Kevin A. has led worship at the same church in Tulsa, Oklahoma for eleven years.
He plays guitar, sings, and occasionally writes original songs for the congregation — songs that address specific seasons the church is walking through, specific needs that the standard worship catalog doesn't quite reach. He is good at this. The congregation tells him so.
But something had been bothering him for years.
"During worship, people sing along to the words on the screen," he says. "But when I play an original song they haven't heard before, they read the lyrics and sort of... wait. They're processing. By the time they've understood the first line, I'm already on the second verse."
The problem wasn't the songs. The problem was that new lyrics, sung live, are hard to absorb in real time. You hear the melody before you understand the meaning. You're catching up to yourself.
Kevin wanted his congregation to come to Sunday service already knowing the words. Already having felt them. Already prepared to sing them with conviction rather than cautious unfamiliarity.
He just didn't know how to make that happen.
The Obstacle Between an Idea and Its Execution
Kevin's instinct was right: share the song before Sunday. Give people a week to live with it.
The obstacle was production. He had a decent recording setup — a USB microphone, an acoustic guitar, GarageBand. He could produce a serviceable audio track. What he couldn't produce, alone, was a video that would look professional enough for people to take seriously and share with others in the congregation.
"I tried making a lyric video once with a basic editor," he says. "It took me four hours. The timing was off. The font was wrong. It looked like a church announcement slide from 2009. No one watched it."
He shelved the idea for two years.
The resurrection came from his 17-year-old daughter, who watched him struggling with another attempt and said, with the efficient impatience of someone who grew up on the internet: "Dad, there are tools for this."
She showed him LyricMV on her laptop.
Fifty Minutes on a Thursday Night
Kevin recorded his song on a Thursday — a song he'd written for an upcoming series on forgiveness, titled "Further Than the East." He uploaded the MP3 to LyricMV.
"The transcription was almost perfect," he says. "It got every word right except one phrase where I sang very softly. I fixed it in about two minutes."
He spent fifteen minutes on timing — checking that each line appeared exactly as he sang it, adjusting a few phrases in the bridge where he'd held notes longer than the default sync expected. He chose a clean, light template with the church's unofficial color palette in mind: warm whites, gentle gradients.
He rendered the video. He watched it through once.
"I sat back and thought: this is what I wanted two years ago," he says. "This is the thing I couldn't make."
Total time: 50 minutes.
He posted it to the church's private Facebook group on Friday morning with a note: "We'll be singing this together on Sunday. Take a few minutes with it this weekend."
What Sunday Morning Looked Like
Kevin had been leading worship for eleven years. He knew what it looked like when a congregation was learning a new song versus engaging with one they knew.
Sunday was different.
"By the second line of the first verse, people were singing," he says. "Not reading. Singing. Mouths open, eyes up. That almost never happens with a new song."
After the service, three people told him they'd watched the video with their families at home. One woman said she'd played it for her mother who was in the hospital and couldn't attend. A man in his sixties — not typically demonstrative — told Kevin the lyrics had said something he'd been trying to say to his estranged son for years and hadn't found the words for.
"He asked if he could share the video," Kevin says. "I told him of course. He sent it to his son. I don't know what happened after that. Some things aren't mine to know."
A Practice That Changed the Church's Relationship With Music
Kevin now releases a lyric video for every original song, two to three days before Sunday service. What started as a practical solution to a preparation problem has become something larger.
People in the congregation have started sharing the videos outside the church. Not as evangelism — just as music. As something they wanted others to hear.
"We had a woman share one of the videos on her personal Instagram," Kevin says. "A friend of hers who hadn't been to church in fifteen years commented and asked where the song was from. She came to visit two Sundays later."
Kevin is careful not to overclaim. He doesn't believe a lyric video brought someone back to church. He believes a song reached someone who was ready to be reached, and the video was the vehicle.
"The song has to mean something first," he says. "The video just makes sure the meaning doesn't get lost in transit."
What This Is Really About
Kevin's situation is not unique to worship leaders. It's the situation of anyone who creates language-based art — poetry, songwriting, liturgy — and struggles with the gap between the words as written and the words as received.
We absorb written language differently than spoken or sung language. When words appear on screen in sync with music, the brain processes them through multiple channels simultaneously. The meaning lands differently. More completely.
For Kevin, this meant a congregation that arrived prepared. For others, it means a stranger pausing a scroll because a line caught their eye. For Natalie, it meant a grief counselor in Scotland playing a song for her patients.
The words were always there. The lyric video is just the bridge.
Give your words a way to reach people →
Kevin A. is a worship leader, guitarist, and songwriter based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He has led worship at his church for over a decade and releases original worship music independently.
