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Welcome to Lifestyle of worship Podcast. I'm Jerry Heinold. When I was young, I thought worship could only happen at retreats and at church on Sundays. And over the next last 20 to 30 years, I've noticed a lot of people also think that way. So this podcast is to kind of explore what actually living a lifestyle of worship, not just worshiping on Sundays or retreats or when it's convenient, but actually living a lifestyle of worship. So I'm excited today to have Jesse Crawley here. What's

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up? One of my favorite young people,

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he's been involved in our student worship ministry at Grace fellowship for the last six years, and is just an amazing worship leader. He has just a crazy, crazy amount of skill in his fingers and his brain, and so I'm excited to get to talk to him today. So join us as we chat about what it looks like to live a lifestyle of worship. So Jesse first helped our listeners to kind of know a little bit about you. Like, who? Who is Jesse Crowley, what do you do? Like,

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what's what you been doing these last few years? Yeah,

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I've been leading worship at Grace fellowship in the student worship ministry for around the past six years, and for the past about a year and a half now, I've been leading the RPM band here at Grace, which is our senior band. First year I led it with gracious Kamani, great friend of mine. She's great. And then this year I'm doing it by myself, kind of a smaller band. That's probably my, my biggest part of my week. You know, that's probably what my most as you know, as I most What's that invested in? I'm just on school life. I'm a senior at Katy classical Academy. In addition to leading worship on Sundays, recently, I've gotten big on producing and recording worship music, as well as been doing it for a while now, but writing worship music and and stuff like that, probably the biggest one recently was I was I was in Austin few months ago and wrote a song called purple robe with Jesse Reeves. So can't wait, pretty excited about that. And, yeah, that's That's me, just school and music, and that's kind of been my life for a long time now. So

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yeah, very cool.

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Well, I know that you have invested a lot of your life in not just worship, but plugging in ministry. Even as a young person, you've been really influential in a lot of young junior hires and other high schoolers lives. And you know, it can look easily from their perspective, like Jesse's got it all together if, if one of them were listening and would you tell us a little bit about, like, what? What does living a lifestyle of worship look like for you? What does it mean to you? Shed some light on the reality of living a lifestyle of worship? Yeah,

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I love how you said that. You know, there's this, there's this idea that we can think that worship leaders on stage, that they have it all together, and they're perfect, but I just want to preface that with Jesse Crawley is not perfect, and Jesse Crawley is a sinner, just like everybody else listening or anyone who knows me. Just need to put that out there, that we do struggle a lot, and I'm sure you're you're mean, you know that, Jerry, but as far as living a lifestyle of worship. I think what I'm most reminded of is probably my life verse, which is Matthew 714 and it says, small is the gate and narrow is the road that leads to life, and those who find it are few. One of the reasons I love this verse so much is there's one song by Josh Baldwin called narrow road, which is actually written after this verse, To me living a lifestyle of worship. It means loving God and living out his purpose, both on stage and off the stage. And you know that whenever we talk about it like and you know that when we talk about it in meetings with our band and stuff, we that's kind of our key goal every week is to talk about that, but to take it a step further. Because not that it's the idea has been numbed, but we say it a lot. What like, what's the next step for going like, what are the practices of living your lifestyle of worship? And I think for me, in addition to Matthew 714 it means staying on the narrow road, on stage and off stage, and like, what does that look like? I think my it has to do with what my biggest pet peeve is with worship leaders, is that the appearance that comes with it, that we often define a worship leader with how someone looks or how someone like sounds on stage, and what they can do like I found myself saying, Oh, this person's a better worship leader than this person, because they can, they have the ability like they can play this like on stage and but like this person doesn't Know how to play this song. But I think that not just people who can pick up a guitar and sing a song are worship leaders, right? Because we also have worship leaders who are off the stage. 24/7, absolutely, you know they're i.

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Biblical perspective. It's not just like, like, what we're talking about, like someone who can pick up a guitar and sing. And some people that come to my mind are Dylan Maloney is one of them. He's always showing up. He prays over the chairs Sunday night sing with Isaiah and Olivier. You know, they're, they're worshiping, yeah. And then

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everybody sees Olivier is jumping in, dude.

