Jeremiah Grube – Taking the Worship Team Mechanics to a New Level
What’s in this Episode?
In this episode, we sit down with Jeremiah Grube, CEO of OnSong, to explore how the OnSong app is transforming the way worship leaders and pastors manage their worship ministries. By streamlining the organization of worship music, OnSong frees up valuable time for worship leaders and pastors to focus on leading worship and connecting with their teams. Say goodbye to the old ways of planning Sunday sets—OnSong allows you to store, sort, and customize your music effortlessly. Lead pastors appreciate how this tool helps worship pastors create a seamless flow that sets the stage for the preaching of the Word.
Read the Transcript:
Dick Hardy:
Hey friend, it’s great to be with you today on this episode of The Church tips podcast. And I am so excited to have my relatively new friend, Jeremiah Grube from the great state of Pennsylvania. Jeremiah say hi to the folks today.
Jeremiah Grube:
Hey guys, how are y’all doing? Thanks for having us on the podcast here with with Dick.
Dick Hardy:
Well, we’re excited we got the Pennsylvania and Missouri connection going here. And of course, this is going all around the world, so you’re going to have a chance to speak into the lives of a lot of great pastors and leaders. And so it is a privilege of ours to have you and looking forward to the content today. Today we’re we’re going to jump into what Jeremiah and his team are doing with a ministry called OnSong, O N, S, O N, G, by the way, nerdy question is the S capitalized?
Jeremiah Grube:
Yes, it is capitalized.
Dick Hardy:
Okay, see, I want to know I’m creative enough I know that’s going to happen there so, but I thought I really wanted to have Jeremiah come on and just talk to us. You know, what happens… what happens on Sunday morning with the worship in preparation for the Word is so critical, yeah. And then what happens during the week… in order to make that happen on Sunday, if you’ve been around church at all, you know, it’s during the week that prepares us for Sunday, that worship, that prepares us for the Word. So, Jeremiah, I’m just going to drop a quarter in you and have you talk to us about the genesis of OnSong, how it came together, what exactly it is, and just give us a tutorial on what we should know about your ministry.
Jeremiah Grube:
Sure. Well, again, thanks for having us, and was just an honor to be with you guys and so OnSong was created by my friend Jason, and he’s the founder and lead developer of it, and he was basically a long story short, he was basically at a worship worship team meeting, and this was before the iPad came out. And he was basically the the worship leader said, Hey, all these paper they had everywhere, and they all these binders and all these alphabetical order things, and, and she basically was just like, hey, that that’d be great if there was an app or something like this, that we didn’t have to have all this paper. And it right, that at that moment, Jason’s wheel started to move. And, and then she and then Jason was like, You know what? I wonder if I can make an app for that. And then the worship leader says, No, I don’t think you could do that. And that right, there was just enough poke in the bear, Jason. That’s all he needed. And he literally went home that night, started coding OnSong, and then literally had the code, some of the code, already created, and had to wait for the iPad, the first ever iPad, to be delivered to his house before we could actually, you know, put it together and to and to make see if this would be a resource for worship leaders. And so that was a 2010, 11. And in 2012 it was, it was, it was up when the iPad came out. We were one of the first 500 apps on the App Store in 2012… when the iPad came out. And thankfully, we can say we’re still around 11, 12, years later. And so I don’t know how many of the 500 are still around, but OnSong is definitely is one of them. So it’s been a huge blessing. So basically, you take all your paper charts you can import from Song Select, Praise Charts, PCO Music Stand, your own creative charts you have on Dropbox, Google Drive. You import them into OnSong, and you view them on your iPad or your iPhone, or now it’s on the desktop, even with Mac. So we are iOS only. We are going to start working on an Android version of OnSong here in the near future, so that