lives and the stages and the platforms that they get to speak on and sing on , that when they come home to church , they can leave everything that ’ s about their career at the door .
Not because there ’ s anything wrong with it , but just because when we walk into church , we don ’ t want it to be about somebody ’ s career or somebody ’ s status . We want this to be a safe space . We want it to be a place where everyone ’ s just here together . And the most important name that we ’ re lifting up is Jesus , not anybody else ’ s . That really has become the foundation for how we ’ ve built our worship team . There ’ s a lot of well-known people , and there ’ s a lot of people that maybe you haven ’ t heard of yet . I ’ m sure that you will , at some point , but that ’ s not the goal . The goal ’ s not celebrity or status . The goal is to lift up the name of Jesus . It ’ s actually been an amazing experience for them to be able to have a space where they can encourage each other .
And it ’ s not a competitive environment .
Nobody ’ s vying for the stage or the spotlight . Nobody ’ s vying for how many times are on . It ’ s just not that kind of environment at all . It ’ s actually become a really beautiful community for these artists as they ’ re part of a local worship team . They ’ re there to serve . They ’ ll tell you themselves , they ’ re just there to serve what God ’ s doing . We really just want to set that kind of foundation .
[ WM ] Well said . Before we talk about the new record , tell me how you develop the songs to the record ? Because now you ’ ve got all these different writers with these great songwriting abilities . How do you figure all that out ? How do you work out with the different record companies ? They ’ ve got different publishing agreements and you ’ ve got your own music . It ’ s kind of a complex procedure in my mind .
[ Henry ] Very , very . Yeah . When we did our first record in 2017 and a woman who works for us ... she started right as we were going into talking about doing this first record , her name ’ s Stephanie Sohnchen and she runs all of our music internally . She ’ s incredible . But the first day that she came to work for us , I said , “ Steph , I think we ’ re going to do a record .” And she said , “ I don ’ t know anything about publishing . I don ’ t know anything about the music biz ’.” She went on a mission , and I think right now she is honestly one of the smartest people I know in the music industry . And she is just such a learner . We did the first record completely independently without a label for distribution or anything like that .
And part of that was because we knew we had so many people who were involved in so many different labels . I didn ’ t want to make it any more complicated . People already thought that we were crazy trying to pull that off , having to work with all these labels . I mean , we definitely had to have some conversations to figure out what it was going to look like so that everybody essentially was on the same deal , but it ’ s been an amazing experience for the last five years to be able to work in and amongst all of the labels