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I love Olivia. He is, he is awesome. I think, like, when I'm on stage and I feel like no one's responding, I always look at Olivier, because I know that he he will, and that's what's great. He's 100% in it. Yeah, dude, it's awesome. He's just

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one of those guys that, no matter what, he's plugged in as, like, although he's not a quote, unquote worship leader on stage, his energy and his ability to just dive in to love Jesus visually helps other people like I want to. I want to have that much fun in the middle of worship. Yeah, I love that. That's beautiful. And

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then there's also Tanner Vance. I think one of the coolest things I value about about Tanner is he's always willing to kind of step back. He's never wanted the spotlight or to be like everyone's favorite but whenever you have a like, deep conversation with him, you find out some pretty incredible things about how he does that intentionally, so that, you know, he had a personal conviction that, yeah, I can have all these friends and I can have a girlfriend or whatever, but is that really glorifying God? And then same with Henry. We kind of have similar backstories with adoption and stuff like that. And whenever we can connect, and whenever he can in breakout groups, I think he's probably with breakout groups. He leads worship during that. You know, he's willing to open up and and share things where, like, wow, we really need someone to start that conversation so we can all go deep. So, yeah, yeah, that's what that's awesome. That means to me. So yeah,

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I love the picture of the narrow road, because the truth is, it is hard to stay on the narrow road. It's hard to it's hard to want to go down that path. Because you look and there's not a lot of people on it, yeah, not a lot of support on it, not a lot of people that are going down that and in today, today's world, you kind of see, like, everybody jumps on the same bandwagons, and you see this bandwagon that, oh, there's hardly anybody on that one, and that's the one that God's saying. Are you willing to go down that bandwagon? And that is lifestyle worship, right? There not a lot of people on the bandwagon of actually walking out life with Jesus. Everybody wants to get on the stage. Everybody wants to be, you know, just I queen or whoever, exactly, yeah, and get all the, you know, the notoriety, the fame, the, you know, kind of the spotlight, but living lifestyle worship. You said that the narrow road are a lot of people on that one, yeah, and that's, that's, it's kind of can be lonely without the support and all the people cheering for you and whatnot, and so I love that picture. Yeah. So last few years, as we mentioned, you've been leading students, your peers, in worship. Every single week, you have been amazingly faithful, like there have been very few weeks that I think that you have missed, and that has obviously been amazing, and I see it in the students disrespect of you when you are up on stage. You know, I see you directing people to Jesus and and I love that. Are there any things through those years? I mean, it really has been six years. I mean, you started whenever you're what seventh grade. What are some things that that you've just learned through the last six years of leading week in and week out, leading your peers, and now this last couple of years, actually being the leader of the band? So what are some of the things you've learned through those experiences? Something that

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I've had to overcome would be the sense of thinking that, you know, on Sunday nights or Sunday mornings in the past, sometimes people will respond differently in worship based on how we dress, how we sound or or these things. And for a while, I had this mindset that was based solely on what people thought of me. And I thought that that was how I was be a better worship leader and how people would respond better. Like, oh, we like this song more, and oh, we have to play a song for reflection time that everyone knows so they'll respond. And I kind of had that for a while, and I think I learned over that process that you don't necessarily have to do like, what we're talking about, like that one narrow road, that one bandwagon is going to be lonely, and you don't necessarily have to join all the others. You know, God has made us all to glorify Him in a different way and in a different setting. And so I've had to learn what that looks like, to kind of jump out of the sense of, oh, will people like worship this Sunday? And I've had to learn how to basically, kind of just listen to God and be like, god. What songs do you want us to play this Sunday? Not like, what do I really like listening to this week that that could sound good? So that's one thing I've had to learn. And it's tough.

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That is tough when you have all these people given suggestions and, you know, throwing ideas in your ears, oh, do this? Do this or this, and, and trying to, trying to just be okay. You know, we could easily. Just do what everybody likes. But sometimes God has a different plan. God wants to challenge us and challenge people in a different way than what's comfortable. And a lot of times, what everybody wants to hear is kind of the comfortable, you know, oh yeah, rah, rah. We're all gonna, you know, be able to easily sing that. But it doesn't, you know, God sometimes does some amazing things, and it has been sweet in some of those times where you've pulled out a song that maybe nobody knew, or pulled in, you know, just a flow through worship where it's like, okay, we're just gonna linger here and wait and see what God does and does, really, we've had some sweet moments where God showed up and it probably isn't what everybody in the audience would have chosen to do, yeah, but in those moments is sometimes where God shows up unexpectedly in some really cool ways. And so it's, it's definitely been super sweet to see those those times and see how being faithful, it goes a lot better than we just, like, stiff arm, God, say, Yep, I know better. God, yeah, I'm just gonna go this way. And

