Starting A Songwriting Ministry At Your Church w/ Andi Rozier (Vertical Worship)

Alex Enfiedjian 00:11 Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the worship leader training podcast. This is Alex Enfiedjian, your host. Today I have the great privilege of talking with Andy rozier of the vertical church band about starting and cultivating healthy songwriting cultures in your worship ministry. I think many churches want to write and record their own worship music. And I think that’s a good thing as long as motives remain pure. And so I talked with Andy about all of the philosophy and logistical side of creating and cultivating a songwriting culture in your church. So I’m excited to share this month’s episode with you. But before we do that, it’s our recommended product of the month. It’s the Ableton Live clicking pads template. You know, many worship leaders want to use Ableton Live or they want to use click tracks or have the ambient backing pads and other things that are going to enhance their musical set. But they either don’t know how to set up Ableton Live, or they don’t want to be stuck using pre produced backing tracks. Well, four years ago, when I first bought Ableton Live, I was trying to find a template created for worship leaders that was both flexible and powerful, and strangely, I couldn’t find one. So I went about the work of creating my own template and the Ableton Live click and pads template features several things click tracks, counting cues for your band, and ambient backing pads. It also comes with 100 pre built worship songs in multiple keys and a 20 minute video tutorial to show you how to add your own songs. You can trigger the songs on the keyboard of your computer or you can trigger them from a MIDI controller and all of that is explained in the tutorial. The ambient backing pads are actually core sound pads Deluxe bundle that we featured in previous episodes and core sound has licensed their pads at a lower cost so you can actually get this template and their excellent Deluxe bundle for the same price as if you just bought it from their website. So the requirements for running this template are Ableton Live standard or suite running on a Mac computer. If you don’t have those this template won’t work for you. You can find out more information or purchase this template at worship leader training comm slash Ableton that’s a bl e t o n worship leader training comm slash Ableton. Alright, let’s get into our interview with Andy rozier. Hey, everybody, I am here with Andy Razia, who is the worship pastor of harvest Bible chapel in Chicago, Illinois, and also the leader of the vertical church band. Andy, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. You all welcome. Thank you for having me. Oh, man, my pleasure. Andy, you have crafted and just the team at harvest have crafted an incredible group of songwriters. And the fruit of that group is spilling out into the global church. And so I’m super thankful and excited to have you share your wisdom with our listeners about starting and cultivating a songwriting ministry, in our churches. And I feel like I don’t know if you feel like this. But I feel like songwriting and album producing is becoming more and more popular for churches of all sizes in recent years. And I think that’s actually a good thing. As long as ambitions and motives remain pure. I’m curious, Andy, do you think that every church should attempt to write songs for their congregation? Or are they some that just shouldn’t simply write?

Andi Rozier 03:31 That is a good question, my friend? Well, I think that, in essence, worship is a response to what God is doing. And for the most part, you know, every worship leader I’ve ever met is some kind of creative. So I think that, yes, worship leaders, if they are in the worship community, and they’ll listen to the worship songs, and they’re thinking, Hey, I could write something, then they should give it a try. Yes. Because when you take a song, let’s take a song. Like, I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice to worship You, my soul rejoice, take joy miking and what you hear, let it be a sweet sampling unit that’s for lives. And I think often like as worship songwriters, we get a little kind of hung up on like, it has to have, you know, to Epic bridges, and it has to have an octave jump, and it has to, you know, and the Lord didn’t have a problem with that. So, you know, he’s used that one to go all around the world, and it’s four lines long. So should worship leaders try to be responsive in worship by trying to write something Yes, absolutely. Why don’t you take a hymn that maybe your lead pastor is really saying, hey, I’d like to keep singing this. And usually as us kind of younger guys start thinking, I don’t know if I want to use that song anymore. Well, let me try right like and For line chorus to that song to try and just give it a little bit of fresh life. So yeah,

Alex Enfiedjian 05:06 yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. So start simple and Yeah, why not? is kind of the answer and who knows how God might use it? Or how am I he might just keep it local to your church. So, you know, Andy, you and I were talking before we hit recording, and you said, You’ve been at harvest now for 16 years. So you’ve probably gone through many peaks and many valleys of this songwriting journey and building out the vertical church band stuff. And I would like to know, you know, for those people who are getting ready to start or wanting to start a songwriting ministry at their church, are there any dangers of starting a songwriting arm of your worship ministry? Because I feel like it has the potential to either hugely bless or hugely harm a worship ministry, depending on how it’s handled.

