NATCHEZ — For Kalyn McElroy and her mother Ann Cavin, the family that praises together stays together.

Each Sunday, the mother-daughter duo helps facilitate the worship services at CrossPoint Church by lending their voices to the band, Kalyn taking the lead and Ann backing her up.

Stephanie Cavin, Kalyn’s sister-in-law and Ann’s daughter-in-law, often joins them, lending a third family voice to the group that seeks to lead the family of faith in a genuine expression of worship.

The rest of the band rotates on who is able to attend church that week or who doesn’t have a work obligation, but Kalyn and Ann will be there every week.

The church has named Kalyn “worship leader,” but that’s a long way from where she started.

When Kalyn was 15, the family was attending the church plant in that would eventually become CrossPoint.

“When we were meeting in the house, (church planter) Renee Loy asked us, ‘Can you sing?’” Kalyn said.

“I wasn’t even sure I could — I had only sung in places like in the car. I had definitely not sung in front of people before.”

Neither had Ann.

But the two were willing to learn for the church, and — joining Loy — they embraced the experience.

“It was outside of anything we had ever known,” Ann said.

“We sat down at the kitchen table and went over what we would do. We practiced at the kitchen table.”

They would continue practicing, twice a week, for several years. Only in the last year have they gone to one practice a week.

Loy said she approached the two because she saw an obvious potential for them to benefit the church.

“There is a saying that God doesn’t ask about your ability or inability, but your availability,” Loy said.

“They were willing to do anything that God wanted them to do to help the church get started, and I knew Kalyn could carry a tune and had good pitch, even if she was a little timid, and her mom came along to support her and she just started glowing.”

As the church grew and moved into its location on Highland Boulevard, the duo kept singing. Kalyn said working with her mother — and now her sister-in-law — has helped her develop as a singing minister.

“It is a lot easier to go to them and say, ‘This is my thought,’ before I take it to everyone else,” she said.

Stephanie Cavin said she joined the band with her sister-in-law and mother-in-law after the church’s new pastor encouraged everyone to get more involved.

“I hadn’t done anything like this before, but I joined them because they are family, and I felt more comfortable to say, ‘I want to do this,’ Stephanie said. “They have made me feel like a part of the group instead of an outsider coming in, even though they have been doing this together for a while.”

Loy said the family’s faithfulness has shown how a willingness to seek the Lord can pay off for them and their church.

“It took a lot of dedication for them, and when a person is willing to put that much effort into something, they can grow and God can produce things in us that maybe we didn’t know we could do until we yielded ourselves to God,” she said. “They have been wonderful, faithful and consistent.”