Multiply Your Ministry Effectiveness

Alex Enfiedjian 00:11 Hello, and welcome back to the worship team podcast. My name is Alex Enfiedjian. I’m your host, thanks so much for tuning in today, hey, I don’t know about you, but I want to be a more effective person. If I can multiply my time, my energy, my impact in this world, I want to know how. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about today is multiplying your ministry how to go from just you to multiple people accomplishing your mission through you. I had a great chance to catch up with my good friend Justin Bell, who is a worship pastor, and pastor of many sorts of things at Calvary Nexus in Cambria, California. Justin has done an incredible job at multiplying his ministry, it started out with just him and three teams. And now it is a huge ministry. I don’t even know how many people are involved. But there are 12 teams, and 15 or 16 worship leaders who are all equipped to do a fantastic job. So he doesn’t have to do everything himself. So if you want to learn how to multiply your effectiveness and multiply your ministry, this episode is for you. Now, I’ll be honest, upfront, it’s more geared towards worship leaders or worship directors. But if you’re a team member, you can still take a lot of the principles found here and apply them to your personal life or even your, your your role as a team member on your team, I would say listen to it, enjoy it, and be blessed by it. I did have some audio issues with my microphone. I apologize. I don’t want you to miss the good content in this. Thankfully, Justin does most of the talking. So you don’t have to put up with my annoying microphone issues too much. But enjoy the podcast. Be blessed. And I’ll catch you at the back end. Enjoy my interview with Justin bell. I am here with Justin Bell, a good friend of mine. Justin and I met many years ago when we were teenagers. And Justin is the we’ll call him the worst pastor at Calvary Nexus. But really he’s the administrative slash executive pastor slash does like everything. He oversees all of the worship ministry at Calvary Nexus, which is in Cambria, California. He preaches he oversees the deacons and the elders and all the admin stuff. He’s a man of many talents, but he’s exceedingly good at multiplying his ministries, his his music team, and the culture they’ve created. There is all about multiplication. Many leaders shared leadership, equipping others to do the ministry well, so I’m honored to be here with my friend Justin. So hello, Justin. Hello. It’s good to be with you. Yeah, man. I’m excited. Okay, so I want to start by having you tell us a little bit about what your music ministry was like when you came to Calvary Nexus 10 years ago, as a 19 year old, give us a little bit of insight where you were when you started 10 years ago, and how you’ve seen God multiply your ministry 10 years in into your journey there.

Justin Bell 03:45 Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. So. So like, like you said, Alex, I started about 10 years ago, came on staff at our church here at Calvary Nexus. In at the time, I was just an intern helping out with youth ministry and, and some of the music ministry within the the youth ministry. And after being into it for about a year and a half. And I just turned 19 the the worship pastor at the time, was leaving his position. And then the our lead pastor, Pastor, Bruce Zachary, he turned to me and said, Would you like to become the worship director? And honestly, I was super overwhelmed at at even the thought of, you know, doing this at at a growing church. I think at that time, we were running about 400 people on a typical Sunday service. But I just, you know, I did something that I had always been very passionate about. always loved, you know, playing music and so I accepted the position. I walked into we’ve always kind of had a culture at Calvary nexus of having multiple worship. leaders, instead of just you know, there’s just one guy who’s doing every single service. So we would have other people who were worship leaders that were leading at a specific service. And when I first took over, there were three other teams that were doing, you know, Sunday mornings in our in our Wednesday evening service. So in a typical month, I was leading worship one Sunday, a month, and maybe two or three Wednesday’s a month as the worship director. And just over the years, the church has grown. About four years ago, when we went multi site, we started a second campus. So now Now, at this point, in any given week, we’re doing five different Sunday services that need three different worship teams. And we’re doing a midweek, Wednesday night service that needs another worship team. So this is just continue to multiply. And it’s something like I said, I kind of inherited this culture. But it’s become something that I think could be helpful for worship leaders and worship pastors and directors to consider a model of raising up multiple leaders so that they’re not just plugging away doing it every single Sunday.

Alex Enfiedjian 06:18 Yeah, that’s awesome. And what you’re saying is, as your church grew, your need for more worship leaders and worship teams grew. So you started with three teams when you came. And now how many teams do you guys have? And how many leaders do you guys have?

Justin Bell 06:35 Yeah, at this point, we, we, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of funny, sometimes I lose track. But at this point, I think we have about 12 worship teams, and we have a couple more worship leaders on top of that, that are kind of on standby for when we have a hole in the schedule. So we probably have about 15 worship leaders, all together that are ready to go and jump in whenever we need them to lead.

