"We wanted to strip away
all of our things... and just be able to
glorify Him..."
We sat with Christina Smith, a member of Asbury University's Worship Collective,
and discussed the group's unique songwriting, as well as personal influences.
Interview by Cody Cooksey
April 2, 2026
Tell me tell me a bit about the "Living Room (Live Worship Sessions).
I go to Asbury University, which has a similar worship collective to SEU Worship, but on a smaller scale. Every year, there's an auditioned group. Anybody can audition, it's not just worship arts majors or minors. They select a group of students, instrumentalists, and vocalists, and then there are two student producers. We had auditions about a year ago, and then started bonding a bit, and we all knew each other because it's a small university, but as a team we started getting to know each other well. Over the summer, we had sent in voice memos, choruses, bridges, or Scripture that was on her heart, just ideas for songs. This group is really unique because when we came into the semester last August, we wrote over 40 song ideas. We had an incredibly talented and unique group. Basically, three of those songs that were fully done were selected to be in “The Living Room Project”, which was kind of a precursor to the album, because the hope is that our campus knows some songs before the actual album recording, A week before the semester started in the fall, we moved in early, had some training sessions, songwriting sessions, and some guest songwriters came in, including someone who works with Sons of Sunday. These guests came in and talked about songwriting, and we had some free flow worship writing sessions. Three songs were selected, “You Are Good”, “Father Of Light”, and “Move Here Again”. That first song was written by Justin Wilson, Josiah McKinney wrote Move Here Again, and Lauren Wilding wrote Father Of Light. There are six vocalists on the album, so we got to split up each song, so there are two of us on each one. We went to this local church in Versailles, Kentucky, in this basement, and had this cool setup. A lot of our film-adjacent students came in and set up all the lighting, all the recording stuff, and they recorded the Living Room Session, which is supposed to be a “tiny desk” vibe. We had the singers and additional people in the corner of the videos, singing along like a choir. That was like an introduction, and then those songs came out December 1st, right as our Christmas break started, so people could learn them and hear them. We were able to sing them in chapel, once each, before it came out. So that's the Living Room Session specifically. They've never done that before with an album, that was a first time thing.
Do you have past experience in music? If so, how do you apply it to the Worship Collective?
I started doing theater in second grade, I'm a theater girl at heart. I've done musical theater my whole life. That was the root of my joy in performing. Growing up, performing only as a character, really made it different and difficult for me to perform in any other sense, because it's myself performing. When you're a character on stage, you can give that your all, you can be somebody else, but even before I knew to surrender everything to the Lord, I felt like worship was still very much a performance, but it was like “Christina” performing, so that was scary. From my knowledge, I didn't sound amazing. I was able to lead worship in middle school and high school, even in our kids' choir in elementary school, a really young age at our church. I think late high school, I was put in more of a leadership position or facilitating worship, I just singing pretty much every week at my church, back home at Maryland. I still had a lot of stage fright. Specifically in coming to Asbury, the Lord has broken down a lot of the lies that I've learned about myself and through theater. I would think it's an audition process, and I want something, and the world would say “Hey, you're good, but you're not good enough”. That was my story for theater, never getting the part or anything, but the really cool thing about worship is that you can do it, because He's worthy of it. Coming onto the album, I joined and got in as a vocalist, so I was able to write songs as well because we all were a part of that as a collaboration. There were some people who were more of a heavy presence in the songwriting because they had experience, and I had never done that, but I did come up with a few ideas. Most did not make it on the album, but I was able to contribute to one of the bridges. It's mainly been vocals that I've been able to do, and it's a big blessing. People could buy tickets and come to the live recording nights, which we did last week. My family flew out from Maryland to see both nights, which was so cool. We want to give it all to the Lord. I’m finding the balance between being thankful for the gift that He's given me, and recognizing now that it's a gift, but also not wanting to take all the praise from other people and turn that into pride. We did four covers for this album, and one of them was “All Hail King Jesus”. I sang the second chorus, and I didn't know if I could do it. I did it, and then I looked around and saw everybody worshiping, and they weren't looking at me, and that's awesome. I almost wanted to fall in pride. I wanted to open my eyes and see that people are saying I’m good. Everyone was just worshiping, and we're there as a group to facilitate worship. I have a lot of music background, but the Lord has really taught me how to use it.
What does a songwriting session look like for you and the collective?
It may be a little unique compared to what some other bands and collectives do. Most of the songs that ended up on our album were fully done coming in from the summer, we did tweak them and touch them up a lot. Even just as a group, we had rehearsal every week, every Monday night from 9 to 11 for both semesters. A lot of the time, especially last semester, we were still trying to narrow down the songs that we liked and wanted to work on, and also felt like whatever God was shaping it to be. We don’t come in with an idea, we're rather going to see what Scriptures say, and what God gives us for songs, and then see if there's a common theme. A lot of weeks we would go in and they would split us off into small groups, and say that we’re going to work on a song. We would play through instrumentally, we would lyrically sing it, and try to make sure that Scripturally it was sound, and then just have fun with what sounded good. That was really cool to do, as someone who isn't necessarily a songwriter, to be in on that, to still have a say, and be able to listen to other people's voices first and what they came up with, and then be able to ask “What if we do this? What if we do that?” I think everyone on our team is so talented in different ways, so lyrically inclined in how they come up with some crazy things that I never would. We're all very different. So it was cool to sit down for those songwriting sessions and just let it happen. We co-wrote “New Song” with Kurt Vernon, who is a local songwriter here in Lexington, Kentucky. We were doing free flow worship that week before school started in the fall, and our drummer was talking about what it means to worship. We wanted to bring a “new song” to the world, and we wanted this album to be completely new and different. We started singing about a “new song”, and it starts with, “Let it bring glory and honor forever always. We will bring a new song.” It's that, repeated over and over. We do this fun round in the song where I start with, “We praise Him with a joyful shout.” That comes out of Scripture (Jeremiah). It's really cool, it's like we're all individually worshipping. The songwriting sessions look different, it's wasn't really that we sat down with a paper, pen and a Bible. It just looks different for all of us.
What Bible verses does your Worship Collective live by, and how do they apply them to their music?
I'd say as a personal thing, what I've witnessed is us being one body. It very quickly become a family to us. Even as we pray every week, it's a lot of thanksgiving to the Lord for this family. It's not just a team that's been put together, we've all just grown to be so close. There's been struggles within it, there's been disappointments. and general miscommunications. It hasn't been a perfect group, but when it comes down to it, the frustrations do not overweigh the fact that we love each other deeply as family. One of our core Scriptures that actually didn't end up in the song, it was supposed to be a different bridge to New Song, but it came out of Revelation 14, “They sang as it were a new song before the throne.” It just really stuck with us, We had a whole bridge about it, the “sounds of the thunder” and “the roaring waters”. I'd say that this was just the beginning of it. Revelation 14 stands out, even if it's not necessarily the route to all songs, just the idea of a fresh wind in worship is what we were going for. I think that’s the idea with "Living Room Project 2", this album is all about the vertical. We didn't want it to be horizontal worship. This is us looking up to the Lord and trying to worship Him and glorify Him. I think our prayer is that all the songs aren't “I” songs. There's some really personal worship songs that we can sing that uses a lot of individual language. Our relationship with the Lord is very important as individuals. We have a song called “Selfless God”, and it's all about who He is. We wanted to strip away all of our things, all of our talents, everything, and just be able to glorify Him through it. I guess we didn't have a a group verse, but we definitely had a root of like newness, and that Revelation scripture was definitely a core to it. That root is definitely there.
Check out the Asbury Worship Collective on Instagram and Spotify.