Andi Rozier 05:47 Absolutely. There’s a massive danger if you are trying to write songs to bless your church. Yes, that’s exactly what I just said. Like, like, I mean, what is it? I don’t think the primary role of songwriting given to a songwriter is to bless the church, I think the primary role of songwriting given to a songwriter is so that that person can spend time with the Lord. And I think when we think let me use my songwriting to bless the church is assuming it’s taking a massive assumption that the church is going to like that song. And that is, even to this day, that’s impossible for us to know, like when we write for records, you know, we record a record maybe once every year and a half, and we write over 100 songs for that record. And what I love about when we gather together as songwriters to write is that we pray in the beginning of those songwriting retreats. God, we have nothing right now we’re going to walk out the end of this day with songs. And if nothing comes of those songs at the church never hears those songs, those songs have still the value that they were meant to have, which was that we spent time with you. We spend time in your word. We spent time trying to sing something about you and who you say you are. I think in its essence, that’s the chief value is of a song. I like to think of songs kind of like as boats, they’re, they’re lifeboats, you know, a song like how great is our God has carried millions of people in that boat? But I’m pretty sure Chris didn’t sit down and think, Okay, how can I build the biggest boat possible? You know, he just sat down and did what the Lord calls him to out of his word, which is to be faithful, faithful to the giftedness that he’s been given faithful to his craft. So he brought about not knowing that it was an OG. So as songwriters with a boatbuilders. And who would say that a bad boat is one that ends up just carrying you in the Lord.

Alex Enfiedjian 08:01 That’s amazing. So the danger then is when we assume that our songs are we it’s our right to play our songs for our church. Absolutely.

Andi Rozier 08:11 Yeah, we don’t have that, right. I mean, there’s been some circumstances here where my pastor has been like account preaching about a specific thing, and I want you to write a song about it. And there are a lot of churches out there who have pastors that that connected with worship that they asked for all the time. Harvest fellowship, Greg Laurie’s church, out in California, the worship pastor, their hands, Ives His name is, I mean, those guys are writing, like, literally a song a week to target a specific message. And that’s great, but they’re not putting like 1000s of records out because they’re writing 1000s of songs, they’re writing just for their church, they’re writing just for their church. And usually, those songs are songs that are put at the end of a message with a much more limited expectation of whether people will respond to it, that it’s just there to bless them with a lyric you know. And I think when you write you have to write without the assumption that people are going to like it. You know, they might not, they really might not.

Alex Enfiedjian 09:15 Yeah, okay, so now it talked to our listeners then. So you came 16 years ago, and you started this songwriting group or this process at harvest Bible chapel. So for those listening who want to get started, how did that take place? Who birthed the idea? I think I know the answer to that. And how did it look like to first begin, can you kind of just take people back to the very beginning and and let them you know, join you in that?

Andi Rozier 09:38 Totally. So actually, who first started it is my pastor James McDonald, he regularly gets up on stage and says, I don’t preach to make you better listeners. I preach to make you better worship as worship is the endgame worship is the game. And he’s a creative guy, but he knows he’s not a songwriter. So he wants original songs. Why? Because there’s There’s a power to an original song in a church, when it’s come out of, you know, what is being heard and preached at your church at that time. There’s, there’s actually a lot more connectivity between the congregation and the Lord, I think when it’s like, hey, we’ve been listening to this be increased, and we’re writing about it right now. And here’s a small song that we’ve written about it. So all the way back to the beginning. Like I said, when I came in, to harvest, you know, those two records of non original songs like covers, and James started encouraging us to write. And then we just had to write, you have to write, write, write, write, write, I’ve talked to a lot of worship leaders, who are like, Hey, we want to record an EP of five songs. And I’m like, so how many songs have you written and they’re like, well, five. For those of you listening to this right now, like, I want to be loving enough, as a pastor to tell you, that’s not a good thing to do. Like, if you want to bless your church with five songs, then you should write 50. That’s very true to the ratio of how many songs that we should be writing, if we’re actually trying to, like, connect with our church. That’s not a crazy statement. Like that’s really real. That’s been my experience, too. So we started to write a lot of songs.

Alex Enfiedjian 11:21 Did you grab some other people to write with you? Did you say, hey, Meredith, hey, this person,

Alex Enfiedjian 11:25 hey, let’s get

Alex Enfiedjian 11:26 together once a week and write or how about Yes,

Andi Rozier 11:28 now this is a really good side point to is that you might be in a worship ministry where there’s a lot of worship leaders or not a lot of worship leaders. But just because your worship leader doesn’t make you great songwriting, if you’re great at worship leading, you could try it, but you might not be very good at it. And so if you’re starting out, it would be really good to keep that group as small as you possibly can. And just assess, hey, who has actually proved just in their personal songwriting experience, that they can kind of get their head around a verse and the chorus. And they have some lyrical depth. You know, it’s very easy. You and I, on this podcast, could write a song, like in the, you know, half an hour that we’re on here, that we could just, like, write some stuff about God, God, so good. He’s so kind, you know, we love him all the time. You know, just write verse one, there we go, we have, you know, and you really want to, like, sit down with some people who are going to press in, and go a little bit beyond that. So we started to do that. And then, honestly, we gave those songs kind of, you know, at the time when we were starting out, I mean, it was like five songs. Okay, James, his five songs that we’ve written, which of these kind of really rise to the surface for you. They don’t have to be like professional demos. Honestly, it was just recording, singing into quick time, with a guitar, printing out the lyrics for him, and saying, hey, which one of those really resound with you? And there was always like, at least one, one that just kind of like, okay, yeah, this one. I mean, I really liked what you guys are trying to say here. And do you mind if I just like, you know, give a little input here. That’s this is a critical part right now, when you write songs, and you hold them so tightly, when you write them that no one in your church or the people that you trust can critique them, then you’re already narrowing the road for success in songwriting in your church, it’s like holding the golden calf of songwriting the like clutching it with your hands and don’t want to let it go. I want to have Matt rather than saying, you know, we write with the door closed, and we rewrite with the door open, there has to be a sense of like, if this song is going to be a lifeboat for other people, then for us to put it out on you know, an ocean of God’s grace, and to be sea worthy in the storm, then I need to pull in some people who I trust to who are going to help me strengthen the integrity of that boat. And that requires humility. It requires you to have a little bit of thick skin as well. Because the nature of being artistic, right is that if you’re a vocalist and someone critiques, the way that you sing, you feel like they’re critiquing your heart and not your voice. And so writings very similar to that. So that’s really helpful actually,

Alex Enfiedjian 14:32 what you say so you start you just start small you grab a group of people you write you record some quick demos, give them to your pastor, let them critique, but you started to say something that really captured my attention. He said that you have to kind of have the right people in the group. But let’s say things start rolling and songs start getting song in church and more people become interested in participating in that songwriting group. How do you Andy determine who is able to participate in that songwriting circle, especially now? Now that you guys are seeing, you know, albums released and et cetera, et cetera, how do you how do you assess whether someone can participate or not? That seems like a very hard line to walk with people

Andi Rozier 15:11 in the church. It is, but you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t get involved in it unless you’re willing to be honest with people. And that is loving, being honest with people is loving them well, and pastoring them well. And if you take our experience here, vertical church band, if really, we added up everybody in between all the bands, and everybody who makes up vertical church members, over 20 people in there. If you open the inlay covers to the CDs, the last four CDs that we released, there’s less than 10 riders, you know, because the riding pool is different than the worship leading pool and being loving, to the ministry, to what the Lord has called you to is saying to yourself, okay, who are not the best songwriters. But who are the Songwriters who work together here and actually, like, can put songs out? So are my doors open to receiving songs from anybody who wants to write a song in my entire ministry for vertical church band? Absolutely, absolutely. I’d love to be surprised by someone who the Lord just gives them this like amazing lyric and melody. But that doesn’t put 120 songs on the table. For every record, that the best way to do it is to just, you know, start small, and create a growing group of people who have proven not themselves necessarily in the white church, but proven themselves with you that they can work with you to get songs written.

Alex Enfiedjian 16:55 Andy, are you the one to have those hard conversations? I am? Yeah. So you say he say, Oh, thank you for bringing that song. It’s not a good fit.