Alex Enfiedjian 07:00 Wow. So you’ve got in 10 years, you went from three worship leaders and teens to 12 teams and maybe 15, more team leaders, all of whom, which over the last 10 years, you’ve equipped to be excellent at what they do. And you’ve trained them and challenged them and helped them grow to be excellent worship leaders. And that’s, that’s exciting to see the multiplication aspect of your faithfulness over the last 10 years. So I want to ask you, to tell our listeners, why you think multiplication is important. Why? Why does it matter that we as worship leaders aren’t just solo acts, but we’re pouring into other people to multiply our ministry?

Justin Bell 07:43 Yeah, absolutely. Alex, I mean, first of all, I think at the at the core of it is that multiplication is biblical. I mean, you see, you know, as you studied the life of Jesus, you know, we all know that a bogus and aspect of his ministry is pouring into these 12 guys that are, you know, going to, you know, basically start the church. And we just see his his example, that he doesn’t do it all himself, but he pours into others so that they can continue. And you know, Jesus says, you’re going to do even greater things in my name. And I think that that’s really, the mark of a good leader is not necessarily how things look while he’s there. And while he or she is doing their ministry, but what that looks like, what their legacy looks like, and and what other leaders they’re raising up and really what the ministry looks like, once they’ve left or when Scott has moved them on to another place. That’s, that’s really the test of someone’s faithfulness, I believe. And when it comes to, you know, being being a worship leader, I think that, you know, beyond the fact that I believe that it’s biblical, to raise up leaders, it’s, it’s incredibly practical, and it’s something that can be very helpful. You know, we’ve all as worship leaders experienced worship leader burnout, you know, we’re, we’re just going, we’re going through the motions, it’s, you know, Sundays always come in and we’ve got to put together one more set, and creating a depth of leadership can can really help with that, like, like, for us, for example, most of our worship leaders are leading one time a month. So they they have a whole month to be getting refreshed, to be praying about their set that they want to do their, their musicians that they’re using, they’re just chomping at the bit to get back up there and to begin leading again. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of one of those things where a lot of times we feel so busy like I don’t have time to pour into a leader but it’s but really it’s you don’t have time not to raise up leaders because you’re gonna end up getting burned out and if if you have To go somewhere, you don’t want to leave your church in a place where, where you’re totally messed up. I mean, I always like to say, if I got hit by a bus today, our church would be completely fine. Because we have so many, so many great worship leaders, you know, I mean, so

Alex Enfiedjian 10:18 yeah, that’s, that’s awesome. I love what you said about how the mark of a great leader is what legacy they leave when they’re gone, like, did they pour into others? Do they equip others? Do they multiply and pour into more leaders? And how will the organization be if you got hit by a bus? And I think that’s fair for all of the worship leaders listening to ask like, how am I doing in this? Am I? Am I the Lone Star? Or will the church you know, obviously, the church will go on without you. But you know, you leave them in a lurch if and when you leave. And I think it’s something that carry neuhoff, a great blogger and pastor says, He says that the leader who raises up other leaders, who can lead well or better than they can, isn’t less valuable to the organization, but more valuable like, because I think a lot of times we’re like, it’s an ego thing where like, I need to be on the stage, because I’m the best at this, or I need to be, you know, in charge, because if someone else is then it’s going to not be as great as if I was up there. So, but that’s that’s an ego trip. And you’re actually limiting your organization, right? Absolutely.

Justin Bell 11:29 Yeah, it takes it takes great humility, to come to a place where you’re gonna raise up other people, and and really knowing that, you know, what, some of these people that I’m raising up, might become a lot better than I am even. Yeah, and it is a humbling thought. And, you know, there is that, that ego that goes there. But, you know, I mean, we all know as worship leaders, it’s, it’s not about us, right? It’s, it’s about Jesus. So we want to be raising up other people and, and, you know, part of raising them up is knowing that, that it’s going to be a process. You know, when I mean, when we once again, going back to the Gospels when I mean, when you and I look at the disciples at the, you know, the end of Jesus’s ministry, you look at these guys, and you think, Oh, my gosh, I don’t think I would trust them to start the Church of Jesus Christ. But, but Jesus does. And you know, as they’re filled with the Holy Spirit, they do just fine. And I think that that’s really what it what it takes is some worship leaders have this fear. Like they think, you know, I’ve got this certain level, when I lead worship, and if I let someone else out the stage, the level is going to drop. And then what if people leave, and we start worrying about all the stuff, but he just got to let someone start to do it. I mean, think about when you and I were leading worship 10 years ago, I mean, you know, and it was really bad. And for some reason, you know, people kept coming, it’s probably because of the teaching. But you know, but we needed to keep doing it to be able to grow ourselves. So we need to have that same mentality.

