Cara Modisett is a collaborative pianist, essayist, teacher, and a contributing editor to Episcopal Cafe. She currently serves as Music Director at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Virginia. Cara attended our MMC workshop at the Barbara C. Harris Camp and Conference Center in October and offered this poignant reflection at the concluding Eucharist.

   We have prepared for the mystery of this hour.

Last night, twenty or so human beings and one yellow lab circled a campfire, and it struck me how small an ember we were, glowing deep in the woods, circled in turn by towering trees and, beyond those, by the high, silver constellations, the waxing moon and the sweep of the Milky Way, so distant and incomprehensible, and also so close that it felt like we could almost hear the music of the spheres.

We seemed fragile, this circle unbroken, singing and laughing and roasting marshmallows, and our music moved from the songs of summer childhoods to something deeper. These last days, while we have been sharing these mysterious hours, inviting God and one another into our souls and hearts, the whirlwind of the world has kept circling beyond us, the hurricanes of weather and politics.

While I was thinking this, and during a break in the singing, one of us stepped forward to give thanks for being able to sing in the night when the morning is what we wish for. And in that thanksgiving was the promise that our fire was stronger than it seemed, small as it was within the world.

     We begin with breath – that’s all the tools you need.

We’ve spent these last few days as teachers and learners and as friends-in-becoming, and often the lessons we’ve spoken have carried as much weight as the music we’ve sung: 

Gather, invite, smile.

Take things step by step.

Music without dissonance is boring.

Oxytocin works.

When we move out of our comfort zones, we can find great joy.

When we make music together, we are never on our own.

“Everywhere I go,” someone told me last night, “I hear someone singing.”

Trust ourselves, trust each other.

You don’t have to be perfect.

A song is a container for the message, the ministry, the prayer.

The congregation is the choir.

Liturgy creates holy space for holy work.

Even when we forget the words, the music doesn’t have to end.

What is created through us can reach far beyond where we are.

Daniel Simons is the Priest for Liturgy, Hospitality, and Pilgrimage at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City. In January 2017 he assumes a new role as Director of Spiritual Formation at the Trinity Retreat Center in West Cornwall, Connecticut, while continuing to oversee Trinity’s pilgrimage program.

As a Priest at Trinity Church Wall Street, I am called to imagine and create liturgical spaces that welcome visitors who attend our historic parish. For many years, the 10 a.m. Service in St. Paul's Chapel was a place of experimentation and innovation, as we frequently offered hospitality to worshippers from other states or countries.

The global and religious diversity of our guests at St. Paul's posed unique challenges, especially because they typically comprised over half of the congregation. Many had no experience of Anglican worship. Planning liturgy in this context required us to abandon assumptions about who belonged and to create intentional spaces for community learning. You can read more about the service in an article published by the Anglican Theological Review.

Music That Makes Community’s method of teaching and singing music emerged as a solution to these challenges: we gathered and wrote music that could be taught in the moment, might be sung in a visitor’s native language, and was beautiful as simple unaccompanied melody or with added harmonies. The result was a tapestry of song that gave confidence to the regulars and included the visitors in a single community of participation. Our congregational singing seemed almost miraculous in its beauty, simplicity, and effectiveness. 

The Rev. Mieke Vandersall is the founding pastor of Not So Churchy. She has been to numerous Music That Makes Community workshops and uses paperless music when she leads worship.

I attended my first MMC workshop in St. Louis in 2010. At that point in my life I was seeking a traditional parish job as a Presbyterian pastor, but because of the restrictive policies of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) against out LGBT people I was unable to live into this calling. The stories behind this reality are complex and long, but the result of these stories is that I felt a call emerging to begin a new worshiping community. 

I entered into my first night of the workshop and was led in song. I remember being overwhelmed with the feeling that I was worshiping for the first time in a very, very long time. I was being served through the incredible feast that the leadership of MMC provides. My soul was being watered and nourished and I began, even in that first gathering, to get back in touch with my passion for ministry and for providing the kind of space I experienced that first hour of worship. A space that allowed for my voice to be heard clearly and yet blend in with the clear and beautiful voices all around me.

Liesl Spitz shares 'Our Mother in Heaven,' a creative adaptation of a song from Southern Africa, at our Holy Week Retreat last February.

I’ve always been happier coming up with harmonies than singing solos. Until I stepped into St. Lydia’s Dinner Church in Brooklyn, it never occurred to me that my voice might be strong enough to lead a group. There I learned to lead song paperlessly. I relied not only on my voice, but my ability to connect with everyone in the room, to communicate with my body and my eyes, and most of all my willingness to be vulnerable. Leading song doesn’t require a “solo” voice— just practice, and an openness to learn out loud.

MMC presenter Sylvia Miller-Mutia leads an energetic Sanctus that would be effective for paperless, intergenerational worship. 

Last month, Pastor Abby Leese and members of Zion Lutheran Church in Etters, PA visited a sister congregation that has incorporated paperless music into their liturgy. They took a Sunday morning field trip to another Zion Lutheran Church, just twenty minutes away in York, PA, which offers an intergenerational eucharist geared to help families with children worship and learn together. 

