Taking A Time-Out With Jeff Deyo
05-29-2007
by Kevan Breitinger

We caught up with Jeff Deyo days after his return from the Caribbean with the Worship at Sea conference. But things quickly got down to the spiritual, covering callings and the Last Day, among other heady topics.

Jeff Deyo: How you doing?

CMCentral (Kevan Breitinger): I’m good, thanks for making time for the call. I know you’ve been putting in some hard time in the Caribbean (laughing).

Yeah, I’ve just been suffering for Jesus down there (laughing).

How was that?

It was awesome! Martha, my wife, got to go this time. We’ve done a cruise one other time, so we were sure that this time we definitely didn’t want our boys to come (laughing). Actually, tomorrow we celebrate our 15 year wedding anniversary.

Oh man, that’s wonderful!  So if you’re ministering in a worship conference, Jeff, what’s the main message you want to get across to other worship leaders?

The topic that comes up the most for me is teaching what God expects from us as worship leaders. As I was preparing for the cruise class, God dropped this little thought in my head: that as song-writers we’re literally putting words in the mouths of people who are then going to say them to Him. It’s an incredible responsibility. It’s crazy for us to just haphazardly jump into it and start singing a bunch of songs that make us feel good, without even thinking about what God might want from us in worship.

There’s a passage in John that says that there’s a time coming when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The key word for me there is “true” worshippers. To me, at tough as it is to say or swallow, it means that if there can be true worshippers, then there must be false worshippers.

Wow.

That’s intense, I know, but if I’m leading, I don’t want to be up there singing just a bunch of songs. So I want to teach the worship leaders how to be real. I don’t focus on trying to be real when I’m on stage. I just develop a real, genuine relationship with God when I’m off the stage and then that’s what comes out when I’m up there.

So your main focus is not on the music but the heart.

Absolutely. I teach on worshipping with excellence too, so I love both sides of it. 1 Chronicles 25 says the Levites were skilled and specifically trained as musicians, so it wasn’t just a bunch of guys with big hearts that went for it, you know? Musicians also had to know the first five books of the Bible, by memory. Imagine if we had that to do! (laughing)

Yeah, that would narrow the field down, wouldn’t it? (laughing) So you see yourself as more of a worship leader than a musical artist?

Yeah, definitely, my calling is as a worship leader. I feel that part of my calling is to write and create great music that helps people worship in the live thing, but also on their Ipod.

I like to look at my life and try to figure out where God is blessing, and then determine to do that thing. When we did SONICFLOOd, back in the day, we went in the studio and came out with a recording of worship, but it wasn’t anything we were trying to market. It was a true heart thing. Most worship up to that point was live, but our studio recording put a different little twist on it, not on purpose. It was just something that God put His hand on, and breathed on.

It’s interesting that you brought that up because it leads to a question I wanted to ask you: I know it’s a hard one, but SONICFLOOd was instrumental in shifting the worship movement, and now we’re down the road a bit and things have morphed into something a little bit different. Where do you see the worship movement heading?

Good question. I think it’s kind of coming around full circle, in good and bad ways. Anytime anything new is created, whether it’s a soft drink or a telephone or whatever, it’s always going to get copied. I think there are a lot of people with good hearts who were excited to think ‘wow, I can finally make a worship album and it might even sell besides.’ I don’t know the motives and hearts of everybody making worship albums, and obviously a lot of people made them. There’s others who follow the pop trend and do what’s popular and so they made a worship CD, but the problem with that is that it ends up dumbing it down a little bit.

I agree.

Matt Redman wrote the song, “The Heart of Worship” and it opened my eyes. I was by myself when I first heard it, and I sat there and bawled my eyes out because it struck me, ‘this is what we’re doing, we’re making worship about us!’ We’ve made worship about the personality of the artist singing the worship song, or the song itself. Of course, it’s not bad to love a song, but we get to the place where we rely on the specific song. This generation could easily do what the older generation did, those who embraced hymns instead of the God behind the hymns, mistaking what is powerful.

Yes.

We could do the same thing with our choruses, if we hold on too tightly to our favorite songs, as if it’s the only expression of worship. I think the good news is that most of the pop trend has faded. That might not be good for record sales but at the same time it kind of clears the playing field a bit and brings worship back to what it really is supposed to be.

That’s a great answer to a very muddy issue. It’s not a simple question, because at the root of it is the evil of the human heart. And it addresses some of what I really enjoyed about Unveil, which is very definitely written for the church, right?

Yeah, absolutely, I’ve gotten more and more clear about what I’m called to do. I know I am specifically called to the church. That doesn’t mean that I don’t minister to non-Christians, or that there’s not evangelism involved. But the central part of my calling as a worship leader is to equip the Body of Christ to be connected to God, to have a real walk with God, so that they can then go out and touch people at their jobs or wherever and live out what it means to be a true Christian, in love with God, in the act of worship.