CCM: So Iron Bell is more than just a worship band. There’s a whole ministry here, right?
SW: Yeah, Iron Bell is part of a ministry in Louisville called Iron Bell Ministries. We have a renovated horse barn in Louisville, which is cool, and the owner of this space used to be president of Kentucky Fried Chicken for five years and was an executive pastor. He felt the Lord telling him to open up his home for some prayer and worship gatherings. It started out with about twenty people and grew to the point where he bought this horse barn and started renovating it. Now it’s packed with people and we’re doing what we’re doing now.

What we do is open the barn every Wednesday for people to come and be with the Lord. One of us will play a guitar or something, or hang out in the corner, and we let people just pray. We have multiple prayer teams and they just pray over people. That’s literally all we do at those meetings. Then we have worship gatherings monthly where we just pack it out and we worship and pray. We love the idea of no fluff. If the Lord doesn’t show up, we look really stupid. [Laughs]

We’ve been at this for five or six years now, in this space. Iron Bell Music came out of us having these worship nights. We’ve been praying and spending time with the Lord and these songs come out of that. Most of the songs are about God’s character. They’re not just worship songs, but we’re thinking of different attributes of the Lord that we’ve spent time with. These songs started getting birthed and here we are today.

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CCM: What does Iron Bell symbolize?
SW: Well, the barn itself is called The Iron Bell, but the reason behind that is a picture of the old iron bells being these dinner bells in the 1800s. The people working in the field would come to set the table and have lunch. We had this picture that the Lord was an iron bell calling people in to have intimacy with the Lord. It sounds like we’re a death metal band. [Laughs]

CCM: Especially if you lead with the Metallica reference.
SW: Yeah, I’m not helping my own cause. [Laughs]

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