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I mean, even in that sense, like I can remember last year specifically a time where we we played gratitude. And it was one, it was some random win, yeah, and like, it was like, it wasn't the first time we had played gratitude that year. Either it was like, probably, like, our 10th time, and out of nowhere, like the spirit, just like, entered the room and everyone was responding, and people were it was like a retreat. People were crying and going to leaders. And I remember looking back at Grant, our drummer, and I kind of looked at him, I was like, What is like, what is happening? Like, no one expected this. And it was, it was one of those senses where we're like, Okay, we got it like, we got to keep going, like, and you even said to us in the talk back, you're like, keep like, don't stop. Like, we gotta, we gotta keep going. And, you know, people came up to me afterwards, and they kind of just asked. They were like, Jesse, like, what happened? Like, like, how did that happen? And my only response was, I have no idea, yeah. And it was, I, we, you can't, you can't plan those types of things. You

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can just be ready, yeah, and faithful, and be, you know, trying to listen to God. I remember because I had told you guys, hey, we really need to stay on time and whatnot. And so time was like, getting over, and I remember going, Oh, wait, forget everything. I just said, Forget about the time. God's doing something really special right now. So, yeah, I was, I was quickly like, keep going. Keep going. This is just really awesome time. We've had some really cool experiences. And I you've always brought just a out of the box creativity to, like, nights of worship, you know, different elements in worship where it's like, hey, we could do this and just just bring a whole nother, literally out of the box, not just to keep doing what we've always done. We've had some amazing nights of worship. Particularly tell about the time where we literally got off the stage went in the middle of, oh yeah, like that ended up being like, for me, top five worship. No, yeah, ever maybe the shirt two night worship nights that we've ever had. And we we weren't on

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a platform. Yeah, I remember we were, I was probably in, I want to say I was in ninth grade, and gracious, and I mentioned her earlier, gracious. And I were talking. This was before we were leaders together. And we were talking, and we were like, oh, it'd be so cool one day to like to kind of do that. Like to to bring everyone off stage, and to kind of go in a circle, and we're like, we don't know how it would work. Like, technologically, like, how are we going to plug everyone in? And we were like, but this would be so cool. And I remember we we talked to it was either my dad or it was you. And we were like, Oh, yeah. Like, we can. We can make that happen if we wanted to. And we were like, Oh, if we have a night of worship one year, like, this is what we're going to do, and it'd be it'd be so fun. Well, so last year, we had our first night of worship in the in the fall semester, and we were on stage. It was, it was kind of like a your run of the mill night of worship. But then I remember, God revealed to me this idea I had. I was sitting in study hall at school one day, and he was like, Jesse, don't forget that you you said this to gracious one time, like, don't forget this idea. And I was like, oh god, you're right. It would be so cool if we did this. And he kind of gave me this idea in mind, in a sense of we, we kind of want to have a, like, a theme for it. We kind of want to break the barriers of what traditional worship on a stage looks like. So gracious. And I got together and we're like, Hey, should we, like, can we actually do this? Like, you know, we've been talking about it. And we came to you, Chris and Claire and Debbie, and we worked it out. And we were like, yeah, we can do this. And we, we came up to the student building one Wednesday to, kind of like, run through, like, okay, would this all work? And we got everyone in positions, and it was like, Oh, wow. This is crazy. And then fast forward to the to the night. We made this circle and we rehearsed, and we were like, this is like, it's not gonna sound the best, but I still think it would be so cool and and everyone comes in, and it was one of our most responsive nights ever. And we we had this whole long set list. We had Stu. Men's prey. We did communion. I remember that was so fun. And and then we ended it all with with deep cries out. And everyone was going crazy in this circle, and, and it was so much fun, but it was so much fun because it was, it wasn't the norm, it wasn't your average Sunday night. And I think that's what made it so cool. And going back to like, you can't plan for the spirit to, you know, to move. Like, we could have planned that. And everyone could have just like, stood at and stared at us the whole time, but, yeah, the spirit decided to move that night. And that's what, that's what made it so cool.

