Today in the Mission Yearbook - The risky business of singing

Churches face worship challenge

March 27, 2021

David Beale/Unsplash

Since the beginning of time, people have turned to song to express joy’s heights and grief’s lows. In Exodus 15, Moses’ sister, Miriam, sang after crossing the Red Sea. Her song of praise is considered to be one of the oldest pieces of biblical literature. Later, David composed songs of praise and lament that would fill the Psalms — a treasured hymnbook for thousands of years used by Jews and Christians alike. Centuries later, singing both in the home and in public worship became one of the defining marks of Reformation worship. According to the Rev. Dr. David Gambrell, associate for worship in the Office of Theology and Worship in Louisville, Reformers especially emphasized singing the Psalms because it was a way to sing God’s Word together. “If you think about a time before we had projection screens or copy machines, singing was a way for the whole people of God to participate,” he said.

Lifting voices together in song is an essential part of who God’s children are. And yet, as more is learned by the medical community as to how COVID-19 spreads, one thing has become increasingly clear: Communal singing poses potential health risks.

Recently, a number of singing groups, including the National Association of Teachers of Singing and the American Choral Directors Association, hosted an online panel, which included medical experts and epidemiologists, to discuss the science of singing. They came to the conclusion that there is no safe way to rehearse or sing together until the COVID-19 vaccine is more widely available.

Gambrell was hard pressed to think of another era in Church history that communal singing has been such a risk. “Singing, of course, is all about the breath, and we are dealing with a respiratory illness. The breath is how it attacks and spreads. So, what do we do now?” Gambrell asked.

Matthew Grauberger, the director of music ministry at South Highland Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was at the American Choral Directors Conference in Mobile as the coronavirus was just starting to make headlines in March 2020. It would be the last time he sang collectively with a group of people. With health concerns growing, he made the decision not to have the church choir sing the Sunday he returned from the conference. He soon canceled choir activities indefinitely.

“For someone who music and singing are two of the things that wake me up in the morning, it has been devastating,” said Grauberger. “We want to be able to do these things with the people that we love and not have to mourn the death of someone because we were not listening and acting accordingly.”

South Highland Presbyterian had just installed cameras to begin recording worship services around the time the pandemic began. The cameras weren’t functional yet, but with the onset of COVID-19 they quickly became so as the pastor and staff tried to figure out how to create an intimate but familiar worship experience in an online format. Grauberger was tasked with figuring out what could be done musically without a choir rehearsing in the same room.

He put together a rotating quartet of voices to sing the anthem and lead in hymn singing for online worship — all done at a safe distance.

“We made a pact between ourselves that we were going to take this very seriously, that we would be careful so that we could continue providing this ministry for the congregation,” said Grauberger. He also found that ringing handbells, in small numbers, was another way to creatively, with distance and safety, bring a musical element to worship.

Grauberger has been amazed at the willingness and the creativity of those who have come forward to help lead worship during this time. “There is so much that we have lost, that we are grieving; but also in the process, we have gained this new awareness that we are way more connected than we realized, not just technologically, but spiritually,” he said.

 Erin Dunigan, PC(USA)-ordained Evangelist living in Baja California, Mexico, where she founded Not Church, a gathering of atheists, agnostics and believers who wish to deepen their spiritual journey

Let us join in prayer for: 

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Magdy Girgis, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Tammy Gish, Presbyterian Foundation

Let us pray:

Lord of all peoples, you are continually gathering your people together in surprising and creative ways. We celebrate your call to find our unity through faith in your transformative power. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Foundation Board experiences life along the El Paso-Mexico border

One member is touched by the wind

May 29, 2020

Members of the Board of Trustees and staff of the Presbyterian Foundation spent a day in Juarez, Mexico, learning about the plight of immigrants hoping to come to America. They toured this crowded church facility. The Foundation’s board meeting was held in El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Juarez. (Photo by Erin Dunigan)

On a cold and windy day in February, members of the Presbyterian Foundation Board of Trustees crossed from El Paso, Texas, into Juarez, Mexico, to learn about the situation at the border.

The Rev. Dr. John M. Nelsen, co-pastor of University Presbyterian Church in El Paso and a member of the Foundation’s Board, encouraged the Board to host a meeting in El Paso in order to provide a cross-border opportunity.

“It is one thing to read about the border situation,” Nelsen said. “It is another thing to experience it.”

University Presbyterian Church has been ministering along the border for decades. “I am so pleased that this group of folks came from the Foundation a day early in order to hear about what is going on directly from the Mexican government, and from those who are working with the migrants,” Nelsen said.

The day began with an introduction by Sami DiPasqule, head of Abara, an organization that facilitates encounters on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez as well as resources migrant shelters on both sides of the border.

“In 2016, we were actually at a 40-year low of border apprehensions, from 1.5 million in 2000 to less than 20 percent of that in 2016,” DiPasqule explained to the group.

Those numbers were primarily single male Mexican nationals who were trying to cross the border in order to find employment. “In many ways, the whole apparatus was around this demographic, and these single men were easier to detain and deport,” he said.

But in the past five years, that demographic has changed. “Now, the majority coming are families from Central America seeking asylum,” DiPasqule said.

“This is not an economic or national security threat as much as it is a humanitarian crisis,” DiPasqule told the group as it began to make its way to one of El Paso’s five bridge border crossings.

Once across to the Mexican side of what has historically been a single metropolitan area, the group heard a presentation from Mexican officials working with Consejo Estatal de Poblacion (COESPO). COESPO is tasked with general population services and development, communications and education of the public, family planning and sexual health, and migrant services.

The remainder of the day was spent visiting two migrant shelters, Pasos de Fe (a part of the Presbyterian Border Ministry) and Pan de Vida, a converted community center that now houses more than 100 people.