Alex Enfiedjian 13:06 Yeah. And it increases your kingdom effectiveness, because I am you, you can only do so much. But if you equip 30 other people in your lifetime to do better than you, you’ve advanced the kingdom 30 times more than you could have done if you just sat on your gift, and we’re greedy about it. So I love that man, that’s exciting. To me what you’re doing, and it’s it’s kind of really my heart too, is I kind of had this epiphany, I’m going to be 30 in the summer this year. And two years ago, I was thinking about that I was like, Oh my gosh, I’m almost 30 or 40. Well, I don’t want to be like just some some, you know, fat balding, 40 year old worship leader, you know, who’s never done anything except for lead worship on Sundays. Like, I would rather start raising up an army and equipping an army of other worship leaders who are younger, better, cooler, more effective than I am right, and start training them. It kind of like, I don’t know if you know, Bob kauflin. Who matters but I mean, he’s, he’s basically empowered countless others into really a fairly effective ministry. And I’m like, I want to be like that, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Which is why we’re doing this podcast, right? Yep. Yep. Yeah. Okay, any other thoughts on like, why multiplication is important. You said burnout helps with burnout. It’s biblical. Any other thoughts?

Justin Bell 14:37 Yeah, I think one of the other thing is that it can create a variety and a freshness for the church. You know, I mean, we’ve all I think experience when we when we have like one worship leader that we’re really into, you know, and you have the you have the timer, you know, you’re constantly listening to their CDs in your car and, and but But then you kind of get to a point a couple of years into it where you’re not as into that worship leader anymore, are we, you know, we’ve done that with, with pastors and teachers as well, you know, you get into one pastor, you listen to him over and over and over again. And then you kind of know what he’s gonna say. And I think that when you have a team of worship leaders, you create a certain aspect of freshness. And with that, you can have a double edged sword that, you know, I’d like to talk about a little bit later with being able to create consistency in a church where you have a culture of multiplication. But I think that, you know, the positive side of that is that you create that variety and that freshness for the local church.

Alex Enfiedjian 15:42 That is so true, because honestly, like, if I lead a whole bunch of weeks in a row, I can tell people are ready for a change. Yeah, absolutely. And then you get somebody gets up there and leads way different than I do. And it’s like, super refreshing for the church. They’re like, ah, and and that person, the way that that person leads meets the needs of other people in the church that I don’t meet, you know. So that’s good. Anything else?

Unknown Speaker 16:09 Yeah, we Yeah, we just,

Justin Bell 16:10 I mean, we have all different ages, all different types of people. And what I’ve noticed is that it’s nice to have different worship leaders, because these different worship leaders will minister to these different groups in different ways. And we try to create a culture of being contemporary, because that’s just what we feel like God’s called us to do at Calvary Nexus. But we, we do, we do insert him into each one of our sets, because we realize that there there is that 80 year old in the service that that’ll bless them be able to hear the hymn and, you know, also the 20 year old, it’s, you know, they need to hear that. And it’s it’s good to learn that, that theology of that song and so forth. But I guess what I’m trying to say is that having different worship leaders, really ministers to different people in the church, I love talking to different people in our church, and you know, seeing what worship leaders really ministered to them. And it’s always different, depending on the person. So

Alex Enfiedjian 17:14 that’s awesome. So that’s, that’s kind of the why multiplication is important. Matt, tell us a little bit about how you at your church at Calvary. Next, you’ve multiplied your ministry. So you came when there was only three teams, and 10 years in, there’s 12 teams and 15 worship leaders tell us how your process is how how, like, let’s say someone’s listening, and they’re like, okay, I want to do this. I have no idea where to start. I’ve always just led myself, it’s been a solo act. How do I do this? So so give us some insight into that?

Justin Bell 17:48 Yeah, absolutely. Um, the way that the way that I like to look at it is, is kind of like you’re creating a farming system, if you would, you know, a lot of times, the only thing that we’re thinking about is sanctuary worship. But if we want to be able to, if you want to be able to create this sort of culture within your church, you have to look a lot further and a lot more beyond you have to ask yourself, do people have an opportunity to grow and to use their gifts in our church? Or is it only a once once you’re good enough to play on Sunday morning, then come talk to me? Do they have opportunities to be able to grow?

