At Music that Makes Community, we believe that people can build trust and connection by singing together. This often happens slowly in worshipping communities through routine, and repetition over the course of a long time. But in moments of urgent need, crisis, grief, or resistance, singing can bring people together quickly as well. Vigils, protests, rallies, direct actions, are all places where singing, and paperless music in particular, can be a powerful practical tool for collective participation. 

There is a rich tradition of music from many times and cultures that has been used by groups of people coming together to work for collective liberation.

I first encountered MMC in a university chapel service, and I received the songs and practices as especially relevant for sacred settings like church worship. I couldn’t have imagined then how the practices would become sufficiently integrated (and my confidence in leading strengthened!) to one day lead paperless singing in an IT training session or the financial education sessions I offered for a faith-based organization.

“There is enough!” became the unofficial anthem of our financial education program, and participants would approach me years later and call out, “There is enough!” or “I remember the song!”

Such simplicity and impact led to me “catching” songs like “We are all doing our best” or one that is unrecorded but led to a Salesforce trainer saying, “Now that is the best introduction I’ve ever received!”

What is the allure of a “buy one, get one free” deal?  For us, it’s the excitement of getting something for nothing, getting more “bang for our buck,” doubling the impact of our money.  It’s a rush.

We realized that we can get that same feeling when giving to Music that Makes Community.  Todd’s employer, Constellation Energy Corporation, has a “matching gifts” program.  Constellation matches employees’ gifts to charitable organizations one-for-one, up to $10,000 per employee.  You can even create a gift through payroll deductions that is matched for every pay period.  So, we can essentially “buy one and get one free,” and double our impact, every time we donate to Music that Makes Community.

For the last three years I’ve criss-crossed Europe to pursue cutting-edge tools in climate law and governance that might help keep my hometown of New Orleans from drowning. Bruce Jennings defines governance as “the overall process of coordinating, shaping, and directing individual and collective agency,” and I sought tools of agency. One night in Amsterdam, after hours of technocratic conversation over a nice bottle of wine, one of the key voices in the global plastics treaty process confessed, “none of these innovations are going to work - we’ve lost social trust. What we really need is new ritual.” To my surprise, experts in at least five other countries expressed the same yearning. A colleague in Sweden delightedly exclaimed, “breaking bread is governance!” 

Courtrooms, the halls of Congress, and the American shopping mall are all venues of ritual, what theologian James K.A. Smith calls, “cultural liturgies.” They are formed by and form our bodies into teleological (~ purpose-driven) belief systems, conceptions of human agency, habits of action. When we gather to sing, to pray, to grieve or rejoice, we enculturate ancient and new habits of social cohesion towards what Hauerwas terms “communities of trust.” Like a stylus on a wax record, our singing carves something akin to shared epigenetic grooves that become the rhythm and timbre of our living. When we co-create music with our bodies, we co-create the telos of our world. 

Over the last five years I have worked on the Development Team for the new United Church of Canada singing resource, Then Let Us Sing!. We will release a print version of the new resources in Spring 2025. Check out https://tlus.onelicense.net for more information about and access to the online content for this new resource.

A simple song that has come to have special meaning in my ‘spiritual first aid kit’ is TLUS 72, Oh Let Us Breathe. The words by Canadian author Lori Erhardt form a mantra that, by using text substitutions in subsequent verses, expands on the idea of how we already know how to be in community.

Today Music that Makes Community is beginning a blog series on "What's in your Spiritual Toolkit?" as part of our Fall Fundraising Campaign.  Every week we will share a story from the MMC community highlighting how someone is using the transformative practices of song sharing without paper as part of their Spiritual Toolkit.  We hope these stories resonate with you and inspire you to contemplate what's in your Spiritual Toolkit. 

- MMC's Fundraising Team: Liesl, Caitlin, Sonja, and Conie

Hello Music that Makes Community Friends, 

As the current Monday Morning Grounding season comes to a close, we will be taking a summer break. After our summer break, Monday Morning Grounding will resume from August 25, 2025-December 8, 2025. Same Zoom link, same time. 

Monday Morning Grounding will be the space for four in-depth Advent song and text preparation sessions on September 22, 29, Oct. 6, 13, 2025 as a follow-up to our Introduction to Advent Paperless Music on Thursday, September 18, 2025 at 4 pm Pacific / 7 pm Eastern.

Those who show up find that they are fed, filled and grounded for the week ahead, particularly in these turbulent times. You’ll leave with a song to carry you through the week. If you can’t regularly make it to Monday Morning Grounding, we wanted to share the resources from this past season with you. Although they were particular to a day and this season, in some respects, they are timeless and timely songs and poems for the coming days as well.

