Wes Crawford Interview

Last week I had the chance to talk with Wes Crawford about his history in music, his thoughts on worship, and his upcoming album. Unlike your meandering existence, this interview has been edited for clarity and length.

 

How did you initially get into music?

Music was always a part of my life. My mom, starting in 4th grade made me take 3 years of piano lessons. After that I could choose to quit if I wanted to. And I did. I quit as soon as the three years were over.

There was a lady up the street from my house in Arlington who taught me. She had three pianos in her living room, and our piano lessons were purely for fun. They weren’t oriented towards a competition. So in my earliest memories, music wasn’t a means for advancement. It wasn’t about proving myself. It was purely about learning music for the fun of it.

I quit the piano lessons in 7th grade and immediately joined the school band. I had a leg up on the other kids because I could read music and knew a bit of music theory. I choose trumpet because we happened to have a trumpet in the house. In high school I played trumpet in the jazz band, which I loved. I was pretty good at it. I actually made lead in the Texas all-state jazz band my senior year. So it made sense for me to go to UNT and play music.

My natural talent got me pretty far, but I never really had the intense work ethic that a professional musician needs to have. And it was at that point that I started getting involved with Denton Bible Church and working on ministry. So, just as I was starting to run up against my limits in the UNT jazz program, I was more and more interested in ministry.

 

You and I first met you when you were leading worship at Denton Bible Church. As a worship minister, who was influencing you at that time?

Well, I’ve never had any formal training as a worship pastor. I remember asking John Bryson, who was leading Denton Bible’s college ministry at the time, “who are the worship leaders around the country that I should be learning from?” And he admitted that he didn’t know of anything or anyone that I should talk to. As a result, I had to go find people who were doing interesting things.

The Passion movement was gaining steam at the beginning of my career as a worship pastor. And I believe they started with a healthy re emphasis that was centered on God. They were talking about God as “the famous one.” But that movement suffered from a strange self-consciousness in later years.

I was reading John Piper at the same time, who was a huge influence. And I was in reading groups with John Brown where we would go through these classic writings by Christians from previous centuries. I also started listening to Kevin Twit and Indelible Grace, and that was a key point theologically for me. I had learned so much at Denton Bible, and I was beginning to grasp the functional centrality of the gospel – that the death and resurrection of Jesus was the center point of theology. And I began to understand how worship ministry fit into that – how we are formed by the words that we’re singing.

 

Did you plan to have a career as a worship minister?

No, as I started getting into ministry, I always assumed that I would be a Bible teacher. I thought music was just how God brought me to Denton, but that I would get my degree, play music as my hobby, but then move on. But as I’m going through these various states of ministry, I keep getting asked to lead worship. And even though I didn’t have a clearly articulated vision of what music ministry was for, I intuited that there was something important about it. I loved the words of the hymns we were singing, and I knew that they were important.

So I was leading worship for the college ministry at Denton Bible, and around that time I was also asked to lead worship at a church in Sherman. The church had an older congregation, and they felt strongly that there should be a piano. It was ok if I wanted to play my acoustic guitar, but there had to be a piano as well. This introduced an important learning experience for me, because my piano player was an older woman named Pat. Working with Pat, I had to learn – on the fly – how to play out of the hymn book in a way that worked. I had to take my skills and Pat’s skills and put those together in a way that made sense. It was a great education for me.

 

And from Denton you moved to Mexico?

Yes, as a missionary, and I really thought “I’m done with music. Now I’ve grown up. I’m going to start big boy ministry. I’m going to administrate BTCP [a Bible training program for pastors] around the country. I’ll do some teaching and I’m going to sit in with the elders and help them with strategy for the church, and things like that. Maybe I’ll get involved with the band, but music is really in my past.” And when I got down there, the first thing they said to me was, “hey, we need somebody to lead worship.” Ha! And so I led worship. In Spanish. And that wasn’t a frustration, really. It was just different than what I’d expected.

About a year before I arrived the church really didn’t have any musicians. And there was a sweet working-class family in the church who saw that need and determined to meet it. This family lived out in the western suburbs of Monterrey where they had two four wheelers. And when they saw this need in the church, they said, “we’re going to sell our four wheelers and buy instruments and get ourselves in lessons and we’re going to meet this need.” And that’s what they did. Out of that family, I had a drummer, a singer, I had an 11 year old piano player and a bass player. And that was my band, essentially.

So again, this is another scenario where week to week I have to figure out how to put something together that makes sense. And that was a great experience for me to work with people’s strengths, minimize their weaknesses and make something good for the church. That was very formative for me and the way I approach leading a worship band. I’m not trying to imitate some popular worship band. I’m trying to work with the people I have with me that morning.

 

And did you carry that philosophy with you when you moved to Kansas City?

Leading worship at Redeemer in Kansas City was certainly different. We had a lot more musicians, and we had a long list of songs that we played. But, yes, the philosophy was the same. If you’re the kind of worship leader who goes into a Sunday with a target in mind. “I want it to sound like this.” That’s one way to go. But I firmly believe, from my jazz education as well as my theological background, that I should look around each Sunday, and say, “who have I got here. What can we create with this group of people that’s beautiful?” I just want to assemble musical personalities and let those personalities come through.

 

So, tell me about the record. Why did you choose to record these Nathan Partain songs?

I think I have a skill as a curator. We did a lot of songs at Redeemer. Probably too many. Nathan’s songs stood out to me because they go right to the heart of theology. They go to the heart of the gospel and press into it in ways that you just don’t find songs doing very often.

Also, I get the sense that he’s writing from the experience of his community and for a congregation. The songs we’ve done on the record are the ones that gave voice to some specific ways our own congregation was experiencing God’s grace and became favorites for our church.

You know, the enemies of good art and of beauty are more than just laziness. Sentimentality is an enemy. The desire for everything to appear perfect all the time is an enemy. There’s a slickness, or a sheen—trying to recreate the perfection you see on television, or trying to make something that is ready to be mass-marketed—that is sadly becoming the norm in most churches. I say it’s sad because it tends to obscure the humanity involved. At Nathan’s church they have a stated goal of cultivating a culture of art patronage; that is, of not only valuing beauty but also its creation by and for people. Somehow the fact that these songs were written for a specific group of people made them easy for us to relate to as well. And I tried to capture that sense of community on the record.

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You can learn more about Wes’ album by visiting his Kickstarter campaign.