A New “Offering”: ORU Worship Releases First Album in 8 Years
For an album that was eight years in the making, ORU Worship’s newest offering, fittingly titled “My Offering,” came together in a practical whirlwind.
The idea of a new album had been percolating for some time and the team got the official go-ahead in early December 2019. Since the album was to be recorded live during a Quest Leadership weekend in early March, the timeline for writing material was condensed into just a handful of months.
“We had one song, ‘Forever I Will,’ and just needed eight more,” said Kimmie Simon, Director of the ORU Worship Center and Producer of “My Offering.” “[So] we dug deep and prayed a lot and really hit the spring semester running and sprinted to the finish line.”
That sprint included a herculean team effort to write and arrange songs for the ORU student body, testing them out in chapel and then honing them in rehearsals.
“We wrote and polished the remaining songs, writing three during our retreat before the semester started,” Simon said. “And then door after door started opening for the perfect producers and perfect mixers, so we got it all done before quarantine hit and everything shut down. It was miraculous we were able to fit it in.”
But even though writing and recording the album happened in record time, it was still a process that was almost two years in the making, starting with the team retreat in 2018.
“We have a retreat in August,” said Joy Werner, a principal vocalist and co-writer of several of the album’s songs, “We were praying and sharing dreams and visions we had for the team that year, and a lot of us said ‘I feel like the Holy Spirit is saying there’s going to be a new sound coming from this department.’”
Drew Cochran, lead guitarist, confirmed. “We were all thinking about and praying about and talking about together what sort of things we’ve heard God say He has in store for us as a team, and every single person said ‘songwriting’ [and that] there was going to be a new sound that comes out of ORU,” he said. “That retreat was where the album was born.”
In the meantime, team members worked diligently to write songs that expressed the deep desires of Oral Roberts University and its student population. Since worship songs aren’t pop hits but are instead reservoirs of Holy Spirit kineticism, the songwriting process became a unique balancing act of striving and listening.
“A lot of our songs were birthed from an intimate place of worship from the writer,” said Simon. “It started off just having that person lead us in worship with the song, from whatever instrument they’d originally written it on, so we could understand the essence of the song, and then from there we would go into ‘brain mode’ to think about what elements we could incorporate and make it sound better but still stay true to the song, just digging deep and playing it and playing it.”
“One of my songs came during an exercise, kind of like homework, where we were told to bring a song back in one week on a certain topic,” said Werner. After spending a week praying, meditating, and working on the topic of Wonder and Awe, Werner collaborated with her friend Charles Graves to write “Take Us Higher,” with its refrain, “We were made to live in awe of You.”
“The vision was: before we committed to any song on the album, we wanted to do it in chapel to see if it connected with the students,” said Simon. “‘My Offering’ is the lead single of the album, and we finished writing that song about three weeks before the recording night, so we were only able to play it in chapel once or twice total before the actual recording.”
In the midst of testing songs, rewriting and arranging them, the team also had to prep themselves and the material for the actual recording, which meant hour after grueling hour of rehearsal.
“The closer we got to recording, the more rehearsals we had and the longer they were,” said Cantique Esquival, second electric guitar player. “We went somewhere from like 4 pm to 11 pm on a Friday, and then Saturday went from 10 am to 8 pm.”
“Time management is the biggest priority, and you have to make sure you’re delegating enough energy to your responsibilities,” said vocalist Vauntez Purnell. “We’re all full-time students. Some of us have jobs. Our drummer is a married grad student. I was taking a harder class, and so I was definitely bringing my homework to rehearsal so that when I wasn’t singing, I could be working on that. There’s a balance there.
“But when I was needed, I was all in,” he clarified.
“After graduating, my plan being in worship arts, I want to go into ministry as a worship pastor,” said Braden Higgs, who plays keys.” I don’t know what that’ll look like, but this experience will help. It prepares you in a lot of ways, and it shows you can get thrown into the ringer and come out of it.”
The long hours of rehearsal helped the team know the material backward and forward
so they could have their hearts and minds focused on the true reason for the worship
night.
“We had to remember it wasn’t just an album,” said Esquival. “It was campus worship and there were going to be Quest weekenders there, so we didn’t want it to be awkward, we wanted it to be a worship event. We didn’t want to lose what God was doing because we had to stop. I loved it.”
The album was intentionally recorded during what is known as a Quest Leadership Weekend, a regular event on the ORU campus when high school students are welcomed on campus for a weekend to experience life as a student at Oral Roberts University. The weekend event always features a campus worship night, which is almost always a unique and intimate experience for those in attendance.
“I think my favorite moment might be ‘All Hail King Jesus,’” Purnell said of the worship night. “The Spirit really began to move on that song, it really began to kick over, and the anointing really began to rise.
“That’s my favorite moment on the album,” Purnell continued, “but my favorite overall was the last take of ‘With All’ [because] I was like, “Y’all, we just recorded an album!’ It was such a breath of fresh air, all of our hard work had just paid off with that last chord, and so we let loose. It was so fun because we‘d done it. I was able to look and see so much joy and bliss, that this was a historic moment.”
The album was primarily recorded in Christ’s Chapel on March 6, 2020, a week before ORU students left for Spring Break, not knowing that the COVID-19 pandemic would disrupt the rest of their semester.
ORU Worship hadn’t planned on releasing a new album in the midst of a pandemic, but the team members believe the Holy Spirit will move through their music, even in such unprecedented circumstances.
“We had no idea what this season would be,” said Simon. “So many people are in that season [and] I’ve heard a lot of great feedback from people saying this is for this season, this is the cry of ORU right now—that we bring our worship and we bring our offering to God.”
“I’ve seen over and over what God does through worship, and I think this record is no different,” said Cochran. “‘My Offering’ could be a very healing song: ‘Though there’s pain and suffering, my worship is my offering, my reward is You and You alone.’ That’s a good place to be in your heart.”
“I’m hoping these songs will have an impact on people,” said Higgs. “I have songs from other artists that are part of my foundation; I hope these songs can become that for other people.”
"My Offering" is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon.