Our Story
Access Worship is the dream and vision of two worship leaders who have over 40 years of combined worship leading experience.
Mark used his degree in music and his experience singing and leading a gospel quartet to land his first job leading worship over twenty years ago. For 8 years, he was the Music Minister at a large Baptist church in south Florida, leading the band and choir and large vocal team with excellence. Years later, he made the switch to another south Florida church (non-denominational) that was right in the middle of a worship transition. Mark helped the church seamlessly make the switch from traditional to blended worship. He watched the church attendance grow from the hundreds to the thousands over the 8 years he was there. Then, in 2005, he felt God moving once more, calling him to help plant a brand new church in North Carolina. This church was an edgy, contemporary church, and once again Mark stepped up to the task and showed he could lead any style of worship. He has been on both ends of the spectrum and is excited to use his experience to help other worship leaders, no matter what kind of church they are a part of.
Harrison started leading worship when he was only thirteen years old, learning on the fly. He quickly developed not only as a bass and acoustic guitar player, but also as a young worship leader. More opportunities came his way as he started leading regularly in both the student and adult worship services. At eighteen, he left to attend Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he received a scholarship to play bass and sing in the Campus Praise Band, a group that led worship for the entire student body as many as five days a week. He used this amazing experience to grow as a worship leader, and soon he was leading thousands of students in worship, both blended and contemporary. After way too many music theory classes, Harrison graduated and went to work at a church in North Carolina. He has watched as the church has grown by hundreds over the years he has been the Worship Pastor there.
Above all else, Mark and Harrison both believe that worship is not about the person leading it or the band or the lights or anything else; worship is about experiencing God, praising Him, glorifying Him, seeking Him… But it’s also hard to ignore the fact that when we are on stage leading worship, we are representing an amazing God, and we have always desired to be excellent at what we do. That’s why we started Access Worship: to help worship leaders from all kinds of backgrounds do what they do with excellence, to create a worship experience that allows people to find God with no distractions.
0-800 in 5 Years
Five years ago, we helped start a church in North Carolina. At our first core group meeting, there were three families; today, by the grace of God, we are a church of more than eight hundred. Step by step, God worked with us and through us to help us reach more people that we would have thought possible, and He taught us a few things as worship leaders along the way.
One thing we learned early on was that we needed to look like the church we want to become one day. We learned to ask ourselves what a church one step bigger than us would look like. When we had 100 people attending, we wondered what a church of 250 would look like. We did this because it continually to give us a vision of where we should be headed. We wanted people to leave our church thinking, “They might have been a church of 100 but they really had it together. It didn’t feel small church-y.” We avoided many of the small church mistakes by thinking down the road, and that helped people connect. Once we got to 250, we asked ourselves what a church of 500 would look like and continued to improve and steer ourselves in new directions.
Basically, we learned to be prepared. It’s easy for a church to feel small simply because they aren’t well prepared for Sunday morning, and it shows. We stopped practicing right up until the last possible second on Sunday morning, got everyone on the same page by using well-made chord charts, got our vocalists singing great harmonies, and really thought about how our worship service flowed. We wanted guests to walk out the door saying, “That service was really well thought out and put together. It was easy to get plugged in to the music and worship with no distractions.” We would love to share some of our experience with you and help your team get on the same page so that you can look and sound excellent. We with Access Worship can help give you and your team the tools to do the job.
We also learned that relationships are critically important. The week started to get so busy with planning and getting chord charts ready and scheduling people and making sure songs are in the right key and that the service flows that we hard a hard time finding time to build relationships with the people on our team. Sometimes it was easy to miss out on those critically important relationships. Once we made time for those relationships, our worship team really improved because we were on the same page, we were living life together.
That’s another huge help that Access Worship provides to everyday worship leaders: since we can help with the planning, it frees you up to have more time to hang with your team instead of sitting behind a computer. For less than ten dollars a month, you can hire us to be your part time worship assistant.
God has taken us on an awesome journey, and now He has laid it on our hearts to use our experience to help other worship leaders in any way we can. Sign up for Access Worship today and give it a try for free!
Testimonials
Mark and Harrison Gillming are rare worship leaders. They are pros as well as pastors; gifted and godly; Christ centered and creative; used by God and loved by people - all at the same time. And they have a heart to help other worship leaders be the best they can be. I am blessed to know them, to call them friends, and to have served with them.
Dan Southerland
Lead Teaching Pastor, Westside Family Church, Kansas City, Kansas
Author of Transitioning: Leading Your Church Through Change
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