A, still take the time to do that. Take the time to try and get a good sound. Because, like, for example, my guitar, like, I have a nice guitar. I have a Martin triple O, a Clapton that I got, you know, 15 years ago.

 

Jason |

And you see on all my videos and I run that through a fishman spectrum Dies, which makes it sound pretty good. And I have presets on my soundboard that I know, like, okay, this is how this is EQed, and this is a little bit of reverb I put on it or whatever. Same thing with vocals. So I create presets to at least give me, like, a close starting point. And then, yeah, we just take the time to do that. The other big thing is volume level. At my large church, it was like, we want the sound to be, like, loud and just like, envelope the room, right? It was like, yeah, it’s got a rock like big so that everybody can really sing out. And what I found is I was falling in love with having the sound kind of quiet so I could hear everybody else sing. From that standpoint, we’ve got some people that are I feel very blessed that some of our folks will really sing out and then that helps everybody else sing out as well. And so the band is trying to intentionally blend in with the congregation, not be over the top of it.

 

Jason |

And so even vocally and same thing with levels, because now we’re playing, I can’t be adjusting everything. So I’m thinking, I’m listening to the mix, everyone’s doing the same, and we’re all kind of being our own compressors. So I talk with the vocalist, I’m like, hey, listen, when you’re singing, like, are you too loud? Back off the mic a little bit. Same thing with me. Like, my acoustic guitar playing lightens up all those things. We’re constantly in the space of a very live feeling experience. And once again, if we play well, the Tweeter that’s not quite catching in the ten k area doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. So it’s like, if you can be passable, if you can just be passable and then play well and play to what you’re hearing and be like, interacting with that like a musician always should, then you can do it and it’ll be great.

 

Alex |

Yes. I always say a good band can make a bad system sound good. And I think that’s what you’re saying. And there are a few things to take away from what you shared. One is the quality of your own instrument does matter. Like, if you have an attitude piano and it’s all old and it doesn’t sound good, it’s just not going to sound good no matter how you might get right? So I always say one of the fastest ways to improve your sound is to improve the quality of each of your sound sources. So are your drums tuned and are your symbols cheap? And like, you know, I know small churches, you can’t, like, always upgrade. Here’s an interesting question I didn’t put on the list for you, but like, if you had to choose a couple of pieces of gear to upgrade first to improve your sound at your small church, what would you choose?

 

Jason |

That’s a good question. I’m not a sound engineer, obviously, so.

 

Alex |

Maybe instruments, like how many symbols? Symbols are important, but maybe not a lot.

 

Jason |

Sure, symbols are important. We have the cheapest crappiest drum set. A guy just like, we’re setting it up for the first time this week, so I’ll tell you next week. But in terms of I think individual instruments are important. A guitar with a terrible pickup is really hard to work with. Like you said, an attitude piano, it kind of just shoots us all on the foot. So having those instruments that are at least passable, I think, for a long time. A lot of times we don’t have a lot of money as musicians, especially for professional musicians. Right. So the idea of upgrading certain gear is like, oh my gosh. But there are certain things that when you purchase those things, they actually make such a huge difference. You’re not fighting against your instrument all the time. So instruments, I think having decent microphones and spending time learning how to EQ, that is like, out of all the things, learn how to EQ. If you learn how to EQ and get all those ugly, you can take something that’s like, oh, this isn’t great, but you can kind of take some bite off there and learn how to do that.

 

Jason |

And I was always really intimidated by EQing. And then Doug Gould or Worship, MD, actually did a little training for us, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is just face melting. And basically the biggest thing was he would just take EQ, and he was like, you probably talked about this in your classes, but just make a point and crank it so you’re like, oh, that’s the bad sound. And then he would dip that, and it was like, oh, okay, that helps me find that wall wall sound and pull it out. And all of a sudden, oh my gosh, we all sound okay.

 

Alex |

Yeah. The other fastest way to improve your church of sound quality, this is something I always recommend, is hiring a local sound technician, even if they’re not a Christian, but as long as you know.

 

Jason |

They’Re good, even better if they’re not a Christian.

 

Alex |

Yes, sure. Hire them in the day. What?

 

Jason |

I said bring them in.

 

Alex |

Bring them in.

 

Jason |

Non Christians.

 

Alex |

Yeah, totally. Hire them to mix your service for the day, to train your sound tech while they’re mixing the service. And then to save if you have a digital, like M 32 or X 32 soundboard, one of those barringer cheaper soundboards, you can save all of his settings as, like, your baseline, and then maybe every six months, as much as you can afford, bring him back to tweak it and refine it. And it just like it gives you a better starting place every week. So get your biggest band on stage and have him mix your biggest band, and then save the settings, and then boom, there you go. So, yeah, there’s a lot to sound. I do plan on making a sound course. Something I wanted to say to you. To the Academy members watching a lot of the arrangement stuff that Jason was talking about. I would encourage you. If you haven’t yet. To watch the arrangement portion of the musical excellence course that’s in the Academy. Because that covers kind of like song segments and micro transitions between song segments and how to add layers and take away layers and subdivisions and frequencies and all that stuff.

