Brehm Center

Meet Eric Herron, Master of Arts - Worship, Theology, and the Arts emphasis, '07. While he studied at Fuller, Eric took on various leadership roles including in our All-Seminary Chapel. Read more about the work Eric has been doing since he graduated from Fuller Seminary.

My ministry through Church Resource Ministries is to “help churches worship better.” This means I train teams and individuals to become more effective worship leaders and I teach congregations how to become more active worshipers.

But how did I get here? Ever since I was seventeen, I’ve been trying to answer the question: Who is a worship leader?

I first asked this question in high school as the worship leader for my church youth group. My training consisted of some college kid showing me how to sing Pass It On to the tune of  Born to Be Wild. Needless to say, my “philosophy” of worship leading was less than robust.

Next, I moved to Los Angeles intent on becoming a record producer. Instead, I became the Pastor of Celebration at NewSong Church in San Dimas, California. For the next twelve years, I regularly asked that Who? question. Accordingly, I grew more proficient in my skills toward facilitating responses to God.

After more than a decade at NewSong I began asking a different question: What’s next? About that time, I heard about the Brehm Center program. In 2007, I completed a MA in Worship, Theology, and the Arts.

In the course of my study at Fuller, I discovered that “worship leader” is only a  recent term. The lack of language notwithstanding, each historical era has seen varying leader roles for worship, each with an unique form-emphasis and corresponding leader role.

The very first Christian worship leaders were the People of God, bringing varied forms in a shared leadership context. The medieval era wrought an emphasis on Communion with the Priest of the Eucharist as the key presider. At the time of the Reformation, the Bible was central and so was the Preacher of the Word when it came to worship. In our own era, we have seen a fourth manifestation of worship leader in the Performer of Music.

All cultural indicators seem to point to Producers of Revelatory Art (a plurality of leaders who use a variety of mediums to promote both worship and mission) as the future role for leaders of Christian worship. This thesis has led me to start an Arts Collective in Pasadena as an outlet for Revelatory artists and an instigator of public, spiritual dialogue.

You can read more about what I do at worshipartist.net. If you are an artist of any sort, I’d love to connect with you!

My dreams of producing records were not completely squashed. I’ve produced six full length CD’s some of which can be sampled at Unkept Records.

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