Andi Rozier 17:06 Yeah, I mean, I get songs sent to me from people in our congregation, you know, who are like, hey, I’d suddenly decided one day that I’m a songwriter. And here’s a song I wrote, and, you know, I’m looking forward to hearing it in your church. And I just wrote back to them, and I’m like, this is awesome. You know, I’ll keep it on file. You know, the process by which we actually choose songs for the church is not like an open, it’s not open door. But me hearing the song and receiving it is, and I’m grateful that you sent it to me. And again, I always want to keep that door open, because I want the Lord to surprise me with someone who’s, who’s been given something that I thought, Man, I wish I had wrote that.

Alex Enfiedjian 17:46 Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay, so So now you’ve got let’s say, you’ve got, you know, you started with a few. And over the years, you’ve you’ve kind of hand selected 10 people that work together. Well, so practically speaking now for the church that wants to kind of like get into a rhythm. How do you guys now facilitate songwriting? Do you have set days of the week that you write? Do you pair people up together? Do you write around a particular theme or scripture?

Alex Enfiedjian 18:11 So

Alex Enfiedjian 18:11 yeah, how does it look?

Andi Rozier 18:13 So if you’ve been doing this, for as long as I have, you’ll, you’ll start to see the point that I’m at that there are some people who write well together. But if you’re starting off, right, now, here’s a few pointers, you’ve got to get out of the office, you got to get out of your administrative environment. So for us, we’re multi site church. So we have a couple of campuses that are away from everything else. And that’s where we do our songwriting or even might get out of town, even. Because if I’m in any proximity to my administrative world, that’s on the other side of my brain. And, you know, and it’s going to lock up everything that I’m doing, and I’m getting very distracted. So I would absolutely encourage people to kind of get out of your administrative environment, I would encourage you to do maybe four songwriting retreats a year. So I pick up about four or five a year. One of them, I intentionally make open door. So this is where, like, I actually let anybody who wants to write a song, you know, in any way, like I let them into that retreat. A Why? Because I want to be surprised be because I want to give them an opportunity to be sharpened. And in my heart of hearts. I wish I didn’t have to make it exclusive. So I make it inclusive for that one. writer’s retreat. Do we get a ton of songs written? Yes. Are they the quality of songs to end up on a vertical church by record? No. That’s the truth of it. But I want that to happen. For the other four songwriting retreats, we take away our core writers, and we seek God in prayer and worship, we talk About what God’s doing. Sometimes I will say, hey, let’s specifically go after these type of songs. Otherwise, even as more seasoned writers will tend just to write something generic. Whereas if we say, hey, let’s write some songs that call people to worship, like, open the eyes of my heart Come now is the time to worship songs like open up the heavens found in you that we’ve written came out of those kind of things. You know, I remember us writing songs specifically about the Spirit because we’d since the in the worship community, there wasn’t a lot of songs directly addressing the spirit. But one of the questions that we always ask ourselves is what do we not have a song about? If you go through your canon of worship songs in your church, you’ll find that there’s, you’re singing about fewer things a lot of times, and the Word of God has not been fully plumbed in, plumbed your mind down, you know, as far as it can be by songwriters, there’s a lot of jewels in the Word of God that we sometimes don’t gravitate to. Because the language of God’s Word makes us think I don’t know how to turn that into a song. But that’s what we would do each of those writing retreats. And what we do at those writing retreats is that we raise souls, usually in groups of two or three, I like three, because it’s, it’s a crowd, basically, you know, if we’re writing over the two days that will be for songwriting sessions a morning and an afternoon. And what we do at the end of each songwriting session is we gather everybody together, and we just play the songs to each other. And 99% of the time, everybody knows that that song is not in its final format. We’re just encouraging each other with what God has given us during that time. And what I’m looking for, and I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit here, but what I’m looking for in that moment is something very critical. I stand in the corner of the room, and watch the reaction that that song creates in the room. Why? Because inherently, we as songwriters, we are worshipers and our hearts and our affections for God will be stirred by something that connects with us. Just like that first time you heard mighty to save or how great is our God, you know, where you were like, wow, Oh, wow. Wow, that was awesome. Like, I want to sing that in my church right now. You know. And I would say 70% of the time, and this is where you have to be a little thick skinned, you’ll play a song in the room, and just with the riders, you’ll get that reaction. They’re just like, Yeah, man, well done. That’s awesome. Good job, man. Like, where you got off?

