Big Sky Christian Fellowship worship team records original music, streaming for its congregation and beyond
By Leslie Kilgore EBS STAFF
For more than a decade, the music of Big Sky Christian Fellowship has been heard primarily on Sunday mornings, when the voices of the congregation join the musicians leading worship at Big Sky Chapel. Now, five original songs written for that congregation are available beyond those walls, thanks to a yearlong volunteer effort by three members of the worship team.
The project began when pastor Brian VanEps approached Mark Goode about recording the worship team. The original plan was to make a live recording, but the acoustics in the chapel made that difficult.
Instead, Goode used equipment at his home and in the chapel to record the songs as studio tracks. His background made him a natural fit for the job. Goode, who has lived in Big Sky for 24 years, has a bachelor’s degree in music engineering from the University of Miami and spent 10 years in the music industry.
“I have adequate equipment for it,” he said. “I don’t have a lot. I can’t do a concert, for example, but we had enough to track it, some ingenuity, collaboration, and we got through.”
The idea gained momentum after members of the congregation began asking whether they could listen to the worship team’s original music online. One of those songs, “Come and See” grew out of conversations with the worship team about what the church needed at the time. Goode, Stephanie Kissell, Sarah Mitchell and the church pastor Brian VanEps came up with a plan.
“We were posed with the question, what are you feeling that the church needs right now?” Kissell said.
“The group talked about the lives of people in the congregation and the temperature of where people were at, just in their own lives,” Mitchell said. “We eventually developed the song as an invitation for people to come and see what we’re about, come and see what our worship is about.”
The song was played frequently at church, and eventually congregation members wanted a way to hear it when they weren’t at the Big Sky Chapel.
That request became the seed for the larger project. The worship team had room in its budget to pursue recording, but the members soon discovered that getting music onto streaming platforms involved considerably more than simply making a recording.
“We didn’t realize how long it would take, and we didn’t realize the path of music, publishing and copyright, and then, even album artwork,” Kissell said. “It’s rather a daunting process. There’s a lot of things we didn’t know until we got started on the project.”
They also discovered how many skills already existed within their church community. Goode handled the recording, while Amy Galloway, an artist in the congregation, created the artwork. Several other musicians in the congregation also contributed their time and talents, turning the project into a community effort rather than a church-funded production.
“I don’t think we actually spent any of our church’s budget on this, because everything else was just our local church community coming together and sharing the gifts they have to produce the music,” Kissell said.
The team originally hoped to have the recordings finished by Christmas. Instead, the process stretched nearly a year as they navigated recording, publishing, copyright and the demands of everyday life. All three members have families and other responsibilities, while continuing to prepare for worship every Sunday.
Still, the extra work brought its own reward.
“I think simply the collaboration was really fun,” Kissell said. “And it was really meaningful for us to have something like that to work on that was somewhat separate from what we do every Sunday.”
Kissell has been part of Big Sky Christian Fellowship since 2005, while Mitchell has been part of the church for 11 years. The two have also grown as musicians within the community.
Mitchell grew up in a musical family, has a bachelor of arts degree and a master’s in music, and previously taught music to Big Sky community members.
Kissell’s path was less formal. Although she also grew up in a musical family, she had only about three months of piano lessons before learning some guitar and eventually becoming part of the church’s worship team.
“When I went away to college, my dad loaned me his 12-string guitar because I thought maybe I wanted to learn how to play it,” Kissell said.
After moving to Big Sky, her husband signed her up to help lead worship at Big Sky Christian Fellowship.
“He told the church I play guitar and sing, but at that time I knew three chords, literally.”
That was around 2006, when the worship team began taking shape. More than a decade later, the three musicians practice about two hours a week and play together every Sunday, all as volunteers.
For Kissell, one of the greatest rewards is hearing the congregation respond.
“I think that our congregation sings really well. And I think that’s my favorite thing–hearing everybody sing together,” she said. “Whether it’s a song that we’ve written or just a song that we’re leading. It brings a lot of joy to me.”
Mitchell sees shared singing as something fundamental to human connection.
“There is something that is very special about our congregation, and also special about communities around the world. Singing together is very unifying,” she said. “And it’s something that humans have done together for thousands of years. It’s a part of our makeup.”
The five songs can be found by searching for “BSCF Worship” on Spotify, YouTube and other streaming platforms. The recordings are currently available as individual releases, though they share Galloway’s artwork and appear together under the BSCF Worship name.
The team’s goal was never to build an audience or track downloads. It was simply to make the music available to the people who had asked for it, including seasonal members who could take the songs back to their home communities. The group continues to write songs and music, and now that it has learned the process, more recordings may follow.
Ultimately, however, the musicians say the songs are less about the recordings themselves than what they might make possible. Mitchell points to a story from the Gospels about four friends who could not get their paralyzed friend through the crowd to Jesus, so they climbed onto a roof, made an opening and lowered him down.
“That’s kind of how we view ourselves-as the four friends,” Mitchell said. “Like, we’re just trying to dig a hole in the roof and make room for people to encounter our church through music, and to make space for them with the gifts that we have.”