Alex Enfiedjian 18:29 And I thought about different avenues or venues for people to gain experience? That’s what you’re saying?

Justin Bell 18:35 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, and I think a couple of ways that you can do this. One of my favorite ways, personally, is youth ministry. youth ministry is is a great place for people to be growing as worship leaders. And that can be for those who are adults can go and serve in the youth ministry, and they might not be ready to lead in your sanctuary yet. But they but the kids will love them. And the kids are super blessed even in kids ministry as well. But not only adults, but they actually the youth. And that’s something that for a long time at Calvary Nexus I was the junior high pastor. I transitioned out of that a little over a year ago. But that’s something I’m always talking to our youth pastors about is you know, making sure Hey, are you guys putting kids on your team? Because that’s once again, it’s easy to show up by yourself with your acoustic five minutes before and play your set. And sometimes when you’re in youth ministry, you’re so busy, that’s all you seem to have time for. However, what happens to those kids in the youth group that played drums that play electric guitar, put in the effort to raise up these kids and a lot of the worship leaders and worship musicians that we have at our church? Five years ago, they were in the youth group playing every Wednesday. Every Sunday. So if you create that culture in your youth ministry and in your kids ministry, where adults and kids have opportunities to constantly be leading worship, then they’re going to be prepared to be able to lead in the sanctuary for for your, your church body.

Alex Enfiedjian 20:18 That’s so huge. That’s actually how I got started in in worship music ministry, my youth leader said, Hey, your musical Do you think you could learn how to play the drums? And he threw me in there? And then, and then he was like, hey, do you think you can play electric? Hey, do you think you could sing? Hey, do you think you could lead? And so thank you feel Eisenhower. I know you listen to this podcast. Thanks for for doing that. But so many kids worship leader starts leading in the youth band. I don’t know your story. Is that true for you?

Justin Bell 20:48 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I did start leading youth band.

Alex Enfiedjian 20:52 So you’re saying great venues for people who maybe aren’t ready for the mainstage and start using those venues to give them experience. So we’ve done that here at Cypress ever since I had my life. I don’t want to be a 40 year old fat solo worship leader, epiphany, I was like, okay, where can we need? One we need places for people to gain experience. And two, we need places to be able to put people when we tell them no, you’re not ready for the main stage. So here are some of mine, my venues that that we’ve created over the last two years and tell me some more stories. So we started a youth band, like you said, and then and then we have a college band. And then we started a thing called a praise chorus for singers who may be you know, need some more experience or don’t know how to find harmonies. So we’re teaching them how to find harmonies they’ve seen once every six or seven or eight weeks, along with us. And then I’m working on getting the women’s Bible study a female worship leader. So those are some venues that we’ve created that maybe some of the listeners could try to do. Now, do you have any more besides like youth ministry? Or is that really like your main training ground?

Justin Bell 22:03 Well, that is our main one. But we do have other venues as well. Like you were saying, women’s ministry, when they have a special event, that’s a good time to plug in a worship leader or studies, community groups will will send worship leaders to community groups to lead worship in those times. Men’s ministry, we have a men’s ministry gathering that happens at our church every Thursday evening. And I’ve sent some worship leaders over there to try and grow I’ve, I’ve got a guy on my team right now who’s playing electric guitar with me, and he really wants to start leading worship. And so he’s been going over there every couple of weeks in hell lead worship for that Thursday night study. And that’s another venue that will send worship leaders to, to be able to play and then one other thing that I forgot to mention is that you can put a put an up and coming worship leader on your team. There, I mean, you know, we’ve we’ve all heard it before that sometimes things are taught. But more often than not, they’re caught, you know, it’s by them being you can sit down and you can tell them how to lead a worship team. But there’s nothing like them being on your worship team and seeing how you, you know, prepare everything, how you lead the team, how you interact with people, how you deal with conflict, and have them on your team. And when you feel like they’re ready, let him lead a song. And if that goes well, then let him lead a couple songs. And and what’s really important when you have somebody on your team, and you’re going to let them lead a song, especially a worship leader that you’re raising up, give them the authority to communicate to your team, what they want to do with the song. Don’t step in and give them training wheels, where you’re coordinating, you’re telling the drummer when to come in, give the reins over to the other worship leader and let them do it. And then you can give them feedback after a few No, say, Hey, Hey, buddy, the bass player had no idea when you wanted him to come in, you’re going to want to tell him that you’re going to want to communicate a clear roadmap to your team. But putting someone on your team once they’re ready, that is so invaluable, because they’re not leading their own team yet. But they’re getting to kind of dabble in it and kind of get their feet wet. And after doing that for a little while. They’re they’re going to be ready pretty quickly, they’ll start leading their own team.

