response: How We Got Here (the story behind Fellowship Songs)

It was May of 2008 and Jennifer and I were spending a week at her family farm near St. Louis when Rob Howard phoned me to ask if I would lead worship at Fellowship the following weekend. All four of the leaders were out of town and he’d gotten my name from Dennis Worley as a possible guest leader. I sensed the Lord telling me this was something I should do so I drove home early to be able to accept. A few weeks later Rob asked me to lunch, and over fish tacos in Franklin, explained that Nathan and Christy were being led to Atlanta and that he’d like me to consider becoming a Worship Leader/Artist-in-Residence at Fellowship. It had been over a year since Jennifer and I (and Hutch) had been back from our six months in Africa and we’d been waiting for the Lord’s leading into what was next for our family. We’d been praying through every opportunity that life presented, each time sensing the Lord’s answer was “no.” We knew we were right to wait, but we had no idea what we were waiting for. This time things were different and I told Rob, fighting back tears, that I was finally sensing Yahweh say “yes.”

A few weeks later Ronnie, Carl, Jason, and I met with Rob at Jason’s studio to discuss the next season of worship music at Fellowship. We had a nice time of planning and prayer and agreed to meet regularly on a monthly basis. Our next meeting was a month later and Rob had just returned from the Catalyst conference in Atlanta. Visibly emotional he explained how he longed for the Fellowship community to go much deeper in our worship together. We agreed that it needed to start with us so we decided to commit to one morning a week that November to get to know each other and seek vision about the future.

During those four weeks something bigger happened, something we didn’t expect. We didn’t talk about worship but instead we talked about our families, our childhoods, and our hardships. As the four of us shared our lives with each other we realized how similar our fears and expectations are. God gave us to each other as a gift and we recognized it quickly. At the end of November we decided to continue our weekly breakfasts together and over the next 52 weeks we met together each Tuesday to grow deeper.

Fellowship Songs is a result of the friendship and affinity those mornings together created. A recording was never on Rob’s agenda for us as leaders. It was birthed out of a deep friendship and spiritual bond between four guys who had been vulnerable with each other. During our time together God planted in us a desire for Fellowship to have it’s own songs, a way to express our unique heart as a body. Exactly a year after those first breakfasts we were in the studio recording those songs for our church, and last week you got a glimpse of where we’ve come and where we are going.

If you happen to be at Cracker Barrel at 7:30am on Tuesdays you’ll still find us there, center section, third table by the window, Lori filling our coffee cups. We probably won’t be talking about worship. Most likely we’ll be talking about our kids or our wives or our jobs. And in that time God will be doing something new underneath, something we can’t see, something sure to surprise us later.

- Jeromy Deibler