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.