Mark Mummert, the congregation's Cantor (and a longtime MMC collaborator) helped develop and lead the liturgy and has made their order of worship available as a resource. He also offered some helpful context for the service. 

"We created a bulletin that is pretty didactic, so we don't have to say much. Also, the entire service has accompanying visual images, with art that comments on the action. The powerpoint for the service has no musical information (texts or musical notation) but we do sing some classic hymnody from the hymnal so it's not all paperless."

Pastor Abby, who attended our MMC workshop in Baltimore last fall, has generously shared some of the things she noticed during her community's visit. As you read, perhaps you'll notice the way that paperless leadership at Zion Lutheran Church is helping create space for deepening trust, shared leadership, flexibility, and connection to the Sacred within and through the community. 

Paul Vasile is a interim/transitional church musician, consultant, and composer based in New York City. He has been a Music that Makes Community presenter since 2011 and now serves as MMC's Executive Director.

My second year of graduate school, I registered for an elective in continuo playing (see above for examples of figured bass, i.e. Baroque chord symbols). It seemed like a great way to round out my skills as a church musician and it offered the opportunity to play different repertoire than I usually encountered as a pianist. I went to the first class with a bit of nervous anticipation, which was kicked up a notch when the professor began with an exercise to assess our skill level. Each student was given an eight-measure melody with figured bass to sightread in front of everyone.

I registered for the class to stretch myself, to gain new experiences, and to be able to perform Baroque music with more authenticity. But, approaching this moment of assessment, all I felt was fear: fear of being scrutinized, judged, inadequate. When an exceptionally gifted keyboardist played shortly before me, I was undone.
 
Intimidated and insecure, I stumbled through my excerpt, sat back down, and decided the class was too difficult. I went to the Registrar’s office the next day and signed up for a choral literature class instead, embarrassed that I had even tried in the first place. 

*          *          *

Ben Groth is currently the Associate Pastor at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Menomonee Falls, WI. He has also worked as a musician in Lutheran and Episcopal congregations and started a choir in a mental health hospital. Ben has been a presenter at Music that Makes Community Events since 2014.

Our beauty is not in our strength,
it comes from our weakness made holy by God,
made holy by God.

Our faith is not in our knowing,
it comes from our yearning made holy by God,
made holy by God.

Our hope is not in our triumph.
It comes from our failure made holy by God,
made holy by God.

I wrote these lines in the midst of a retreat on the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius. Each verse shares the theme that the drive for personal success might be the greatest enemy of success as it relates to a life of faith. Strength, knowledge, triumph: these are all things that successful, well-adjusted, driven people are supposed to have. But the deeper truth is that we never get where we’re going on our own, and that the beauty, faith, and hope we yearn for can only come when we let the grace of God shine on the places of failure in our lives. In the midst of a world filled with violence, these verses ask us to let go of our own self-righteousness, and seek to empower us in the places our need is greatest.

Charlotte Moroz is an actress, musician and playwrite and the co-creator of The Society for Misfit Puppets, a year-long puppet-musical-producing team. She has been a Music that Makes Community Presenter since 2014.

Friends, I want to talk about surprise and singing today. Since leading and singing paperless music more intentionally these past years, I've noticed that the degree of surprise that I feel has increased mightily. To contextualize, I am a bit of a song-seeking missile, working in theatrical and music-making fields and attending a church where group paperless singing is the norm. And yet, I still think "hot dang, this is the coolest!" and "Wow! That was so cool/weird/awesome/unexpected!" every time I get to sing with you all. That's a 1 to 1 ratio of my surprised delight to singing with a group.

A friend and mentor of mine and an amazing musician and teacher, Jake Slichter, introduced me to the importance of surprise in making music and spurred my contemplating the delightful and motivating play of uncertainty in this kind of music-making. In this spirit, I offer 5 ways to think about singing paperless music via knowns and unknowns:

1. Without paper in front of us, our focus has the chance to shift to the group. The things we don't know become things we have in common, so we get out of our own heads and into the mind of the group as we learn together. With focus shifted, we're kids out for recess: we can't help but be game to play.

Matthew Burt is an organist, choir director, and liturgist who has been a presenter at Music that Makes Community events since 2010. He lives in Palo Alto, California, and currently serves as West Regional Councillor of the American Guild of Organists.

Jesus said, “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4), yet for centuries many churches have taught and required children to sit in respectful silence as adults lead their worship and song. As the father of a two year-old, I think that possibly the greatest humility we can embody is to view the world through the lens of a child—inquisitive, appreciative, and unencumbered by the prejudices and fears of our adult society. How then can we approach this in our liturgy and our music?

Marilyn Haskel is a composer, choir director, organist and liturgist who has been a Presenter at Music that Makes Community events since the project's beginning.


You probably know the song form "round." A melody is taught to the whole group, then the group is divided into smaller groups that are led to enter singing the melody at different times. In this round the smaller groups enter one measure after each other when it becomes a four-part round. The leader here (me!) should have learned the piece a little better before teaching, but she didn't, so making the best of a hurried situation, she corrects the melody before going on. This is a four-part round, but can also be sung as a two part round first as is done here.