Grace Baptist Church played host to an event providing church leaders across Southern California with the tools to be better equipped in their church leader journey at the “Sing! West” conference on Saturday.
“It’s training for worship leaders, it’s training for those involved with children’s ministry, as it relates to music for musicians, singers,” said Ryan Foglesong, pastor of corporate worship at Grace Baptist. “Basically, for anybody involved on a Sunday morning at their church, they hope to have a conference every year that serves those folks.”
Grace Baptist worked with Getty music to host the conference.
“The Getty team has been great to equip us,” said Foglesong.
Keith and Kristyn Getty are hymn-writers and performers who work to host a four-day conference in their resident town of Nashville, Tennessee.
Foglesong described hymns as, “a little bit of a forgotten art,” and through the conferences leaders learn the art in hopes of continuing it.
The breakout sessions available at the conference included electric guitar, acoustic guitar, electric bass and drums, songcraft and the art of hymn writing, and the pastor and the worship leader partnership.
“It’s been really neat,” said Foglesong. “It’s been great to see all the turnout. We really didn’t know how many people would come out to this and it’s been we got people from San Diego, we got people from Bakersfield.”
Shauntae and Landon Martin came from their church in Orange County to come back with more skills to share with their church.
“It was our director of our music department, we’re both on the worship team at our church, and they offered it to us as like a worship team experience to get to come together and just learn more about how to improve on various things,” said Shauntae.
“I mean, something as simple as like new, different sticks to use for the drums and then how to learn a new song to practice,” said Landon.
The “Sing! West” conference offered a one-day, condensed conference in Santa Clarita compared to the four-day conference in Nashville. The two end the same way, however, with one big concert.
