What began this series for me was the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1963 March on Washington in August, and my thinking about this landmark moment regarding school desegregation caused me to think about the church. When in 1968, just before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a sermon at the National Cathedral said, “We must face the sad fact that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing ‘In Christ there is no East or West,’ we stand in the most segregated hour of America,” I doubt that Dr. King could have imagined the small strides we’ve made in 50 years toward desegregating our houses of worship. While we’ve made huge strides in most arenas of public life, I believe Dr. King’s 1968 observation is just as true today as it was then. While some churches are fully integrated, many (dare I say a majority) of our churches don’t look much different in terms of racial and ethnic diversity than they did 50 years ago. How can this be?
The Pitfalls of Racially Segregated Worship
What began this series for me was the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1963 March on Washington in August, and my thinking about this landmark moment regarding school desegregation caused me to think about the church. When in 1968, just before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a sermon at the National Cathedral said, “We must face the sad fact that at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing ‘In Christ there is no East or West,’ we stand in the most segregated hour of America,” I doubt that Dr. King could have imagined the small strides we’ve made in 50 years toward desegregating our houses of worship. While we’ve made huge strides in most arenas of public life, I believe Dr. King’s 1968 observation is just as true today as it was then. While some churches are fully integrated, many (dare I say a majority) of our churches don’t look much different in terms of racial and ethnic diversity than they did 50 years ago. How can this be?
0 Comments
The Pitfalls of Musically Segregated Worship Nothing defines the American church more at this historical juncture than its music. When we are asked what kind of church we attend, most often we describe the congregation’s worship, and we describe it in the all-to-familiar terms, traditional, contemporary, or blended perhaps with a qualifier such as “leaning toward.” Not unlike the generational segregation that we discussed in an earlier post, worship in many churches is fully segregated, and many have accepted the notion that other options are not possible. Yet when I talk with friends about musical preferences, they have wide-ranging notions, and they act on these choices as they listen to music in their daily lives. For instance, the dozens of students I work with each day are open to all genres of music, and I haven’t in many years encountered a student who wasn’t open to explore music from popular culture, choral music from previous centuries, and the sounds of organs and brass. Likewise, my baby boomer cohorts might regularly attend a Three Dog Night concert on Friday night and go to the symphony on Sunday afternoon – they are not willing to be boxed in by a single-genre musical diet in their daily lives. Why should we accept such a limited offering on Sunday? Recently, I took 45 of the 90+ members of the Baylor Men’s Choir to Kenya for fifteen days of singing, hands-on ministry, cultural exchange, and enjoying the beauty of Kenya. While in Kenya the group sang in churches, schools, orphanages, out-door markets, airports, restaurants – anywhere people were gathered! We also painted a significant part of a school with which we have a long-term partnership and sponsor several girls in order to rescue them from Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and early marriage that are still prominent among some groups in Kenya. While this was my fourth time to take a group to Kenya, I’m still processing the ways in which music impacts people in Kenya, and I’m challenged to find ways to translate the best practices back to those with whom I work and minister. (To see some amazing photos and read some of the group blog posts, go to https://bumckenya2013.wordpress.com/). Following are some of the distinctives that characterize the power of music in Kenya: This week, I’ve been away from home at a deserted farmhouse a couple of hours out of Waco working on my presentations for the upcoming Alleluia Conference at Baylor. Perhaps in future columns, I’ll share some of the substance of these sessions; however, this week I’ve been reflecting on the theme of our Sunday’s worship – rest. The sermon centered on Jesus’ instruction to the disciples in Mark 6 to pull away from the crowd and rest. If you’ve read the passage recently, you might recall that while Jesus could have kept the disciples on-task serving the people, he commanded them to take care of themselves and rest. During worship, we sang about rest, prayed for rest, and we asked forgiveness for trusting ourselves too much and God too little. In all my years of music ministry, I don’t remember ever planning a service around this theme, and as a person who doesn’t rest often or well, it became a convicting experience for me. Consequently, I’ve been ruminating on this subject, and I’m searching for ways that I can intentionally participate in moments of Sabbath more frequently. Here are a few ideas that have been percolating inside me. If we don’t learn to involve others in our ministry, our ministry will never be larger than we are. How do we involve others meaningfully? How do we cultivate those who work on our team? What do we delegate and what do we hold to ourselves? These questions and others deserve frequent revisiting. In my book From Postlude to Prelude: Music Ministry’s Other Six Days, I discuss working with volunteers and the art of delegation. I believe that you should delegate responsibilities that (1) someone can do better than you, (2) someone can do instead of you, (3) someone can do with better timing, and (4) will help someone else grow and develop as a leader. As I manage both teaching and a music ministry position, I frequently visit these four points to see if I am utilizing others and their skills and abilities appropriately. Let’s begin by unpacking each of these more fully: |
AuthorC. Randall Bradley Archives
July 2015
Categories |