I’m always late for church. And so when I finally arrive at the former theater that houses Vanguard Church and head down the sloping aisle in search of a seat, I always see Brian Beatty and his band at the bottom of the slope rocking away. It’s a pleasing sight to me. This four-year-old, eight-hundred-member church in Colorado Springs bears the stamp of Kelly Williams, its cofounder and senior pastor, more than any other. But if Kelly is the church’s head, I like to think of Brian as its heart. Brian’s history with Vanguard goes back to its very beginning, when it was just a small group meeting in the apartment of Kelly and Tosha Williams.

Brian Beatty

Brian swiftly became one of the church’s most faithful volunteers, among other things playing in the band. (He likes to recall his stint working at Josh & John’s--famous in Colorado Springs for serving the best ice cream--just long enough to make money to buy his guitar.) Then in 1999 he was hauled on board the church’s staff because they simply could not do without him.

His role has changed over the years, but his central focus continues to be worship. And let me tell you that, while I’ve visited many of the best churches in America, I’ve never known any church to have better music, and better worship in general, to my taste anyway, than Vanguard. It’s not just the quality or style of the music; it’s also the aching honesty before God displayed by Brian Beatty and his whole worship team.

For some reason, when I think of Vanguard’s worship team, I recall a few lines from a Waterdeep song we sing at Vanguard:

At Vanguard, worship is indeed a wild dance in the Spirit. And that’s why I thought it would be a good idea to sit down with Brian and ask him a few questions.

I basically handle everything that gets plugged in. [Laugh.] Not exactly. There are a number of things I’m responsible for here at Vanguard. I handle public relations and advertising. We advertise on secular radio and in local movie theaters a lot. I copyedit everything that goes out churchwide to see that it has a consistent feel. I’m also in charge of facilities, which is a big thing now with the build-out of our new 27,000-square-foot building. Until recently I was in charge of the computers and telephones. They call me the office police, too. I make sure our decorum is professional and we are offering proper hospitality. I have a knack for presentation, and I don’t mind enforcing it. If I was to be pegged into one area, though, my focus is on the development of our worship.

We started as a Gen X church. Our target audience was 22 to 30 or somewhere around there. But we have grown and matured as a church to the point where it is not so much a Gen X congregation as it is a postmodern or post-postmodern congregation. We are now seeing those in the audience who are 16 to 76 years old.

The leadership of the church remains Gen X. I think it’s been very difficult for some of the Boomers to accept that. There’s certainly been some opposition. We hear things like “How can I sit under the leadership of a 30-year-old pastor? How can a 32-year-old worship pastor take me to places with God that I’ve never been before? I need somebody that’s more mature than me.” But we’re very intentional about empowering the young people. A lot of times the young people are the ones with vision. It is the older ones and the Boomers that have walked the path before and want to do it the old way.

But a beautiful thing is happening. Those that are older are willingly submitting to the authority of the young people, to allow them to lead in the way they think God sees fit for them. And at the same time, we as a young leadership look to the Boomers and Builders and say, “We’re in this place. How should we walk in wisdom?”

Well, here’s a confession: I struggle with selfish ambition and want the band to be really good. But I have made it a point not to pursue people to play with our band. A while back I heard about this professional musician in our church. A part of me is like, “He would be so rocking to have in the band.” But I had to put my personal desires aside, ask God if it was in his will, and wait for this musician to come to me.

When people pursue me, I say, “This is not a gig. You’re serving something that is so much bigger than you. Come see me in a couple weeks when you have figured out that, a, this is your church home, and b, you’re coming to serve the church and not your needs.”

Honestly, I’ve told people to come back and see me in three months, in four months. I say, “Wait, wait. I don’t see that God has opened the door yet and that you’re supposed to be on the team.” I don’t think that I have a direct line, an 888 number to God, but I feel a peace, and it has happened time and time and time again.

What ends up happening is I serve the people on the team by enabling them to serve God with their gifts. My job is to servant-lead them. So people are giving of their complete selves to worship. I feel it is my responsibility to free them to concentrate on their relationship with God. So what has ended up happening is we have a very, very low turnover rate and many long-term relationships in the band.

I listen to a lot of music. A lot. I try to attend as many concerts as I can. And I’m always talking to other worship leaders. “What are you listening to?” “What’s good?”

I think we have a personality as a church with the music we listen to. I think Counting Crows fits pretty well. The Wallflowers. Something that’s a little more eclectic, organic, acoustic. We’d love to incorporate techno stuff, DJ stuff, sampling. I’m listening to a lot of Radiohead and Moby and getting back to my old U2 CDs. But you know, a little bit at a time.

I try to be as transparent as possible to my team and to the congregation. You run the risk when you say that your life is crap, because people could think you’re being patronizing or you want their sympathy or something like that. So I think, in the selection of songs is where I end up saying that my life is crap. I’d rather let the songs speak my words. So what we end up experiencing in the church corporately in worship is what I’m going through personally.