Unknown Speaker 22:36 Yeah, exactly. You know.

Andi Rozier 22:40 But what I’m looking for is the wind in the sails of those lifeboats. Like, if you put a boat down on a lake, and put the sail up, even to this day, in 2017, only God can put the within the sails of that button. There’s nothing that captain of that boat, even with his sail turn towards the wind can cause that boat to move unless God puts the wind in the sails of the boat. And it’s and it’s exactly like that. There’s no secrets. You just sit down and you play the songs and you see whether the Lord makes people Breathe in and like, wow, yes, I want to sing that. Sometimes before the soul is even finished. Everybody’s singing along,

Alex Enfiedjian 23:23 huh? Wow, that’s amazing. So I want to go back to this whole thing about like, the writing retreats and your writing for the Lord your writing for the church. But I think a lot of Christian songwriters are hoping that their songs gonna get picked up by a publisher. And so, you know, obviously you guys are, are on a, you know, record label? Or maybe you’re not, maybe it’s all self done. But like when you write Are you writing for the people at harvest? Are you writing also for the publishers in Nashville? And then beyond that? Are you writing for the global church? Or do you strictly just say, okay, we are trying to write the best song we can for the Lord. And we’re not even going to think about these other people. Because I do think that a lot of Christian songwriters are writing in hopes of getting a Chris Tomlin hit.

Andi Rozier 24:12 Yeah. So Chris has a massive weight on his shoulders where the Lord has given him a ministry where he does impact the whole global church. The chances are, if you’re listening to this podcast, I lovingly tell you as a pastor, that God has not appointed that to you, unless he puts the wind in the sails of that. But what He has called you to are the people that you look into the eyes of every single weekend. He has called you to those people and he did not call Chris Tomlin to those people. He did not call Chris Tomlin to York to serve your local church. He called Chris to serve the global church and he might have anointed both you and Chris with the same songwriting gift, yet he appointed Chris to one thing and he appointed you to another. Wow, that’s so good. So when you write, unless you have a massive identity crisis and you think you’re Chris Dolman, you have been appointed to the people that you stand up in front of every single weekend, and you should write for them.

Alex Enfiedjian 25:27 So cool. That’s so encouraging. I love that anointed but appointed. And that’s, that’s a huge clarification. And it’s like you said, it’s really God, who puts the wind in the sales and God who decides success. And I think, you know, part of the problem as artistic people is we want people to hear our art. And so I that’s where the ambition and maybe the unholy ambition and the pride, I think that’s where people fall. And that’s what I was getting at earlier where I asked about some of the dangers, because I think people love their art, and they come with their art, and they bring it to you, and they want to, they want to see their art go out and more people hear it. And that can be I think extremely divisive, extremely unhealthy and can like literally take down an entire worship ministry. So I wanted to ask you, Andy, what are some of the ways that you actually deal with the division or disagreement over a song? Or over a person who thinks they should be involved? But But you know, they shouldn’t? And how do you strive to maintain the unity of the bond of faith in the midst of differing artistic personalities,

Andi Rozier 26:30 right. So usually, when agenda becomes the greatest thing, it’s because the relationship is fractured, I run into a lot of situations, I can think of them over the years where some agenda has creeped up, I feel like I should be in the songwriting circle, or, you know, no, I refuse to change that lyric of that song, it’s been really hard for me to navigate those things, when the relationship behind it has been hard in the first place. And that’s when you’re in a whole other situation that you need to navigate, you might need to pull someone into that conversation, so that you can lovingly kind of figure it out with the person. But to get a song across the finish line, there needs to be from the beginning, a couple of things just kind of established, you know, like, hey, when you sit in a group of three people to write this 33% going to each writer, whether one of them adds a word in the hole, and one other person writes the entire song. If you can establish that, like at the beginning, it actually like down the line, just kind of like when you’re trying to like get the songs finished. And people are like really like, clutching on to their specific lyric that they really love. Because that was all taken care of at the beginning, someone like my pastor, who is the authority, and therefore he’s not just the senior pastor, but he’s the worship pastor as well, because we’re not trying to say that worship is just about music, that when he says no, for this song to get across the finish line, this lyric has to change. He’s not looking for a rider’s credit. He wants the song to win. And if you don’t want to be submissive to that, then we can all agree that the soul is not going to go there, because of where your heart was, you know, instead of where the soul was. And that’s kind of maybe tough for people to hear. Like, I can imagine some people listening to that right now just being like, you know, I’m not sure I can get there. Yes, because of the relationship. Trust me. I love you enough to tell you that it’s because of the relationship. Like the best songs, I just came off of a songwriting retreat. And I walked away from that retreat with some songs I heard, were just like, wow, wow. And some songs were like, Yeah, let’s go get good songwriting session. Like we spend some time with the Lord. It was awesome. But I said to like three or four people, man, I love when the relationship sings louder than the song itself, then the songs will always be good. Because the song follows the relationship. I know that might not be full of like, practical guidance, you know, or secrets. But that really is my experience of how to navigate through that territory of like getting songs across the finish line.