Alex Enfiedjian 24:30 That’s awesome. And I love how you said because I kind of hold the reins tight. I’m like, I’m the music director. I got to make sure the band is tight and sounds good. But I love that challenge to myself, which is like, dude, just relax and let the let the kid try or let the guy or the guy or the gal try. And I really think it’s important. What you said is about feedback afterwards. Because a lot of times will be like, Oh yeah, they lead the song on Sunday and then we won’t debrief with them about it and be like okay, how do you think it went? How could you engage the congregation better? How can you you know, and just like pick their brain a little bit and give them feedback? I think feedback, the F word is that’s a really good F word. Right? Yeah, I really.

Justin Bell 25:14 Yeah. And that’s something that we do as well is I always try to make sure that there’s what I like to say there’s some sort of a worship director type that is in any to the services so that we can provide that feedback. And we’ll do it on site. And we’ll also do it sometimes through email after we also try to meet with our worship leaders, at least one on one once a year, and then we can just kind of spend some time talking to him about, you always want to start with the areas that you think that they’re doing well, you don’t want to jump right into the criticism, you know, tell them the ways that you’ve seen them grow, tell that they’re really effective with and then move on to that with sharing with them, areas that they can grow. And something that I always like to tell my worship leaders, when we’re having that conversation is I say, you know, hey, I’m I just reminding you that the very fact that I that we’ve put you on the schedule, is that we recognize that you have a gift of of leading worship. So I don’t want you to get confused when I’m giving you feedback. Like I think you’re some, you know, terrible worship leader, because if I thought that I just remove you, you know it, so I always tell them that so that because, you know, as musicians, you know, our ego sets in and when we hear someone, you know, tell us that a note was a little flat, then, you know, we get all extreme about it. And we go and start crying in our room and thinking that we’re the worst worship leader in the world. And it can be good to kind of preamp that with the sharing with them that hey, you know, we think you’re very gifted. These are just some things that I think that you could work on.

Alex Enfiedjian 26:58 So awesome. So that’s, that’s another way tell, is there. Are there more ways to multiply your ministry that you’ve you’ve utilized over the last 10 years at Calvary Nexus?

Justin Bell 27:10 Yeah, I think, I think an important question that you want to ask, and this is kind of a more of a big picture, worship ministry ministry question is you want to ask yourself, so if, if you were coming to your own church as a musician? What is the experience like you getting involved in that in the worship ministry? Is this something that is a clear process? Is it something that’s easy to understand? Or is this exclusive club of musicians that it seems like you can you can never get in with? What is the process like of getting involved in worship ministry at your church? Is it something that is clear, it is something that people can really understand. And what we do is, the first thing that you want to look at is what are the portals for getting connected. And for us, we have something called the Kinect card, that will give out on Sunday mornings, everybody gets one, or they can pop it open in their app or on their website, where they can sign up for history saying, I’m really interested in worship ministry, and then I’ll get that information. And then I can reach out to them, and I can connect with them. And then what you what you want to do from that point, is you want to make sure that they’re qualified spiritually, you want to make sure that they’re a Christian. And you also want to make sure ideally, that they’re living a life generally, that’s above reproach. So what we’ll do is we will give them a questionnaire to fill out. And this will just, we have like 11 simple questions that kind of give me an idea of, you know, hey, how did you get saved? How would you define worship? And asking these questions? I mean, it’s not, you know, it’s not foolproof, but it certainly gives you an idea of where they’re at spiritually. And our last question that I asked on there is, is there anything in your life that you think would disqualify you for being in church leadership, because I view a worship leader or worship leader or the worship musicians, you know, they’re all really worship leaders. I view them as being held to a First Timothy three standard personally. I mean, these people are on the stage, people are seeing them for a third of your service. You want to make sure that they’re generally living a life that’s above reproach. So you make sure number one, that they’re qualified spiritually. But the second thing that you want to look at is are they qualified musically? Because they could be the godless person in the world. But if they don’t know how to sing or play well, then they might not be the best fit for your worship ministry. So you want to have a way, a clear process for how can you determine if they’re gifted musically, the way that we do this is we do open auditions. And it used to be that I would just meet with somebody, one on one and I’ll do that Sometimes, but it’s much more effective if you can plug them into a band. So if I got someone who’s trying out for keyboards, we have a day, it’s an open audition, I have a house band that’s already they’ve learned the songs, and the person jumps in on the keys, and they have to play along with the band, and then that gives us an ability to see, how do they do playing with the band using the monitors, you know, messing with the drummer, all that good stuff. So Second thing, you know, like I said, you want to make sure they’re qualified musically. And the last one is that you want to make sure that they’re qualified theologically. And what I mean by this, is, you want to make sure that they generally line up with the beliefs of your church. And you know, and that’s not to say that there that there can’t be minor differences. But I mean, if somebody comes to our church, and they want to join the worship team, and they don’t believe that Jesus is God, well, that’s that’s an issue for me. Because that’s a major theological point. If they disagree with us about timing of the rapture, I’ll still let them on the worship team. That’s, that’s more of a of a minor issue. The way that we do that is we are our pastor actually wrote a book on on worship. It’s called fruitful worship by Pastor Bruce Zachary, I’m just giving a little plug for that. And we’ll have them read the fruitful worship book. And and I’ll say, Hey, get back to me, let me know what you thought about it. And we also have a question on the questionnaire, are there any teachings of our church that you disagree with? So through your process, you want to make it simple? And you want to make sure are they qualified spiritually? Are they qualified musically? And are they qualified theologically to serve in your worship ministry?

