Matt McCoy
Somewhere along the way, worship leaders started believing they had to sound exactly like the recording.
Matt McCoy lived in that pressure too. He admits there was a season he cared more about the music than his band, hard on volunteers for missing a fill, and he says he burned people out doing it.
In this conversation, you’ll hear why tracks quietly became a way to replace people instead of free them, and how to fix it.
You’ll get the one band conversation that changes everything: asking your guitarist what they actually worked on this week before you mute or keep a track.
You’ll also hear the reframe that reorders your whole week: if it’s ever music versus people, people win.
Matt is the founder of Loop Community, creator of the Looptimus pedal, and now president of CCLI.
If this one hit a nerve, Worship Online gives your team a system to learn their parts at home so rehearsal becomes refining, not reteaching. That frees you to pour into people instead of fixing parts. Start at https://worshiponline.com/
Mentioned in the Episode
About Matt McCoy
Matt McCoy grew up as a pastor’s kid in Southern California during the Vineyard music era of the 1980s. Surrounded by worship music from an early age, he began leading worship in middle school. After high school he joined staff at Vineyard Community Church in Cincinnati, then moved to Chicago to lead worship at Willow Creek Community Church. It was in that season that he identified a real gap in how churches were finding and sharing tracks, and that gap became the foundation for everything he built next. He went on to found Loop Community, one of the most widely used worship track platforms in the world, create the Looptimus pedal, build the Prime app, and launch the Worship Innovators Conference, a gathering where the people who build tools for the church get to teach and invest in the worship leaders using them.
Today Matt serves as president of CCLI, the global licensing organization that supports songwriters and serves over a hundred thousand churches worldwide. Under his leadership, CCLI has expanded its offerings to include Song Select, Lyric Videos, and Rehearse, a tool that helps worship team members practice individual stems and parts at home. The Worship Innovators Conference returns to Chicago on October 12 and 13.
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The Worship Online Podcast is produced by Worship Online in Nashville, TN.
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