As we continue to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and its influence on music and worship, we bring our weariness and disorientation as we move forward in a changed and bruised world and church. Yet we still come to God’s table—hungry for the hospitality of welcome, relationship, and interconnection; thirsty for reinvigoration of our imagination and hope.

Join clergy, music ministers, laity, activists, and artists for three days of generative, embodied music, liturgy, and worship, reconnecting to our voices, our spaces, and our communities, and offering new tools for creating worship infused with genuine care and hope. Anticipating unknowns in COVID safety, this workshop will adapt to evolving guidelines, and may be held entirely outdoors.

All are welcome to stay for a special worship experience with Paul Vasile and Leah Silvieus on Pentecost, June 5, at St. Paul’s UMC!

Sliding scale tuition is $60-$100 per participant before May 1; $100-$150 after May 1. Scholarships are also available. Your tuition supports ongoing programs in our George Harper Lecture Series.

Register here!

To enroll or inquire about this event, contact Dr. Maren Haynes Marchesini, Director of Worship, Music, & Art at St. Paul’s UMC

About Paul Vasile

Paul (he/him) is a church musician, consultant, composer, and teacher who finds his greatest joy in collaborative and community-centered ministry.

Committed to modeling expansive, imaginative, and hospitable experiences of music making wherever he goes, Paul's leadership builds trust, invites spaces of creativity, vulnerability, and play, and supports practices of reflection and holistic learning. Recognized as a multitalented musician and liturgist, he is helping to strengthen, energize, and liberate faith communities through the ways they worship and sing together.

With over 25 years of ministry experience in ecumenical contexts, Paul’s skills make him a unique resource to congregations in transition or those experiencing anxiety or conflict. Over the past 8 years, he has accompanied communities with a range of challenges through seasons of discernment and transformation.

As the Executive Director of Music that Makes Community, Paul is passionate about modeling and sharing leadership practices that sustain the musical and spiritual life of communities. He mentors and supports an ecumenical network of song leaders across North America who are committed to oral tradition (“paperless”) song leadership practices. Additionally, Paul serves as Director of Music at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, where he invites the community to pray and play through song, collaborating with faculty, staff, and students to curate worship experiences where embodied learning and spiritual formation are prioritized.

Paul is an inspiring teacher and has been a guest lecturer and worship leader at Baylor University, The Candler School of Theology, General Theological Seminary (NYC), the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Princeton Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary (NYC), and Vanderbilt Divinity School. He has also curated notable concert series, arts events, and educational programs exploring the intersection of music and spirituality. He has led a Hymn Festival for The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, as well as a workshop for the Christian Congregational Song Conference in Oxford, England.

Committed to expressing and exploring faith in new ways, Paul composes sacred music that expands and enriches the church’s language of praise and prayer. His music is represented in Glory to God, All Creation Sings, and Voices Together, as well as The Hymn Society resource, Songs for the Holy Other. Through a long association with the international theater collective Compagnia de' Colombari, he has also composed and arranged music for innovative, site-specific performances that juxtapose and blend cultures, traditions, and art forms to bring fresh interpretation to the written word. For the last decade he has collaborated with Artistic Director Karin Coonrod in the creation of Judith, a chamber opera inspired by the Old English telling of a story from the Apocrypha.

For more about Paul, please visit his website.

About Leah Silvieus

Leah (she/her) was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old. She grew up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and western Colorado. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), Season of Dares (Bull City Press), Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and co-editor with Lee Herrick of the poetry anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books).

She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, The Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright and serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, The Believer, and elsewhere.

She holds a BA from Whitworth University, an MFA from the University of Miami, and an MAR in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music. She splits her time between New York and Florida working as a yacht chief stewardess.

For more about Leah, please visit her website.