What Would You Say It Is You Do Here?

  Several weeks back in staff meeting, Dale asked us to write a summary of what it is we do here.  The idea is that if we get run over by a bus, someone reading the list should be able to more or less step in and fill our shoes until a permanent solution can be found.

What would you say it is...you do here?

        This can be somewhat challenging for a job like mine because the task list is fairly fluid from day to day and week to week.  I mean, there’s the obvious things like picking out music and directing choirs (actual music directing kinds of things), but that actually represents a pretty small slice of my task list pie.

The Music Ministry Pie

Over the last 17 or so years, I’ve discovered that “Church Music Director” actually includes a strikingly diverse set of non-musical responsibilities including but not limited to: logistics, writing, counseling, care and feeding, building maintenance, light design, set design, cooking, construction, painting, instrument repair, typesetting, publishing, technical support, taxi service, database design, web design, stage hand, event planning, packing and moving, dispute resolution, praying, preaching, and more.  And in the last year I added remote audio engineering and video production to the list as well as meteorology and sociology as we created online worship and tried to guess both the weather and the willingness of people to participate in outside activities on a given day.

Actual picture of me doing "music ministry."

It’s actually interesting to me how my role as a director of music has changed across the years based on the technology available.  Things are changing so fast.  When I started doing ministry, a full color print of anything required an act of congress, and it cost enough to fully fund the budgets of some small countries.  Unless you ordered 10,000 of them, in which case the cost per print was quite reasonable.  It’s just that you then had to use the 9,950 you had left over as scratch paper for the next 30 years.  I’m not kidding…I actually still have some paper left over from one such print job around here somewhere.  It was Café del Sol at Embry Hills.  I haven’t been there for almost 15 years.

On my first Youth Choir Tour, I took a road atlas to help navigate.  A few years later I was SUPER high tech because I used Mapquest (do you remember mapquest?) to print an overview and details of our route.  Today I just say, “Hey Google, navigate to Hampton Inn in Sedona, Arizona,” and I get turn-by-turn directions as well as a clever ETA that tells me I’m definitely going to be late.

If you had told me in 2005 that in 15 or so years we’d use our phones to record videos so we could all make music together from home because it wouldn’t be safe to be together, I’d have asked you what episode of Star Trek featured a choir (and how did I miss it).  Sure, some of the basic principles of how we do things are the same, but man alive the day to day tasks have evolved to the point you wouldn’t even recognize the job.

But I’ve also found the most important parts of the job really haven’t changed much at all.  One of my tasks is to care about people—in music ministry and out, inside the church and out.  It means I need to listen to them and try to help them in any way I can.  Honestly a lot of the time there’s not a lot I can do for them, but sometimes just sitting and listening is enough (and if it isn’t, I can set out to find someone who can help!).

Maybe the most important part of my job is building community.  In fact, that’s what my job really is.  You might have thought it was music, but music is really a tool of my community building trade.  I bring people together around a common goal. I encourage them to take on challenges and overcome them together.  I connect them with each other so that when life gets dicey they have each other.  And I do that for people of all ages, because you’re never too young or too old to need a group of people who care about you.

It’s hard to put that on a daily task list.  Maybe that’s why weeks after he asked us for these lists I still haven’t given him one.  Dale, if you’re reading this, I’m really trying to do what you asked!  I’m just not sure what to put on it because things I can put on the list are just physical manifestations of a much deeper purpose that by themselves seem kindof ridiculous.

Well, I’d better wrap this up.  The scale drawing of the new folder slots isn’t going to draw itself, and somehow I need to figure out how we’re going to hang lights in the sanctuary for the Christmas Concert, which is on December 11 and 12.  I’ll wait while you mark your calendar.