Back in February while attending the Twin Oaks Mission
Conference I met Andres Garza. Andres is
the head of City to City for all of Latin America. City to City is a missions organization which
focuses on church planting in major cities.
Andres is also the pastor of San Pedro Iglesia in Monterrey,
Mexico. As we talked and shared about
the ministries we’re involved with he came up with the idea to have me come and
help lead a seminar for church musicians to explore the ideas of Gospel
Identity, Excellence, and Networking for musicians both inside and outside of
the church.
While the seminars came together very quickly, I can trace
the roots of these topics back for the last 10 years or so. As I progressed in both church music and
music outside of the church I found myself fumbling for words and ways to
describe what it is I do and how to articulate my feelings and thoughts about
how I wanted to approach to these two very different worlds.
The seminar had four sessions and took place on Friday and Saturday, May 13th-14th. Friday was an introductory session and I
shared about my background as a musician and the ministry work I’ve done in St.
Louis, the work Missy and I will be joining in Perth, Australia, and I outlined
my three topics for Saturday.
Saturday saw us explore gospel identity during the first
session. We discussed questions such as, "As a musician how does the gospel impact our approach to music inside
and outside of the church?"
Session two explored excellence and how that must be pursued
with the understanding that our identity is rooted in the gospel of Jesus. We also
discussed how the standards and expectations of excellence vary when we’re
playing music outside of our church community.
In the final session we looked at the networking and what it
means to connect and cultivate as musicians.
The response to the seminars was overwhelmingly positive and
I’m thankful for that because I was extremely nervous beforehand. I’m quite
comfortable being on stage singing and performing but speaking and sharing
ideas like this was was a completely new experience for me. The other night as I was sharing with some
musician friends about the sessions and trying to explain the experience I
told them it was similar to debuting a bunch of new songs. When we play new songs we usually say maybe
next time we’ll try this song here and this song as an opener. Maybe we change this lyric up and focus on
bringing the dynamic down. And the same
can be said about these seminars. The
material played well but there are certainly things I’ll rearrange and state
differently should I have the opportunity to do a seminar like this again.
Below I’ve included some photos to show the timeline of my adventure.