Music that Makes Community facilitators from across the continent gathered via Zoom for a Facilitator Playlist Party to share Songs of Justice on April 29th. We had more songs than we could sing in an hour and a half, and new songs on the way, so consider this an introductory resource list for those of you who weren’t with us. We learned and sang these songs together:

Hello Music that Makes Community Friends, 

As the current Monday Morning Grounding season comes to a close, we will be taking a break for Holy Week and Easter Monday. The late Spring/Summer season will start again on April 28th. 

Those who show up find that they are fed, filled and grounded for the week ahead, particularly in these turbulent times. You’ll leave with a song to carry you through the week. If you can’t regularly make it to Monday Morning Grounding, we wanted to share the resources from this past season with you. Although they were particular to a day and this season, in some respects, they are timeless and timely songs and poems for the coming days as well.

Music that Makes Community facilitators from across the continent gathered via Zoom for a Facilitator Playlist Party on March 30th around the theme of Easter and Joy. We spent time connecting, singing, sharing songs, and learning more about what MMC is up to in this season. Here are some of the songs we sang: 

In mid February, Music that Makes Community Facilitators gathered for a playlist party around the theme of “Lent/Spring.”  Here are some of the songs we sang:

So you want to sing MMC style regularly, locally? Or how could I start a local MMC community singing gathering?

We asked several local group leaders to share how and what they have been doing when things work. Spencer Foon from Chicago and Sylvia Miller-Mutia spent an hour with us. Board member Nancy Willbanks provides this summary of what they shared.

Every Thursday night for nearly thirty years, a widely diverse group of 30-100 people gather for worship and a meal at Idlewild Presbyterian Church in midtown Memphis. The irregularity of this service is that it is not comprised of members of the host church, but primarily filled with the men, women, and children of the streets of Memphis.  The service is short and loosely follows the Presbyterian liturgy:  an opening hymn, a sentence or two of confession and prayer, and an acclamation of pardon are followed by a statement of peace and symbolically passing this peace to those assembled.  The second section begins with another hymn and contains a scripture selection and short sermon. After a third hymn, an invitation is issued to a communion table with the Eucharist taken by intinction. The leaders of the service are all volunteer lay persons, with an ordained minister who presides over the communion and for seven years I was one of them. 

An Anti-Racism Triad

Reflection by Nancy Willbanks

For the past year and nine months, I have been meeting monthly in an anti-racism triad. We each had participated in one of the several book groups reading My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem (link to Bookshop.org) under the auspices of Music That Makes Community in 2021 and 2022. (See more about forming a triad in this article: When White Bodies say, "Tell me what to do.") 

We meet on zoom. I knew Jeremy from Monday Morning Grounding, and I didn’t know April at all, before we started meeting. We made a commitment for a year, and we are still meeting because we all find the hour and fifteen minutes we spend together each month valuable. We live in Massachusetts, Arizona and South Dakota. We juggle competing schedules and time zones. We are all in ministry and ordained. Jeremy and I are pastors and April is a chaplain at a community hospital. Jeremy is in a community where the BIPOC population is primarily from the Lakota tribe, while April sees a broader range of ethnicities in the hospital setting, including Native Americans, Latinx, and Black. In my neighborhood, the BIPOC people I see or interact with are Asian (including my daughter), Black, and Latinx.   

Each month we share some of our own noticings about racism that we have witnessed or heard or read about, and we share a somatic practice, often from My Grandmother’s Hands, and we share a song. Sometimes in between our meetings we text.

If you have ever enjoyed the gift of international travel, you may have encountered a mind-numbingly long line to go through Customs. My sister, mother, and I were returning from a trip a year ago and, following a lengthy plane trip and crowds of people at baggage claim, we were next funneled into a room so large, we could not see the far wall of it. Somewhere in the distance, we would be plucked from the line and sent to designated Customs booths to show passports and discuss what was in our luggage.

Back and forth from wall to wall, heavy rope stanchions guided a line of weary, cranky humans of all ages, ethnicities, and dispositions. Muttered curses, groans, and sighs filled the air as we moved glacially along, mere inches at a time.

Among my earliest memories are the 5-hour car trips we used to take to visit my grandparents. My sister and I could while away most of that time singing. Pop songs from the radio, rounds learned at summer camp, show tunes, pretty much any Beatles' song- we could and DID sing for hours on those trips.

Maybe it's no surprise that my first introductions to MMC felt like coming home. Oh! You just start singing? And you invite others to join? 