everybody with devices can use it, can use OnSong, but for the most part, we’re on iOS. Basically, iPad is the main, the main thrust, of what people view it on. You can transpose on the fly. You can do so many things with with your charts. But really for worship leaders, we wanted to have an app that basically you spend less time working on the technical side of things, as far as redoing charts and and redoing this, redoing that, and spending more time in preparation for the stuff that really, in my opinion, matters, as far as preparation, as far as being with your team, connecting, praying, asking God to come, fill your fill His presence with with the services and things that that are less technical and so most, like I said to you earlier, as like, we find that 80% of people use 20% of the app, and 20% of people use 80% of the app. Well, I think a majority of worship leaders are the 80% that use 20% of the app, and we’re great with that. So we’re always trying to evolve the app, and I have it just here on my iPad right now. It’s like, like, “Stand in Your Love”, there’s a, there’s a that’s basically what OnSong looks like. I have it in low light mode right there. And so you just kind of scroll down through to your songs. You can make you can make notes on a notepad there. You know that,”What a Beautiful Name” that’s been imported from a CCLI or Praise Chart right there. And so you make a set list on the app, and then you can share them. You can be in them. You can email them. You can get them to get them to anybody that you need to in your band. And for the most part, we don’t have really hard numbers on this, but we’re 50% of our users is house of worship, and 50% of our users are clubs, pubs, cruise ships, music therapists, ukulele groups all over Hawaii, I mean, crazy places that people have used OnSong. So, but really, the heart behind the heart behind OnSong is to be a resource, a tool for the local church. And that’s why, you know, we have group subscriptions for churches, single subscriptions through the App Store and things like that. So it was birthed out of, out of wanting to be a blessing to worship leaders so that we wouldn’t have to take paper everywhere. When I started, actually with, well, I’ve been a pastor for seven or 20 years. I was a pastor before I started working at OnSong, and over half that time was a worship leader, and I traveled with a guy by the name of Todd White, and it was called Power and Love Ministries and and before the app came out, I would literally have my suitcase full of seven or eight packets of music to go play with the house band that I was going to play with. I would maybe travel with my drummer and acoustic or my guitar player, but I’d be going going to places I’ve never been before, pulling up shop and then having a band in front of me. And you know, I would have 45 pounds and 25 pounds of it was paper. So when I came back, I had a, you know, half my suitcase wasn’t there, so I ended up just using the app right out of the gate. And it was a huge blessing, because they were all on the same page with me. I gave them the set list ahead of time, all the keys, all the notes, everything I needed, even my little annotations I had on there, they all used it. And so, like it was a one stop shop for me when I went to these cities all all throughout the United States. And that’s how I got hooked on OnSong myself. I was a power user of it early on when I was a pastor at Christ Community Church here in in Camp Hill PA, and then on the road with it during worship conferences. And so I was using it, you know, probably within the first six months, and it revolutionized how I led worship. I spend way less time worrying about the technical side, and more, you know, with the Lord, with my team, pastoring. And it just, it just maximized my time so much better.
Dick Hardy:
Yeah, wow, that is so good. So what would you guess a a worship pastor or no, let’s go to the lead pastor first. Yeah, uh, we got a bunch of lead pastors who are watching this podcast right now. So what would you say to the lead pastor who maybe isn’t technically savvy on worship, he just knows, or she knows they want good worship to lead into their message. Why would you say? What would you say to them to say why they would want to get this for their volunteer worship leader, sure, or their paid worship pastor? Why should they do this?