Alex Enfiedjian 29:25 That’s amazing, actually, super helpful. Okay, well, we’ll wrap it up here shortly. You You talked a little bit about writing credits and splitting songs. And I’d like to talk on the practical, tangible side of things. So it sounds like you guys are splitting a song equally among anyone who participates regardless of how much they participate. And you found that that’s the best way to do it. Yes. Okay. If they are in the if they’re in the writers room, yes. Okay. Now, here’s another question that a couple of friends of mine asked me to ask you and that is, so from a financial perspective. I have heard on staff who are paid full time salaries to work at their church, and part of their responsibilities are for songwriting. And so they’re asking me so Okay, so I’m paid to song right? Does that mean the song belongs to the church since I’m being paid to write? So how does that model work for your church? How did you guys navigate that? Yeah.

Andi Rozier 30:20 So here’s my experience with it, is that I want to promote a culture where our songwriters are encouraged to write, and there is a financial implication to soul writing, although people think it’s massive, and it’s really not, it is pennies, you know, unless you are like, tracking in the top 10 ccli on the church, like you are not like making any type of money that is going to support you or your family, or even buy you like a nice new guitar or anything like that. Right? It’s like my podcast. So, you know, so you have to like, Oh, my gosh, that’s just I mean, it just feels like it feels territorial. And, and it doesn’t feel Kingdom minded to me. So that’s why I established it right at the beginning, okay, if there’s three writers in a room, then everybody gets 30% 3%. Now, we specifically are signed to a label, but I am not signed to a label. So I signed something that says, our church is part of that label. And the only songs of mine that gets signed are the ones that end up on the record. So there’s like 30, or 40. Other songs that I’ve written, that, as a leadership team, we have decided to say to our writing, crew, anything you write, you are a work for hire, it is unto the Lord, which is unto his church. Which means that the people who decide what songs, make the records have hold of those songs until they tell you that they don’t want to hold those songs. Because we’re all trying to advance this thing together. And if you have if you have some kind of competitive agenda for like, well, I might hold that song back. I’m telling you, like, even the guys like Meredith’s husband, Jacob sudah, who produces our records now lives in Nashville, he’s he’s a writer for Providence, yet I love Jacobs heart that like when he comes to write with vertical, he says, oh, man, I’ve been holding the songs for like, these little side is for vertical and I’m just like, so excited. And he knows he’s gonna then give them to the vertical part. And he can’t do anything with them until vertical has decided whether we want to put it on record or not. And then if we don’t put it on a record, then it’s his 100% to do what he wants with it. If you write a song that ends up on my Church’s record, then I’m going to tell you, dude, congrats is awesome. I would love to get some money in your pocket. But you know, we’re going to do we’re going to recoup 100% of everything that was made in the making of that record. First, no one gets anything. Why? Because we’re doing this to bless the church. We’re doing it to bless the church. We’re not doing it to bless primarily the writer. But then as soon as we’ve made profit on that song, whatever industry standard royalty is, if you’re just the sole writer of that song, then you’re going to get industry standard doubled. Which way for it drum roll is going to be like four cents.

Alex Enfiedjian 33:47 Yeah. And then if you split the song between four people, then it’s one cent.

Andi Rozier 33:52 Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s just the pennies are like so small, you know?

