by Tommy Shapard, Minister of Music and Worship
During the writing of this article, I am in the middle of our week-long music camp, singing and playing instruments with over twenty 7-12-year-olds. Debbie Hagan, Laraine Humbert, Sarah Morrell, Drew Shapard, Echo Saunders, Maddie Weise, and a few University of North Florida students are making the camp a musical success for its ninth year. For all of them and this week’s music-making and community-building, I am grateful.
Throughout the year, many people help us make music at HAB. This begins each Sunday morning with our band members and our 8:45 singers who lead so well in the early service. Andy Clarke, Laraine Humbert, and the 35-member Sanctuary Choir put in many hours to make the late service both beautiful and meaningful. Our Master Ringers continue to ring at a high level and contribute to worship and community events, consistently. Our children and students meet on Wednesday and Sunday nights during the school year to learn more about worship leadership and music-making that is meaningful. We pray this kind of “music department”-based model is around for years to come at HAB, but we also know for it to morph into something new for the future, innovation needs to occur.
We are investigating ways in which to bolster our music-making throughout the church. We are looking into the possibility of a choral-scholar program, a scholarship program that supports local college students that will help us continue a rich tradition of choral music through supplementing our wonderful Sanctuary Choir. Also, if you were in worship in the late spring, you heard fantastic joy and energy in our HAB Singers, who sang cyclical songs that enlivened specific action during worship, like the call to worship, the prayer of intercession, and scripture responses. This is a new kind of ensemble that not only participates in worship on Sunday mornings but extends itself into our community on a regular basis. The HAB Singers – an intergenerational group of 20-plus children, youth, and adults – will go into our community to sing with those in Jacksonville we might not otherwise encounter;, sing with groups to express our solidarity and support, and sing with other people to simply make friends in Jacksonville so our city is a better place.
Faith and song are a millennia-long partnership grounded in beauty, power, and the human soul – what music-making for Jesus’ sake looks like in the church and the community in the years to come is the question. This is a time of innovation and evolution in churches like HAB. In my next article, I want to explore what that might mean and describe a theology of singing that expands our music-making from performance to participation, exclusion to inclusion, and loft to Table.