Jeremiah Grube:
Yeah, there’s multiple reasons. I think. I think one of the reasons is and other apps might have had this feature as well, but we really hone in on wanting to understand the genre of what some of these songs are. So we’ll take a we’ll take a key word like love or repentance or forgiveness or something like that, and you could within the app one of the features is you can, you can separate out songs under those type of categories and those kind of themes and maybe even messages and so, so, like, even for me, like, if we were, you know, speaking on the Father’s love, and then the senior pastor wanted a song about the Father’s love to close, close the message with, I could go to my rolodex real quick and say, Hey, there’s three songs right here. Two of them I know, one, I don’t, and I can, I can pull that up if I’m a volunteer on the fly, and I didn’t really have a service planning meeting throughout the week. On the flip side, if I was a paid guy in there, then I could recommend that on the service planning sheet throughout the week and say, hey, you know what “Goodness of God” is something that I think would really, really tie together this your message, tie together your notes at the end of worship, and I would just submit that to the senior pastor at the service planning meeting, and he could say, Hey, that’s a great idea, or let’s find another song. But it would be at my fingertips that I could at least do that instead of going like this, or going back to my desk, or going to the binders and and, you know, things like that. So one reason is that the you have genres and you have thematic words that are being created and generated and searched on the search engine throughout OnSong that makes something on the fly easier. And we all been… us worship guys, we’ve all been caught out to dry with the guest speaker that we’ve never seen before, asking us to do a song at the end of the service. And most times we probably might not even know the song. But if there’s a way that, there’s a way that they give the title, and it jogs your memory of something that you might be able to have in your Rolodex of I have probably 700 songs over the 20 years of leading worship. So not that I remember all 700 of them now, but I’ve done at least 600 of them in 20 years, which is insane amount of content. So, you have all your content in the front row on your iPad at a moment’s notice, if the senior pastor turns to you,
Dick Hardy:
Well, that is that’s a huge, a huge asset to have that and not be caught. Yes, and plenty of worship leaders know that feeling of, oh my goodness, what am I going to do? And plenty of lead pastors know that feeling I’m asking for something, and I can’t get it. And everybody’s watching us. So, this is a huge, a huge thing for people to to be able to tap into. What about your…
Jeremiah Grube:
Let me say one thing about it. The other thing about it is is outside of on the fly, on the the actual Sunday morning or Sunday evening service, lot of senior pastors, in my opinion, over the years, they actually just want you to give them ideas. And as a worship leader, if you give them ideas on how to land the plane. That’s actually what they’re looking for, because they have focused so much time on their on their sermon and the content of the sermon, I found most, sir, most senior pastors just, just need a little bit of help on the back end, trying to, trying to come up with a a creative but meaningful and anointed way to land the plane.
Dick Hardy:
Yeah, good. That is so good. What about the volunteers on teams? So, whether a little bit larger, you got the paid guy at the top or everybody’s volunteer, but you’ve got this huge cadre of people who give of themselves. How does OnSong help them?
Jeremiah Grube:
Well, the best thing to do, in my opinion, would be to get a the have the church person get a group subscription through the through an Apple ID account, and then every person that has an iPad could have OnSong and that they would be able to again, the volunteer would be able to use it for free, because they would still be under the account of the of the church account created in the Apple ID or off of off the website, and so they’re able to take take real time changes. They’ll be able to see the songs ahead of time. They’ll be able to know what key the worship leader is doing them in ahead of time. To me, the volunteers and keys are always a tricky thing. Volunteers don’t necessarily always understand it takes actual time to pick the right key that the worship leader is doing the song in which then sets for the guitar guy, it might knock him out of bounds on a different fret that’s too high, too low, they run out of space. So there’s multiple variables that are in worship leading when you pick songs and what keys picking songs is one thing, picking a key is another. They’re two different things. So if you have any of that information or those charts ahead of time, that just helps you when you’re practicing, say, Wednesday night, before the kids go to bed, you give it an hour or 30 minutes at your own whatever instrument you’re playing. You can give it a run through, knowing the key, knowing the recording, knowing what they’re looking for, and the leader can actually send out the notes on there and say, Hey, bass player, I want you to make sure you make sure you play C over E, over this part here, they can give you all that information ahead of time, in real time, in any way, even if they don’t even have an iPad, they can still email it to the person with the information on the PDF. They get the PDFs with all the stuff on it. So, there’s no way that, even if they don’t have an iPad or an iPhone, they’re on the Android side of things, they can still receive an email and get all the information from the head guy or gal.
Dick Hardy:
Yeah, that is so good. Okay, so how would they access this? Give us some mechanics here. You know, where do they go? How do they do it? What kind of cost is involved, that kind of stuff.
Jeremiah Grube:
Yeah. So, there’s couple ways to do it. You can go just flat, if you’re your own musician, and you play out and you have multiple bands that you’re part of, or your multiple worship bands that you’re part of at different churches, go to the App Store and just look under OnSong on the app store, and you would purchase it under your Apple ID account we have. It’s $3 or$2.99 I’m sorry, $3.99 a month for the essentials, which isn’t all the features, but for the most part, is it gets people going at the cheapest cost that we could do it at. So, it’s $4 a month there. Or you can get premium, which is $5.99 it’s basically $6 a month there. You can purchase it annually to get a couple dollars savings off of, off of purchasing it, purchasing it annually. But also, let me go through I’m just gonna change my screen here the pricing. If you want to go to OnSongapp.com and sign up for for group subscriptions, it’s $240 for up tofive users and two devices. Then $360 a year for up to 10 users, which ends up being, you know, even less than that, about$4 a user, or $3 a user. So OnSongapp.com would be for the group subscriptions. And then, if it’s just you and your Apple ID and the way that you’re playing in multiple bands, different things like that, just go to the App Store. The app store probably be the best way to do it.