This had been a part of my life from my childhood. 

At the end of October, Music that Makes Community Facilitators gathered for a playlist party around the theme of “Advent.”  Here are some of the songs we sang:

The last time I wrote for the MMC blog, I had yet to move across the country to serve my first congregation, become ordained, live through a pandemic, or behold the kind of transformation that comes with putting roots down with certain people in a certain place. Paperless singing has been part of that journey all along, and has helped me hone my own theology and leadership with it.

There have been times, say when the musician of my small and scrappy internship congregation fell ill on a Sunday morning, when paperless singing was an immensely helpful tool. When I began my first call as an ordained minister, I entered a different setting entirely — one with a resourced music staff and a deep bench, and a variety of music led. There wasn’t a need to be filled per se, so I started introducing paperless tunes small moments of transition, one season at a time. My first year, we sang “Come, O Lord and Set Us Free” during the lighting of the Advent wreath.  We sang “What We Need Is Here” as the Gospel Acclamation in Lent. Over the coming years, that repertoire slowly built. The Caribbean Alleluia, “Our Stories Are God’s Stories,” “Listen to the Word that God Has Spoken,” “All Who Are Thirsty (Come to the Water)”, “Open My Heart,” “Come Light of Lights,” and “Jesus We Are Gathered” are all under our belts now.

Greetings MMC community!

Can I share a vision with you? 

The dream is “A Songleader in Every Family, Every Household”. 

That sounds pretty straight forward, but let me tell you how I'm defining songleader. 

I describe a songleader as a “collaborative ritual artist.” Let me break that down… 

• COLLABORATIVE = someone who shares leadership and responsibility 
• RITUAL = meaningful patterns and rhythms of communal life 
• ARTIST = Creator, tender with beauty, grace, creativity, and attention to process  

So a Songleader is one who shares the tending of a creative process of meaningful communal patterns and life rhythms with attention to beauty and grace.  

A collaborative ritual artist.

And if there's a collaborative ritual artist/songleader in every family…

Do you know what this means for spiritual communities?  There’s multiple song leaders in every community!

Music that Makes Community facilitators met online in August to build community, hone skills, and share songs with one another around the theme “Connection in Fractured Times.”  As a gift to the MMC community, we are offering a playlist of the songs we sang to you.  We hope that they may aid your own practice of singing in community as we navigate fractured times together.  

Hi, friends, 

Breen Sipes and I have been doing the behind the scenes facilitation and space holding for MMC’s Monday Morning Grounding this past six months, and because of school changes, Breen is unable to do this in the fall. 

Can you join me and Amy Steenson in holding the space for Monday Morning Grounding this fall. (10 a.m. Eastern, 9 a.m. Central. 8 a.m. Mountain, 7 a.m. Pacific)

Here's an update on the Sacred Lands Playlist Project, a partnership between Music that Makes Community and the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery.  

This post includes two updates.  First update is on the review process and when creators will be notified if their submission was accepted.  Second update is an invitation to a hybrid, in-person and virtual gathering, where songs from the Playlist will be shared.  

You know that something is good, when a clergy colleague on Friday tells you that what you’re doing in keeping Monday Morning Grounding going is a ministry and makes a difference, and then on Monday when the Trader Joe’s cashier asks how your Monday has been and, I can say: I woke up tired and grumpy and because of Monday Morning Grounding, I’m having a better day. 

So, that’s the truth. Monday Morning Grounding can turn your day around and set you up for the week. We sing, we’re playful, we share meaningfully, we are hospitable. We notice and share what we notice. People are welcome to come on Zoom with camera on or off, singing on mute unless we’re passing a song around (which we often do), and as Breen (MMC Board president) likes to say, you can come with your shoes on or off, because this is holy ground. You are welcome and invited!! Don’t think that this is like any other Zoom meeting (non-MMC) that you’ve been to.

The Deadline has been extended for the Sacred Lands Playlist to Monday, July 1st!

The Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery and Music that Makes Community are collaborating together on a community singing playlist project!

MMC is excited to partner with The Coalition, a faith-based movement that seeks to respond to the call of Indigenous communities to the Christian Church to address the extraction, extinction and enslavement done in the name of Christ on Indigenous lands, to support their mission and liberate and spread the power of communities’ spiritual life through singing.

We welcome original* song submissions around the theme of "Sacred Lands." Understanding the land as sacred, not as property or commodity, is an Indigenous worldview -- one which the dominant culture desperately needs, if we are going to actually address the root causes of today's climate crisis.