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TechnoratiSince its inception in 1999, Kansas City’s International House of Prayer has been a hot spot of revival in middle America, drawing thousands from around the world to a place of 24/7 worship and prayer. BREATHEcast.com, a partner of The Christian Post, had a chance to speak with IHOP worship leader Misty Edwards, who has witnessed God’s work at IHOP since the beginning. Read on for an inside look at worship, songwriting and vision at the International House of Prayer.
BC: Hello Misty, I’m glad that we could have some time to speak with you and provide our visitors with an introduction to you and your ministry.
Edwards: Thank you, I’m glad also.
BC: Since this is our first interview with you, I was wondering if you can just give a background of your ministry as a worship leader and also on your involvement with the folks at the International House of Prayer.
Edwards: OK, so I’ve been leading worship since I was 19; I actually got my start here at the International House of Prayer, which I was first introduced to as an intern when they just got started. And when I came here, I really just jumped right into the prayer room. At that time, I was looking for a place where I could really meet God face to face.
I had been caught in the mundaneness of church life – I grew up in a church and with music as well; my mother was music teacher. I never thought music was my thing – I always thought it was for my sister, or for someone else – but when the House of Prayer started, we needed singers, and we needed musicians; to do worship 24/7 takes a lot of people. So I found myself at the piano with my two chords and my little weak voice singing for hours a day. And that is really when my heart was hooked on a whole other level on worship. Because I found that in singing and worshipping, I could really connect with God.
There were very few people in the room in the early days, and I would do the night watch. So there were maybe 10 people in the room, and I didn’t have a band, or a lot of knowledge of music, but I would go for two hours at a time, two or three times a day, just singing love songs to the Lord. Because there was nobody in the room, you really do have that audience of One. And I cultivated that – that heart cry just between me and the Lord, the connection between the heart of a lover, between me and God, just singing the songs, taking the Scriptures and singing them to heaven, listening to Him and singing it back and forth. So I started worship leading in that kind of environment, which is still the environment that I thrive in the best.
BC: That sounds like an amazing experience. How much has the audience grown, since then for the International House of Prayer?
Edwards: The audience has really grown for IHOP. We have soooo many people now. Back then there were five interns; now there are hundreds, and we have 3 different internships. And right now we have 300 youths here, so there’s a lot of people. We have a lot of internationals that come and go, and the IHOP staff is growing, going from 50 people to over 500 now.
It’s growing and growing, but I can still see that the Lord is so jealous of our worship leaders. Now we have about 24 different worship leaders, and different worship teams that each have about 12 people on each team. Each team does about six sets a week that are two hours a piece. So everybody is on the platform for about 12 hours a week at least. I lead two different teams, so I’m up there a lot. But I can still see even with all of the growth, and all of the people that are coming, because of the mundaneness of doing it 24 hours a day, there’s still such a sense of humility and the audience of One. So many of our worship leaders still, when they come up there, I can tell that they are really doing it before God. Just the fact that you do it every day for 2 hours every day cultivates this reach and this hunger to do it for God. Sometimes the audience loves you, sometimes they don’t – you can’t really do it for them. So although our congregation is growing a lot, and corporate worship is growing a lot, I still love the audience of One. Continue »