Dick Hardy:
Jeremiah, this has been just outstanding content, really, in a different vein than a lot of our Church Tips podcast interviews. I am so grateful that you’ve taken time to talk with us. If someone’s watching this and they haven’t caught,… they really haven’t caught it, or maybe it’s a blur. What is one thing you say if you don’t remember anything else, remember this that you’d want to say to pastors and leaders?
Jeremiah Grube:
Sure. I mean, OnSong, again, it’s just a resource tool that takes your paper charts and it puts them into an app. And everybody nowadays is pretty much flowing with iPad or iPhone. Even the bigger iPhones now are being used the Mac, iPad, I iPhone, Pro Max are being used for OnSong. And I would say, hey, you know you don’t want to do long hand. You don’t want to keep going from the key of G to the key of A and writing it out for your band mates every time check out OnSong. Check out how quickly, with a snap of your finger, you can transpose from G to A. You can import all your content from Praise Charts, from Music Stand, from CCLI, all your content that churches have out there. You can import it through OnSong. So it’s really a one stop shop for your band, for your team, and be able to just be on the same page at a at a higher rate. And, you know, in a day and age that we’re all using devices, we just encourage people to to use OnSong, to get rid of paper. I mean, even we were at a conference a couple months ago it was a Baptist conference down in Nashville at the big Bridgestone, Bridgestone Arena, where the Predators play. And this was a new people group for us, the Baptist denomination, and a lot of them still use paper. We were floored that people would still be using paper today, but we were like, Hey, we need to keep reaching these, these people groups, as far as knowing that they they don’t have to use paper anymore, and once we expose them to OnSong and Praise Charts together, that you could import them together with those two companies, that we blew their mind. So that was, it was beautiful, because they were like, man, we spent all this time doing long hand! They’re showing me their binders that are like, 30 years old with, you know. And I’m like, this is incredible. This is 2024 people, you know, like, this, right? Okay, no, no judgment, but by all means, like, spend a cup of coffee a month and get yourself some help!
Dick Hardy:
Yeah! Oh, man, oh, man, that is so good. Jeremiah, I cannot thank you enough. I really, I can’t thank you enough, pastors, worship leaders, lead, pastors, uh, team leads. Feel free to, I mean, share this with friends. And I gotta tell you, one of the things I appreciated so much early on in meeting you, Jeremiah, yeah, was your true heart for ministry. You you really want to help what happens on Sunday morning. You know, I use the term doesn’t sound very spiritual, that’s game day, and that’s where people are in the the audience, the worship, is drawing them into the presence of the Lord. The Word is spoken through the pastor, and by the end of the service, we pray lives are changed. So what we’ve just talked about the last 10-15, minutes will help you do that even better. So thank you again.
Jeremiah Grube:
I appreciate it, and I always I appreciate that comment. I view it as every Sunday is somebody’s first Sunday there. And then, if I can make that easier for them, and they can enter into the presence of God sooner and quicker, I’m game.
Dick Hardy:
There you go. Thanks again. Very much, Jeremiah, and thank you to you as the viewer or the listener to tuning to the Church Tips podcast. We’ll look forward to seeing you in the next one. Make it a great one today and be blessed.
Jonathan Hardy:
Hey, Jonathan, here real quick before you go, everything in your ministry rises and falls on your leadership. So investing in your leadership is essential to staying healthy and growing the ministry, and that’s why I want to invite you to join us inside the Leaders.Church membership. This online streaming service for pastors, gives you access to more than 300 videos, plus training material to level up your leadership and improve your ministry skills. If you’d like to do that, I want to invite you to go to Leaders.church/boost. Again, that’s Leaders.Church/boost. Well, thanks again for joining us on the Church Tips podcast. We’ll look forward to seeing you next time.
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