And I think that God has got us at the point where I’m going to start writing my own material, instead of allowing someone else to speak for me. I think that we have a definite personality as a worship team, but I think we can own it more.

We like to incorporate the media into our worship service because we believe, if Scripture is true, God is everywhere. We embrace secular culture because we feel it’s God’s. God works in the society in spite of Christians who are trying to put him into a box and say God can only work in this context on this day between these times. We embrace films like Magnolia and Simon Birch and songs like “The Space Between” by the Dave Mathews Band. The culture is screaming out the need and desire for relationship, and they’re doing it in ways that they’re gifted in the arts.

But we use secular art not only because we experience God in secular culture but also in order to connect lost people to the service. It makes us stop and say, “I’m going to look at this differently.” The song “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd is an example. How many times is a lost person, or even a believing person, numb in their heart? I get numb often and don’t experience God. But I hope I wouldn’t get comfortable in that.

We have to speak the language of the culture. If we don’t speak it, then we’re not going to be able to reach people. The mission statement of our church--to love people into a real relationship with Jesus Christ--means we have to step out of our comfort zone.

I went to the Gay Pride Fest in Acacia Park [downtown Colorado Springs] because I’m tired of just reading about homosexual issues. I wanted to hear from gay men and women themselves. I met two transgendered people, from male to female, who believe they have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. One of them was a fundamentalist Baptist, King James only. What does a creative ministries pastor have to do with a homosexual gathering? Well, we took a video camera and I interviewed them about community. Hopefully, that’s going to be incorporated in our worship service. There’s something about community that the gay community understands and that the Christian community doesn’t get. We’re just not loving people the way Christ taught us.

A lot of people say that. Our purpose in that service is to provide a more intimate environment. There’s generally one or two acoustic guitars and vocals. That’s all. No preaching. Just some singing, prayer, and Bible reading. It’s a very believer-driven worship, and that allows for more expression than we experience on Sunday.

We also do Communion, which we don’t do during the weekend. We allow people to come to the table in a personal way, picking the time to come up and get the Communion elements.

For a lot of people, their weeks are just ballistic. So on Wednesday night we intentionally slow things down. Without the clamor of all the band, the words are heard more and experience more and expressed more. Even if people don’t sing, they can look up on the screen and see a simple lyric. It can have just as deep an impact.

I believe that worship goes to the core of who we are. God built us to worship him in spirit and truth. Eventually, in eternity, that’s what we’re going to do.

Worship can manifest itself in a whole bunch of different ways. I believe you can worship God in silence. I believe you can worship God in art and expression. I think that’s what it comes down to--expressing your love and your surrender to God.

Isaiah 55 has been a paramount Scripture for us. It starts out, “Come, all you who are thirsty.” It gets deep into the love and the joy we have in worship for God. When we’re in need, and even when we’re not in need, we are able to come to God and he’ll be glorified.

I try to keep my understanding of worship simple and not overtheologize it. When it gets down to who we are in a worship setting, we experience God in our own way. We’re playing corporately as a team and the church is worshiping corporately, but to see each individual person on the worship team have their own experience of God is probably the most beautiful thing that I’ve ever seen.

In 1999 I went to the Worship Together conference in Franklin, Tennessee, and that’s where I first heard a term from Brian Doerksen. He said, “We do not need to be worship leaders; we need to be lead worshipers.” It’s becoming a buzzword now, but it really impacted me when I heard it. My responsibility has flipped into becoming a lead worshiper.

Worship leaders need to teach people how to worship. They have it deep down inside them to do it, but they’re not really sure how. So our desire is to say, “God, allow me to experience you,” and that will be infectious to others.

Sometimes I come to a weekend and I’m like, “God, do I have to do this again?” I don’t always feel like worshiping. But you have to be transparent. You can’t be fake, because people will see it. So I end up on the whipping post a lot. In my mind and heart, I’ll experience God three different ways in each of the three weekend services. I wouldn’t want to be any other place but that.

One of my greatest goals in leading worship is to get out of the way. I think that there are a lot of problems that arise with having a personality and an agenda as a worship leader. You can whoop it up and whip people into a frenzy and really kind of control things. I want nothing to do with that. I believe that God has called us as a congregation, and me as an individual, to just be free. To feel. To experience. I think that is a trait of our generation--we want to feel. Postmodernism embraces feeling.

At the same time, we’re in a maturing process. We’re on this wild journey. It’s just amazing to see what’s going to happen in the future. As I grow and mature, as the team grows and matures, as the church grows and matures, we come to understand the beauty of worship--that it’s not just a couple songs we’re throwing in. We’re truly desiring to enter into God’s presence and preparing the heart to make it fertile ground for the Word to sink in and for people to just own a beautiful relationship with God.

We haven’t even scratched the surface. We haven’t seen God’s full glory. And I remind myself that worship is not something that I do but something that I’m trying to be. I try to lose the mindset of mechanics and process and program. I want to respect the need for structure and order but also be free within those confines to really experience God.

Vanguard Church: www.vanguardchurch.org

Brian Beatty: brian@vanguardchurch.org