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“Worship is a lifestyle.” 

My whole life, I’ve heard my parents say this phrase and it’s been an anchor for me as seasons of life ebbed and flowed. I’ve been thankful to live out worship as a lifestyle in multiple ways: in the church vocationally, at home with my family and even at Fishhook as a young intern in 2014!

Now, I’m continuing to make worship a lifestyle as a Fishhook Account Director. I’ll be helping churches clearly communicate their Kingdom driven goals that help point people to Jesus! How much better can it get?! 

I’ve been working in and around the church … well … my whole life! My dad was a worship leader and, as soon as I could sing, I was helping him lead worship. The older I got, the more I did. I was leading teams and rehearsals, making sure we had volunteers, communicating with the pastors and planning out messaging. Even then, I was learning how to do communications in a church setting. 

Leaving my sunny home in Daytona Beach, Florida, I traveled up to good ol’ Indiana to attend Anderson University. I intended to study music business, but quickly changed my major to marketing. Though I really liked music, I realized that I wanted to work with and for people.

Interning at Fishhook

In 2014, during my time at Anderson University, I first connected with Fishhook, a team of people who led worship by helping church leaders communicate well! I jumped onto the Fishhook team doing content creation for my first college internship. Throughout my internship, I started learning the landscape of video production within the marketing world. It was a blast! I learned how to have fun and do things well at the same time. I also learned the importance of putting people first in communication practices, and am excited to continue doing just that as an Account Director on the Fishhook team today. That internship experience shaped me more than I knew at the time. The work yes, but most importantly the focus on Jesus and people. 

Vocational Ministry

I jumped back into the worship world after graduating, taking these lessons I had learned into my vocational worship rhythms. My job as a worship leader was focused on pointing people to Jesus, all while building a team, creating culture and finding the right tools to do it all! It was a lot of work. There were plenty of times I failed and a few times I was successful. Learning not only what to communicate, but also how to communicate was both challenging and important! Fortunately, I was learning more and more about communications every day. 

From content creation and video production to leading worship and building teams, I realized that the principles were all the same, the medium was just different. You see, the biggest communication problems — whether in a marketing, music, spiritual or personal setting — is assuming we communicated when we actually haven’t. Just because we say something, send an email or even make a social post, it doesn’t mean it was clear or even received. On top of that, I still have the same phrase ringing in my ears: worship is a lifestyle. 

What have I learned?

So, how do we as church leaders and communicators actually do this work well, in a way that integrates worship through it all?

In my experience, there are two principles that have not and will not change: stay close to Jesus and love people.

No strategy, set of tools, tips or tricks will help if these two things are missed. When we begin seeing Jesus as the greatest communicator, we can then begin to communicate like Him! We begin loving people and speaking to them in a way that they both hear and move. That’s worship. That’s how we live it out. That is worship as a lifestyle.

So how are you living it out? We’d love to help you do just that.