 

Alex |

So check that out if you haven’t yet. But Jason, this has been super fun. I feel like we could probably talk for another 40 minutes, which we won’t answer.

 

Jason |

I give no.

 

Alex |

It’s so good. We are going to move into our Q and A time with our academy members. For those of people who are watching after the fact or on YouTube, we do have an academy where you can join and you can be live on these podcast interviews and ask your own questions. So that’s what we’re going to be moving into shortly. But I guess I have two last questions for you before we do that. One is like, do you have any final words just of encouragement for our listeners. But before you answer that, I want you to tell people where they can find you online worship artistry and anything else you want to share.

 

Jason |

Sure. So worship artistry is the main thing I do. And I created it for me in the sense that we had to make a decision right in the beginning of like, who are we building this for? What essentially we do at worship Aristotle is we take all the big songs, all the elevation, all the hill song, all the stuff, and we’ve got over 600 songs. And then what we do is we strip those down to bass, drums, keyboard, vocals, and electric and acoustic guitar. So we take those and we arrange them so they sound just like the record. I mean, they really do like your church will not know the difference if you learn to play it this way. And the idea is a couple of things. One is every lesson is built so that people who are very novice can get tons of teaching. We’re teachers. Like, ultimately, I taught guitar for 20 years. So when I’m teaching the guitar lesson, I’m thinking about all the questions that my guitar students have. So I have these like, detailed things, but they’re also built in a way where you can skip over all that and jump to I just need to listen to a practice loop of the bridge and I can just practice that.

 

Jason |

And I’ve got my transposable sheet music and tabs and music video to practice with and like, all the things. And every lesson is built to do that because we’re trying to COVID everybody. We are also trying to do it for the smaller church. Like I said, we chose in the beginning, like, we’re going to do this for one electric guitar. Because I’ve never been in a church that had more than one electric guitarist on stage. So why do we have six electric guitars in this song? And there’s a lot of stuff that you don’t really need in terms of that. Go to worshiprsy.com. You can get a free trial. It’s free 21 day trial. You can reach out to me. Jason@worshiphostry.com is a really easy way to reach out and answer your questions. We look like a big shop, but we’re actually a tightknit group over here and we all work together and are very personal. So you can reach out to us there at worshipartistry on Instagram, also at Jason Houtmana. That’s H-O-U-T-S-M-A. Also on instagram. I’ve avoided social media like it was going to give me cancer forever. And I finally I’m like, no, I have to steward this thing that I’ve created, and that means being out there and showing who I am and helping people in the best way that I can.

 

Jason |

So it’s a lot of fun. There’s a lot of goofing around, so you really get a sense of what’s going on, but all those places you can come and find the stuff that I do, and I hope you engage. We’re really here to support you. That’s what we’re here for.

 

Alex |

Yes. And I’ll link all that in the show notes. Okay, last, just final encouragements to smaller church worship leaders or even big church worship leaders. Just final closing thoughts and then we’ll jump into our Academy Q and A.

 

Jason |

The idea of success for a worship leader is a very deep one. A lot of people throw, like, hang all these different things on what we’re supposed to be. Sometimes it’s about our style. Sometimes it’s about, hey, you got to put more butts in the seats. Sometimes you’re not doing this enough or you’re not doing that enough, or like, we hear a lot of voices. And what I want to encourage you to think about and to pray about is what has God called you to do and do that? You don’t need to sound like hillsong and you don’t need to sound like elevation. You can sound like you. God built you and puts you in a place to be who he created you to be. And so don’t get the sense of like, oh, I don’t sound just like that, or I don’t look like that. I don’t wear the right clothes, or I don’t like, the world overall is going away from that. I was talking to a worship leader or messaging with a worship leader this week, and I was like, they’re talking about being more relevant to youth. And my number one thing was, like, you can smell inauthenticity from a mile away.

 

Jason |

Like, just love people and be who you are. And so whatever you do musically in your ministry, all those things, it’s not about having massive numbers and having the best sound. It’s about being faithful and what God has given you to do. So seek that and do that, and everything will also kind of fall into place.

 

Alex |

That’s such good words. Thank you, Jason. All right, Academy members, hang tight. We’ll be right back. Thanks for tuning in today. I hope this episode encouraged you, helped you, and pushed you forward in your ministry. If it helped you, can you take a second and help us by sending it to just one person that you think needs to hear this. And if you’re feeling extra nice, leave us a nice shiny five star review on Apple podcasts or like this video if you’re watching it on YouTube. If you want to discuss this episode or ask questions, we do have a free section in our academy where you can post comments and questions and chat with other worship leaders just like you and also sample some of our courses. And you can go to Worshipinistytraining.com Free to join us inside the free portion of the academy. If you’re looking for more, check out the full access academy. You can get 15 days for just $1 to start and try things out again. You can try all of it for 15 days for just $1 by going to Worship Ministrytraining.com. Hope to see you inside the academy, or else I’ll see you next month for another you.