“And that was kind of the impetus of what started our really long journey at The Worship Initiative,” he said.
The resources The Worship Initiative offers include assets to help worship leaders grow in their musical skills, find supportive community, learn different worship songs, and deepen their own intimacy with God. The importance of this last point was one that Everett and Seay emphasized throughout the interview.
“It was easy to get these students to learn their instruments and be good at what they were doing and to want to get on a stage and stand there and sing in front of people,” Everett said. “But there was a lack of hunger for intimacy and a longing to know the Lord via the Word of God.”
“So that’s where we were like, ‘Oh, maybe we can say, hey, come learn your instrument. But ultimately, let’s wrap these songs that you’re singing in the richness of the Word,’” said Everett. “And so we started writing devotionals on all the songs, pointing to Scriptures.”
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“Let’s point to the Scriptures,” he reiterated, “and let’s say, ‘This is where these thoughts come from,’ to really create a hunger for the things that the Lord says bring life.”
Everett said that he and Barnard were “trying to create an appetite for the things of God more than performance,” although training people to be “excellent at their instruments…is a huge part of what we do.”
“It’s like, we don’t want you to be distracting by playing the wrong notes, but we also want you to know what you’re talking about, you know?” he said.
Seay shared that when Barnard and Everett started The Worship Initiative, his son was interested in learning to play the guitar, so Seay subscribed to the platform as an alternative to “wandering around YouTube looking for ‘how to play guitar’ videos.” The result was that his son not only learned how to play the guitar but also developed a theology of worship.
“Fast forward to today, I just have a front row seat at The Worship Initiative on the great need in the lives of these men and women who are faithfully serving churches,” said Seay. “I mean, if you boil it all down, what we think about all day, every day, is healthy, thriving, worshiping churches who will sing God’s Word.”
“How can we serve the worship minister? How can we serve the volunteer guitar player? How can we serve the congregant in the third row who’s an engineer who says, ‘I’m not really a singer?’” he said. “We want to serve all of them for the end goal of, as Jesus said, worship happening…in Spirit and also in truth.”
“Shane might not tell you this, but you know, what started as a songwriting class is now 11,000 and growing churches that are represented that we have a touch point to every day,” Seay continued. “We also have a hundred thousand men and women and families and students who listen to our daily devo every day. And we just celebrate the fact that God is doing something in the lives of the people that we get to serve.”