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It was so unifying, just to the cross and where the cross was in the middle of the room, yeah, and you guys as a band were like, kind of the first circle around it, and everybody else was kind of concentric circles just around that. So it was, it was like, nobody was leading. It was like, it was like, literally, Jesus and the cross was the central figure. I honestly wish that we could do that always, all the time. Yeah, get, get the band off the stage and, like, just make the focus Jesus. That's really what we should be doing anyways. And it's just, obviously, it's, it's tough to do that. You know, we really, really weird if we always did that. But I love that picture of, like, hey, we as a band, we're worshiping Jesus, just like the rest of you guys are, and there's no divide between us. And, you know, I love that picture of just like, Don't look at us. Yeah, the book How to worship a king by Zach nice. I love when he talks about what the picture of worship leading is, is where you're the worship leaders are grabbing the hand of Jesus worshiping. Obviously themselves. They're worshiping, and then they're grabbing the hands of the audience, and still that's not actually leading worship. Yet. It's not leading worship until you connect the two and get out of the way, like here, let me, I've got the hand of Jesus. I got the hand of the audience. Now, let me connect the hand of Jesus with the hand of the audience and get out of the way and let them have a moment. And I think that's what we were able to do that night, is give those students a moment where, literally, the band wasn't even on stage. And I just think that was probably one of the most powerful things about it. And you could see they responded, they met with Jesus. Like the visuals. Visuals ended up being so powerful that we used that on our Spotify. That was so cool. Ep visuals, you go and look at Grace fellowship, RPM, band, EP, you see those visuals of that literally night, because it was just that powerful. It was

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awesome. And I remember one of the biggest motivations behind it being, you know, on a Sunday night, like, what you were saying, grabbing God's hand and the audience's hand and putting it together. And I remember gracious and I talking, and we were like, wow, this is so cool that they're so used to kind of looking this is gonna sound terrible looking up at us in like, a physical sense, because we were on a stage. But we were like, I remember thinking, wow, the people standing directly behind me, I don't, I don't know why this was such a big deal to me, because it's really not the people behind me are gonna see me activate and deactivate my pedals, and see my pedal board and and I was like, Wow, this isn't like, this isn't something they see. And I don't know why that was a big deal for me, because the fact of like, activating a pedal and turning it on and turning it off them seeing that is, is like connecting them into worship, both in the the spiritual sense. But also, some people came up with me afterwards. They were like, it was so cool to be able to see the things that you guys do. Yeah, that weren't like, we don't really get to see because we're down on the floor. They were part of the band, exactly. And that was that whole night. Was just awesome. And yeah, they're

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standing around, grant a drummer as he's like, Yeah, drumming, and in the talk back my cu guys and stuff, and they're all just standing there. Really was cool. Like, an entire you know, band that just had a zillion vocalist with you. Yes, we

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had them all spread out and, like, we had them, like, sandwiched in between instrumentalists, just to, like, kind of get all that was so

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funny. Loved it. Loved it. Yep, definitely a highlight night of worship in all the years that I've been here. So I'm excited about the next night of worship. Awesome man. What a great legacy that you're building, what an amazing impact you've had in the student worship ministry, the worship that's happening. I I've told you a zillion times in our meetings that we have, you know I just respect your walk with Jesus. I know that you're the real deal. I know you're not perfect. I know you don't you know nobody's perfect. But even in that imperfection and the weaknesses. You reflect Jesus. You you walk with him. I know you're spending time with him through the good days and the bad days. You are faithful. And so I think that's one of the reasons why, why worship is so powerful these days, is people. People can see through the fake, the facade of people, and you bring the real thing. And so I feel like that is lifestyle worship. When, when people bring the real stuff, the vulnerabilities, the good stuff, the bad stuff, and you bring that as a worship leader, it, it does something for the audience. They're not worshiping this golden calf that looks perfect. They're worshiping with somebody who's who's real, who's walking with them. And the relationships that you have with people, I feel like all that stuff is, is lifestyle, worship, time and stuff, and so I respect, respect you, and I'm pumped about to see the future. I don't want to obviously rush you out the door of your senior year, but I'm super excited about what God has planned for you in the future. And honestly, some students, I can kind of see, yep, this is what they're gonna be doing in the next 510 in the next 510, years. And I have so many like, there's so many things that you could be doing that will be amazing, and I don't know which one is gonna be, but I'm excited to see where God takes you. So thanks so much for your time here with us today. Love looking glimpsing into the life of Jesse Crawley and the brain of Jesse Crawley and sharing that with our listeners. So thanks for being with us.

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Yeah, thanks for having me

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Absolutely. We'll see y'all next time, hopefully

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it won't be as long as a time between my last episode and this episode. So thanks for joining us again, and we'll see you next time on lifestyle worship. You

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