Alex Enfiedjian 31:41 Yeah, and I think that is just about getting musicians, from the seeds in teams. And then you start looking at the musicians that might be able to lead and you take them through the next, you know, set of processes of like you said earlier, hey, lead this song, hey, lead these two songs, hey, here’s some feedback. So there’s, so there’s a trail from the pews, or the seats all the way up to being a worship leader. And if you have not created that pathway, you will never be able to multiply your ministry as effectively as our friend here Justin has. So I think that’s awesome. I want to say something about multiplying our ministries how to do it. Because right now, we’ve been talking a lot about worship leaders. And maybe if some of the worship team members that are listening, maybe they’ve already tuned out, they’re like, this is boring, this isn’t for me. But if you’re still listening worship team member, I think there are some things that we say to you worship team members, about multiplying yourself to because it’s easy to fall into the same trap of like prideful, I want to sing, I get to sing, or I’m the best bass player, I want to play as much as I can. But really, if your whole team if you’re a worship team member, you should be trying to multiply yourself. So if you’re a bass player, you know, go to the youth band and start training up and helping these younger bass players, and tips and advice and show them how to move around the neck and how to do Phil’s and what’s tastes tasteful. And what grooves work, you know, or if you’re a singer, start attending, like the praise course or the choir and help some of these younger singers understand harmony, and blending, and, you know, parts. So I think this isn’t just for worship leaders, this is for every single person in the church, how are you multiplying yourself? How are you pouring into others? How are you giving away your knowledge and your insights in your experience, to advance the kingdom by passing it on people? And I think if we start doing that, and all of the members of our music teams jump on board with this multiplication mindset, it’s gonna have massive Kingdom ripple effects, through through our team members and through everyone in the church. Right, absolutely. So do you have any you have any other tips on how to multiply your ministry? Or do you want to start talking about some of the challenges that we face when we do start to multiply ourselves?

Justin Bell 34:09 Yeah, just I mean, very, very briefly, I think what you said is, is golden, and that that was one of the thing that I forgot to mention is that at our church, we have something called a youth center. It’s called the bridge. And this is something that Junior highers. And high schoolers come to after it’s a basically an after school program, and it’s totally free. And one of the things that we offer is lessons. And a lot of the people that are in the worship ministry, they’ll serve in this capacity. And they’ll teach these Junior highers and high schoolers how to play their instruments. And you know what, when you were talking, I was thinking about, one of our drummers, in particular, serves at the youth center a lot. And he’s teaching like two or three different kids right now, how to play drums and those kids have joined the youth worship team, and they’ve grown and some of them have even started to play in the sanctuary. So yeah,

Alex Enfiedjian 35:02 that’s awesome. Okay, so we’ve taken our listeners through why they should multiply how they can multiply. And now, like, just tell us in your experience, like, obviously, it’s not all smooth. What are some of the challenges you faced over the last 10 years in trying to multiply yourself?

