SEU Worship Has a Question About Worship Music: Where Did the Joy Go?

Chelsea Plank didn’t want “The Cost Is a Joy” on this album. The song came out of a writing session with Cam Giddens and Austin Shuffit, who produces for the group, and when the session ended, what Plank had was an acoustic demo. For her, that’s close to useless. “I need a fully produced-out track at the end of a writing session,” she said. “I don’t have much vision up here when it comes to, like, man, this acoustic track — I’m just not sure how it lands.” So when the group sat down early in the year to sort through what might make the record, Plank didn’t put it forward. Other people did. “They were like, let’s just try this out,” she said. “And it has actually been the anthem of my heart now.” It’s also the song with her name on it. “The Cost Is a Joy” is credited to SEU Worship and Chelsea Plank, and it hands Found in the Field — the group’s new live album, out now — both its argument and its title. The argument started with something Shuffit had been noticing in Southeastern University’s students. He came up through the school himself before joining staff, and he prefaced the thought carefully. “This is no shade towards anyone,” he said, at which point Plank cut in: “Gosh, I don’t know what he’s about to say.” “There is a lot of language around the cost of following Jesus,” he continued. “The suffering of it, the hardship of it. And we just thought it was a fresh and important perspective for our students to have — that yes, there is suffering, but there is joy in this.” Plank grew up on that language too, and she doesn’t think it’s wrong. “It is such a powerful message,” she said. “Even when you hear David talking about, I’m not going to give the Lord an offering that costs me nothing. There is a price to following Jesus. It’s your whole life.” The problem is what happens when the price is all anyone sings about. “It can turn really legalistic really quick,” she said. Her alternative puts the events in a different order. The surrender doesn’t come first and the joy doesn’t arrive later as a reward for it — the seeing comes first, and the giving-up follows from it almost as a reflex. “Out of the abundance of our heart of seeing him, of needing to know him — that’s easy. I will give up everything, and the cost is a joy.” She has a line for this: “The kingdom of heaven is made up of righteousness, peace and joy. Joy is a third of the kingdom. Joy is the serious business of heaven, we like to say.” The album title comes from the same place — the parable in Matthew where the kingdom is a treasure buried in a field, and the man who finds it sells everything he owns to buy the land. The transaction only makes sense if you know what’s in the ground. Not, as Plank puts it, “a begrudging act of surrender, but a joyful act of servitude.” There’s a second reading of the phrase she likes as much: being found in the field of God’s presence, and staying there. “Giving up everything to remain there.” Made for One Room None of these songs arrived as an album. They arrived as chapel services. SEU Worship is the worship movement at Southeastern University, an Assemblies of God school in Lakeland, Florida, and the group’s records are assembled backward from what already works in the room. Songs get played on campus for months before anyone decides whether they’re worth recording. “When you hear an album of ours, usually we’ve been playing it all year on our campus,” Plank said. “It’s almost like a yearbook of our year. A snapshot of our year.” “We play them on campus first to see if they even resonate with our community, or if they even work. And then what’s working in chapel and in our community is usually what makes the records every time.” It’s a filter that runs in the opposite direction from most of the industry, where a song is written to travel and then handed to a congregation. Plank’s advice to other churches making music is to stop reaching so far. “It is first and foremost for your community,” she said. “Who did God call you to steward? I can’t steward the nation. I can’t disciple the world.” Even the writing sessions start there: “What’s the language that our community is missing? What concept do you feel like we’re needing to sing about?” Rooms That Used to Be Empty That approach got tested this summer, when SEU Worship — coming off a 10-day outpouring on campus in February that drew national attention — took songs written for one chapel out on its first headlining tour. The group also served as its own setup and teardown crew. “We set up all the stage design, lighting, all the booths that we had,” Plank said, calling it a boots-on-the-ground experiment and, unexpectedly, a bonding one. What Shuffit remembers is the singing. “We were filling a room with young adults and people from all age groups and doing like two hours of worship, only playing our songs,” he said. “Me and Chelsea have both been a part of SEU Worship long enough to know that there were times in the early days where that wasn’t always possible. There wasn’t always a room full of people that could sing our songs.” “That was a very sobering and humbling realization.” The song he keeps coming back to isn’t the one Plank almost left off. It’s “Bless the Blood,” written in an unusually small room — just him, Plank and Caylie Bryant. “We had to fight for it,” he said. Months of it, on and off: leaving it, coming back to it, leaving it, coming back to it. It wasn’t finished until the week of the recording. “The way that it portrays the sacrifice that Christ made for us, and the power that that has, is some of the most moving lyrical content I’ve ever gotten to be a part of.” As for the song she tried to leave behind, Plank has noticed where it lands hardest, and it isn’t with students. It’s with the people running things. “Where I’ve seen it connecting specifically is with other church leaders,” she said. “Because of just remembering the why.” “It’s just a joy to give up our lives for the Gospel.”