Welcome back to Worship Leader Wednesday. This will be the final worship leader interview of 2007 before Consuming Worship takes a little holiday break.

James Ridgers

Biographical Information

Spouse's name: Rhonda
Years married: Almost 4 years
Children's names: No kids, but we have 4 cats, if they count.
Years leading worship: 10 years
Church name and location: The Summit Church, Irvine, CA
Church website: www.thesummitoc.com
Denomination: Non-Denominational
Years at current church: 1 year – we launched in January 2007.
Instruments you play: Guitar, Bass, Drums, and a little keyboards. Not all at the same time.
Blog: www.immersionworship.com
Is your role full time, bi-vocational, or volunteer? Volunteer for now.

What are you listening to right now?

"Too Broken To Break" by Fono
"All That We Needed" by Plain White T's
"Remedy" by David Crowder Band
"Drastic Fantastic" by KT Tunstall

What are you reading right now?

"Recoil" by Andy McNab
"Praise Habit" by David Crowder
"After God's Own Heart" by Mike Bickell.

What's your musical heritage?

My dad was a career military bandsman in the British Army, and later on was the conductor or bass trombonist for various concert bands, swing bands, and other military musical organizations, so I grew up in rehearsal halls and championship-level band competitions. One of my sisters was also quite advanced at playing the flute, so there was music in my house almost every day. I first learned to play the drums at age 8, and was given a drum kit for my 10th birthday. Then I picked up the guitar at 12 and taught myself, and around the same time began fiddling around with the bass guitar and a bit of keyboards. I played in various bands through my teens before really understanding the call on my life as worship leader.

Describe your journey to becoming a worship leader:

Well it all happened a bit by accident really. I grew up in church and in a Christian school, but early in my teens I began rebelling against pretty much all authority in my life. After spending much of my teen years with my face away from God and my life centered entirely around myself, God brought me to my knees when I was 18 at an event in London called 'Champion of the World', shortly after one of my friends had died from meningitis. I was at a complete low and felt lost and lonely, and then God simply told me that He loved me. It was a life changing moment. After knowing that He had found me again, I began committing myself to my church, and quickly got involved with the worship team once more. I took a guitar along to a Bible study one evening and was asked to lead a couple of songs, and it all built from there. I started leading worship for the youth meetings, then the adult meetings, and when I moved to Scotland a couple of years later, I led worship at a church in Edinburgh. Then when I moved to the USA, I checked out a local church that I immediately felt a part of. I ended up going on staff there and being a full time worship leader for a couple of years until they closed their doors. Then last year my good friend Scott Turner approached me with an idea of planting a new church in Irvine, and asked if Rhonda and I would come onboard. We said yes, and here I am today – leading worship at The Summit!

What's the "DNA" of your church?

We're still so young that it's difficult to accurately analyze something like that. We're located on the UCI campus, so we have quite a large demographic that sits within the 'student' bracket – early twenties, academic types. But when I look around the church, I see an incredible diversity for a church so young – young and old of different ethnicities. Although I think our kid's church is about to explode – we currently have 6 expectant couples, one with twins!

Describe for us your church's worship "style":

I guess the best way to describe it is "raw and real". What we do is 100% representative of who we are.

Musically, we're not in to massive bands and orchestrated sections – we have a 4 or 5 piece rock band. We deliberately under-produce our sound and our arrangement, but we are highly rehearsed, tight, and 'in the pocket'. We put an emphasis on excellence, not just to offer to God the very best that we can, but also to remove distraction from the worship service so that the congregation can also offer to God their very best.

Non-musically, we have communion every week, but rather than pass the elements, we have 'stations' either side of the congregation. By doing this, it forces us to really think about the act of communion as an act of worship, and not just go through a holy motion that doesn't have any depth or meaning. Likewise, we also don't pass buckets for the offering; we have a couple of containers by the door. We want our giving and our tithing to be something that we do willingly and gladly, not because someone's putting a bucket in front of our faces. We teach briefly on it every now and then, but the emphasis is on the fact that God is our source, not the congregation.

How has worship leading changed you?

Put simply, it's given me a purpose in life. Being a part of something that exalts God's name above all else is something I feel so privileged and blessed to be a part of, and there's nothing I'm more passionate about than seeing lives changed through a worship response. Personally, it's in those times of worship that I've petitioned God for breakthrough in my life and seen it and felt it. And I also know without a doubt that being anointed and appointed with the responsibility of leading the body of Christ in worship has forced me to learn more about Him and seek Him more and not be afraid to hold Him to His promises over my life. In short, it's given me an understanding of what real relationship is about.

Describe the make-up of your worship leading team:

Very simple really: drums, bass, a couple of guitar, and lead vocals with one or two backing vocalists. We're still so young that we're growing and changing so quickly that it's hard to keep up sometimes, but God has provided and continues to provide all the people and resources we need. I have a rotation with 3 drummers, and another with 3 vocalists. I play rhythm guitar and sing, and I have a lead guitar player who is quickly becoming my 'right hand man'.

Because we're in a rented facility, we have full setup and tear down every week – it turns out to be about an 8 hour day from arrival to departure for one service at 11:00am – so we deliberately designed our sound system to be easier to set up than a permanent sound system. It's all in road ready cases, and our mixing desk and processing rack connect with one cable. We use wireless mics and wireless in-ear monitors to ease setup further, and the in-ears also help bring clarity to our front-of-house sound by removing the 'muddying' that can occur with stage-wedge monitors. We enclose our drum kit to isolate that sound, and we use no amps; we either DI or we use amp modelers. Our facility just doesn't have the acoustical space to deal with a lot of stage noise.

One of the best tools we have, and it's feasible because we use in-ear monitors, is that we use a click track on every song. This is controlled by the drummer and is fed to our ears to keep us all on que. It also ensures that we are consistent with our tempos, consistent with the length of our worship sets, and keeps our transitions clean by not requiring a 'count in' from the drummer at the start of songs that have, for example, a guitar only intro.

Come back next week for part two of James' interview.

Popularity: 2% [?]