Justin Bell 35:21 Yeah, I think that, I think that one of the things that can be a challenge is that you know, as a, as a worship leader, or pastor or director, one of the things that you wanting to do is you want to shepherd those that are in your worship ministry, when you just have your one team, and you’ve got your, your true guitarist, your basis to drummer, your backup singer, your keyboard player, let’s find people to shepherd and that’s, you know, can be fairly manageable for most people, but when you start to expand to, and now you have all sorts of worship leaders, and you have all sorts of musicians, you have to number one, create depth of leadership, you have to have people that are assisting you, what we try to do is I actually localize that responsibility with each worship leader, and I charged them and just say that, you know, hey, you’re not just, you’re not just playing music here, you’re not just the worship leader for the service, but you’re the shepherd or the shepherd is to your team to make sure that everybody’s doing okay. And you really have to also, trust the Lord. Because it’s, it’s something that you can try to organize and administrate as much as possible. But you just have to also trust the Lord that he’s going to be faithful. And he’ll reveal to you when somebody might may need a little bit of extra help. So that’s one aspect that that can be a challenge. Another one, a big one I mentioned earlier talking about the double edged sword. Remember, I was mentioning that one of the benefits of having this culture of multiplication is that you have variety and freshness. The other side of that double edged sword is that you have the potential to not have consistency in your worship services. And that can be in quality, which I’ll talk about in a moment here. But it can also be in your song selection. And that was an issue that we were experiencing for a while because the more that we started to grow, we had all these different teams that had the songs that they wanted to play. And this team had their 20 songs they like to play, this team had their 20 songs. And before you knew it, there was nobody knew any of the songs that we were singing. Typical Sunday, when it’s just one person, one of the benefits of that is that you kind of have the holistic view of what songs are being played. A couple of the things that we’ve done to work with this and to try to create more consistency is number one, we made a song pool, which which I know for some worship leaders, that’s just like the worst thing that you could say, you know, don’t don’t control me, I don’t want to be controlled by some sort of song pool. But it can be helpful and it can be beneficial. And I would say that, within that for us, something that I found that works well, is to have a song pool, but it’s it’s sort of loose. I know, I know, some worship ministries, that they have a 2020 songs in their song pool. And the worship leaders are only allowed to play those 20 songs. And I know that that works great for some churches, that doesn’t work for our church. So what we have is we have a song pool of more like 50 or 60 songs. And what we do is we ask the worship leaders to choose the majority of the songs from that song pool. But then we allow them to introduce one new song on top of that. But we do ask that they try to be strategic about that. What we’ll do is sometimes we’ll coordinate with some of the different worship leaders say, Hey, this is a really cool song that we heard lately. I’m gonna do it, why don’t you pray about doing it on the Sunday after me. And we also asked the worship leaders to try to repeat that song The next time that they lead, so that they can start to create consistency. Another thing that we started to do is we keep a song history of every song that has ever been played in the service. And I share that resource with the other worship leaders. So they know when they’re going in and they’re planning their set, they can look back and they can see okay, these are the songs that were done last Sunday. These are the songs the Sunday before at this particular campus at this particular service, so that they can plan based on that and they can realize that if they’re coming in and they’re bringing five songs that haven’t even been played at that campus for nine months, then there might be an issue with their sets. So things that we try to do to create consistency. But I’ve, I’ve created that loose model because we need to realize as worship pastors and directors that we’re working with artists here, and you know,

Justin Bell 40:14 artists want to be able to create. And if you put an artist in too tight of a box, they can’t flourish. So if you can create sort of those boundaries and organization, while not getting them in this tight box where they feel like they have to make this cookie cutter worship set, then you can create that consistency.

Alex Enfiedjian 40:37 That’s awesome. Like you said, consistency and quality, you know, that is a struggle, because we’re like, oh, yeah, this person is still learning. So maybe it’s not quite as good as if this person led or if I led, but I think like you said, In the beginning, we just have to be okay with that, and trust that God is gonna bless His Church anyway. And I think God will bless it even more, because we’re making disciples, you know, we’re obeying His command. So maybe the quality will dip a little bit on a Sunday that someone new is leading, but they’ll never get better if they don’t lead. So we’ve got to be okay with a little bit of a dip in quality, knowing that in the end, they, they might surpass us.

Justin Bell 41:17 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And just very briefly, a couple of other, you know, challenges that you have is, as you were talking about is the quality. And I think that a couple ways that you can really mentor, your worship leaders and raise them up and even your people on your worship teams, is, as we talked about, is to provide regular feedback to those musicians. And to those worship leaders. I personally will charge the worship leader to give feedback to a bassist, it’s kind of strange, if all of a sudden, I’m calling him up and telling them that they need to work on their their bass tones or something like that. But a will mention it to the worship leader. So the worship leader can provide that feedback to the to the musician, and then also providing resources to those that are in your worship ministry. And this can be telling them about a conference that’s coming up. It can be even, you know, asking your your senior pastor, if you can have some funds to be able to pay for people in your worship ministry to be able to go to some sort of conference, if they can get away for a couple days during the week. That’s great. But there’s also a lot of conferences that are Friday, Saturday, but there’s these little getaways that you could do different resources, different books.

Justin Bell 42:38 Worship matters, as you mentioned, is a is a great one. Having them listen to like this podcast, for example, is that is a great resource. And then the other thing, the last, finally, you want to try to meet with your worship leaders. And what we do is we try to get together quarterly with all of our worship leaders, I use that time to try to get a pulse on them. The last thing that you want in your worship ministry is knowing that all of your worship leaders are super bummed out about the direction and the vision. But they don’t have a form to be able to share that with you. Because then they’re going to get burned out. There’s not there’s going to be division in the worship ministry. So I use this time to just say, Hey, guys, let’s be real, why don’t you share with me about the things that are frustrating you things that you think that we could do to grow, also use that time to cast vision to try to train them to try to encourage them. And then beyond that, try to get one on one with the worship leader. So we can get a little bit more intimate and details on some of the areas that we’re you know, we want to give them that that feedback. You know, I think we live in a day and age where we do a lot of email, and we do a lot of texting. And I think that that’s good, and it’s helpful. We email our worship leaders, every time they lead worship will email them feedback, but it can be very beneficial to get that that FaceTime and not FaceTime with your iPhone, but to sit down with them and have coffee with them and find out how they’re doing and to really Shepherd them. So those are some of the things that can be challenges. And those are some of the remedies to be able to create a healthy culture of multiplication in your church. Justin,

Alex Enfiedjian 44:19 that’s awesome, man. And it sounds like you’re doing an excellent job. And I would love to kind of conclude this conversation by just saying we’re just saying make disciples people. Right, right. Just Just make disciples if you don’t multiply, if we don’t multiply ourselves, we are holding our church back. If you didn’t multiply yourself, your your church would not have been able to grow to have all the services that it had. So you know, don’t be selfish and make disciples and I think that’s super cool. And Justin, I think people might have some questions for you. After listening to this is there a way to get a hold of You online like Twitter or Facebook? Where would they find you?

Justin Bell 45:04 Yeah, absolutely. They can follow me on Twitter. My username is Justin Emery bell. They can also always email me. My email is Justin at Calvary Nexus. org. And they can they can also go to our church website, Calvary nexus.org. And you should be able to find me in any way. I’d love to be of any help that I can’t, possibly to anyone that would be interested in asking these questions.

Alex Enfiedjian 45:30 Awesome. Hey, Jesse, thank you so much for taking the time to share your wisdom and experience with us. On this podcast, we are very blessed. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It’s good to be with you. All right. Well, some great stuff from Mr. Justin bell. Thank you, Justin. Hey, again, I want to apologize for the audio issues with my microphone, I will have those sorted out by the next episode. Speaking of the next episode, it’ll be in about a month. And it’s going to be about what to do when a team member sins. And that’s, you know, for worship leaders and team members, how do we react as a team member or a worship leader, when one of our team members falls into sin. So that should be a great episode, I’m going to have my Australian senior pastor on so you get some good accent there. But it’s just going to be great time. Hey, if you want to interact about the episode and multiplication, or if you have questions for me or for Justin Bell, if you click in the show notes on your podcast app, there’s a link that says show notes. If you click that, it’ll open up to my website. And it’ll go straight to the episode and you can click to leave a comment there. And we will interact with you about that. So feel free to do that. Also, if you haven’t left a rating on iTunes and you’re being blessed by this podcast, please leave a rating on iTunes that would help us get it to more people. So we are thankful for you as a listener and I just want to encourage you to continue to press on multiply and make disciples and lead your church well, musically and spiritually. And I pray that you have an awesome Sunday this week, and may God richly bless you as you lead your church in singing to Jesus