The Rev. Wonjae Choi, pastor of Gwynedd Square Presbyterian Church in Pennsylvania, serves on the Foundation’s Board and went with the group to Juarez. “I was shocked as we began our day that these Mexican government officials spoke to us with such passion for their work in helping the migrants, as if they were doing ministry,” Choi said. For Choi, the joy that she saw in these government officials — whose job could be seen as more administrative than generative — was eye-opening.

“From there, we went to visit with a pastor who converted his church into a shelter because he heard a prophetic word to help these migrant people,” Choi said. “He was just a regular pastor — I saw myself in him.”

But for Choi, what was perhaps most impactful from the day was the wind.

“I was struck by the wind and I remember thinking, it wasn’t a violent wind, but it was blowing, and you don’t know where it is coming from or going to,” Choi said. “I stood there along the border, with the wind blowing at me, knowing that I have a legion of people who hold me up in the wind,” she said. Her family, her church family, her privileged life — all of these things hold her up against the wind.

“But it is the same wind that blows on this side of the border as on that side — and I began to be weepy about the folks on the other side, the migrants, the displaced,” she said. “But then I was also heartened by the thought that the church is helping them, and the passionate government employees, that even in the midst there are those who are there to gird up against the wind so that it doesn’t become so bitter cold.”

Erin Dunigan, an ordained evangelist and teaching elder in the PC(USA) and graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, serves as a photographer, writer and communications consultant and lives near the border in Baja California, Mexico

Let us join in prayer for: 

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Elle Drumheller, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation
Kate Duffert, Office of the General Assembly

Let us pray:

Dear Lord, thank you for the blessings brought to the many who have been called to serve your mission. We pray that you would bless them as they serve others in Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Out of three, one

West Philadelphia Presbyterian Partnership finds transformational leadership is the key

March 5, 2020

The West Philadelphia Presbyterian Partnership is a blend of three former congregations in the Presbytery of Philadelphia. Worship takes place in a community center. (Photo by Erin Dunigan)

Three churches in the Presbytery of Philadelphia were at a crossroads — each considering their future for different reasons.

Some might see a crisis, but the Rev. Ruth Faith Santana-Grace, the presbytery’s executive presbyter, and the presbytery’s stated clerk, the Rev. Kevin Porter, saw an opportunity to help all three find new life.

“This has been such a crazy non-linear journey,” Santana-Grace said. “Every time we took a step forward, it was clear that God was blessing it.”

Several ago, Santana-Grace and Porter began meeting with the session of First African Presbyterian Church to determine how this community of saints, faithful but struggling with attendance and finances, might enter into a new season. First African is the first black Presbyterian congregation in the United States.

At the same time, an administrative commission had been appointed to consider the future of Calvin Presbyterian Church.

And not long after that, Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church experienced a fire that took its physical church building and left the remaining dozen or so members of the congregation wondering what might be next.

By 2017, it became apparent to those involved with the three congregations that there might be something new emerging. The presbytery earmarked funds to move this potential new ministry forward.

A new administrative commission formed in early 2018 to come alongside this “new thing” that seemed to be unfolding. After about 18 months of monthly gatherings with the sessions, they voted to hold a joint service the first Sunday of Advent in 2018, followed by a town hall meeting to present plans for moving forward as one worshiping community in early January 2019.

The West Philadelphia Presbyterian Partnership was officially given form.

“We got to the point in the journey where we understood we needed a leader, someone with special gifts,” Santana-Grace said. “Someone who was system savvy, a gifted proclaimer of the Word, someone who exhibited grace, honored history, but also dreamt about new ways of being and could bring divergent styles together.”

That leader was unanimously chosen.

The Rev. Eustacia Moffett Marshall calls the ministry of the West Philadelphia Presbyterian Partnership “divine transformation that is happening at the core of our souls.” (Photo by Erin Dunigan)

On July 21, the new designated pastor, the Rev. Eustacia Moffett Marshall, preached her first sermon to the combined worship gathering.

Marshall grew up in Oakland, California, a city geographically far from Philadelphia but in many ways quite similar. She attended church in West Oakland, where her mother, the Rev. Dr. Diane Moffett, now president and chief executive of the Presbyterian Mission Agency, served as the pastor.

Marshall had been serving Faith Point Fellowship, a new worshiping community in Greensboro, N.C., in a dual role. She was serving as leader of the NWC and also as transitional pastor for the aging congregation that was hosting the NWC. She thus found herself pastoring a congregation that largely consisted of members in their 20s while at the same time pastoring a traditional congregation that was much older.

She had also served as a full-time minister of music, received her real estate license, and was in a doctoral program studying leadership. Additionally, she has chaired the Board of Trustees for the Presbyterian Foundation since 2018.

“I had all these things I was doing, these passions I was following that might seem randomly placed,” she said. “But when I learned about this initiative and what was being sought, I realized that all these unique experiences were exactly what was needed.”

In many ways, this new partnership, as well as Marshall herself, are beginning a new phase of life together.

“This project is about entering into a new season of life for these three congregations that have come together to become one and in so doing to connect to the community at large,” she said. “It is exciting work.”

The partnership is currently meeting for worship in a rented community center. The hope is to build something of their own one day.

“I see us not only as hosts for the community, to be a space where the community can gather, but also guests in a community that already has a sense of what it needs,” she said. “It is exciting work, divine work — it is divine transformation that is happening at the core of our souls.”

Erin Dunigan, Writing for the Presbyterian Foundation

Let us join in prayer for: 

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Mienda Uriarte, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Kym Vaughn, Presbyterian Foundation

Let us pray:

Lord, we give you thanks for ideas shared, ministries birthed and communities developed by which we may participate in your kingdom’s work and experience bearing fruit and growing in our knowledge of you. Amen.