thel. I was on staff for
s at Bethel Church. So
zy situations. I went to
e, my life got wrecked,
t’s kind of the path.
he youth pastor when
g?
happened for us was
eart to see a generation
ing after campuses in
gathering Wednesday
In the midst of it, this
99, we decided to put
Our heart was to see
outh groups. We didn’t
, I was out walking at
and there was a skater
a skater brand called
a hat that said Counter
I love the concept of
that’s counter culture.
st be counter culture, I
culture. So we named
Culture. We actually
onferences that but we
ence as Jesus Culture
ame caught on. Then
erything Jesus Culture!
ce we did was Jesus
worship it was Jesus
s just took off, and what
t worship was a central
enagers. God was just
agers, they were going
e of these moments in
e were getting reports
g, “I don’t know what
ifferent at home”, and it
orship times. If anyone
s like Kim Walker Smith
been at the forefront of
’re probably our best-
We’ve got others with
lts, but Kim and Chris
d they were just part of
[WM] The worship at these conferences was
impacting the students so you decided to do a
recording?
[Banning] Yeah, this is the honest truth, and
this is something… worship wasn’t like what
it is today. You couldn’t make a living off of
being just a worship guy, it wasn’t really like
that. There was Integrity Music, there had been
worship movements for sure, but there wasn’t
a digital world, there wasn’t YouTube, there
wasn’t this kind of thing. So we started the
conference, and in 2005 we were encountering
God in such a profound way in worship,
and I said, “I wonder if we can capture the
conference worship, put it on a CD, and then
maybe other people can encounter God the
same way that we’re encountering Him?” So I
talked to a producer I knew and he said it would
cost like twenty thousand dollars to do it. We
couldn’t even believe the amount of money he
said at the time! We ended up just doing the
recording, but did no postproduction on it at
all. We did a little mix on it, but we didn’t go
back and fix anything or do anything else to it,
we just recorded it, did a mix, and done. It was
powerful. We called it Encounter.”
The worship albums were recorded at our
conferences, and people were saying, “Why
do you do so many covers?” We didn’t sing
our own songs, we were just capturing our
conferences. So if that was the song that we
encountered God with, it went on. We did
Hillsong songs, we did Darrell Evans songs,
we did Phil Wickham songs, it didn’t matter
to us. If we were encountering God, then
that’s the song that’s going on the album. We
weren’t even thinking of trying to write our own
songs or anything else, we were just capturing
conferences.
So the next year, one of the guys in our youth
group says, “We should do a DVD to go with
the album”. I was like, okay, how do we do that?
People see Bethel as Bethel now, but Bethel
back in the day wasn’t that. We didn’t have
the resources, we weren’t doing multimedia or
any of that stuff. We said, how do we do that?
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