Alex Enfiedjian 33:58 Yeah. That’s super helpful. Okay, couple final questions, then. So let’s say the church has listened to this podcast and has started writing songs. They started recording, what do they need to do on a like administrative side? Do they register their songs for ccli? I know that actually, I’ll just answer that question for you. You have to have a song song in at least five churches before you can even register to ccli. But what else do they need to do paper wise sign a contract with their co writers? What else do they need to do on the paper side? And then we’ll end this this conversation.

Andi Rozier 34:30 Yeah. So if you if you have staff guys who are writing, I would draw up something that just says, Hey, you know, we are a work for hire. So if you write at home or if you write in the office, you’re still paid by the church to write songs for the church. So you can’t be territorial that way you write it. And yeah, I wouldn’t, you know, unless your soul is kind of getting picked up by a TV show or or Radio, you know, I wouldn’t necessarily go down the route of, of even like ASCAP and BMI and any of that, you know. But yeah, I’m just speaking now just to worship leaders listening to the Songwriters listening to me, I mean, hey, you know, if you can write for your church, the way it happened for us was that we were writing so much for our church, that those CDs ended up in people’s cars, who have family who are other churches who they handed it to their worship leader. And their worship leader was like, wow, this songs out of your church, wow, I’m going to contact that guy for the chord sheet. That’s exactly how our things started. We didn’t. We didn’t approach a record label, we didn’t think that we were something that we weren’t, you know, and let that is my final thought. Let that be the thing that guides you. Whether the Lord puts the wind in your sails, the sales of your songs outside of your church, you know, before you start thinking, Man, I need to get these things registered on ccli. You know, just let the Lord prompt you in that let let him make the decision about your souls.

Alex Enfiedjian 36:09 And he this has been so awesome. I do want to give a shout out to your new album frontiers. It’s incredible. I love it. I wanted to ask you, what are some of the most congregational songs that you think came off that album so that some of our listeners can look at introducing those in their churches? I have my favorites, but I want to hear yours. Okay,

Andi Rozier 36:28 well, there’s a song that called set my heart, which has been really big in our church. And is a perfect example of a soul that like, was kind of split the decision. Our church was really singing it loudly. The people outside of our church or weighing into our records was like, yeah, this will never work. And then it did, you know, Exalted over all 1000 times. And then surprisingly, out on the road, we started playing frontiers. And it’s really been connecting with people. I wrote that science. He was in the first session of the first songwriting retreat. And when we wrote it, I thought, Oh, that’s good. So we spent some time with the Lord. Pretty awesome. So I had no idea that it will be congregational until we open the door and saw that it was,

Alex Enfiedjian 37:14 that’s awesome. Yeah, my two favorite right now that I’m leading a lot is our 1000 times in fact, I’m leading that this Sunday. And your mercy that you wrote with Paul wash that song is incredible, beautiful moving. So thank you, Andy, for Thank you sourcing the church. Okay, any any final final words for our listeners who are thinking about starting a songwriting group in their in their ministry, what’s the bottom line?

Andi Rozier 37:38 Bottom line is relationship with writers is the greatest song that you will ever see. The greatest song that you’ll ever write is the relationship that you have with the writers that you write with. And if the relationship is good, then do what you want to do with a friendship that you have with someone that you like, which is spend time with them. Right, right. Right. Right together. Right. Lots of songs.

Alex Enfiedjian 38:04 Amen. Thank you so much, Andy, for your time today. You’re welcome. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for listening today. I hope this episode was a blessing to you. Be sure to check out Andy and vertical church bands, new album frontiers, I’ve put links in the show notes for you. And there are some really great songs on that album, 1000, tongues, your mercy, and many others. So check it out and start singing them in your church. So that’s all we have time for today. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode, feel free to email me at Alex at worship leader training calm, or you can even call and leave a voicemail that we may use in a future episode. You can do that by clicking the phone number in the show notes. Also, if this episode helped you please help us by forwarding it on to a friend. You can do that very easily by clicking the links in the show notes. And also feel free to leave us a review it helps us get the podcast out to more people. Thanks so much for listening this month and I will see you next month with another great episode. In the meantime, feel free to visit worship leader training comm for articles, podcasts and resources for worship leaders. God bless you guys have a great day.