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.

The Rev. Sylvia Miller-Mutia is Rector of St. Thomas of Canterbury in Albuquerque, NM and has been a presenter at Music that Makes Community events since 2013.

One of the great things about paperless music in liturgy is that it frees us up to look at each other and to move our bodies when we sing.  If you're not holding a hymnal, you have the freedom to hold hands with your neighbor, clap, dance or sign along with a song.  

As a dancer, movement has always been an important part of my spiritual life, but it wasn't until about four years ago that I began working with a parishioner who had studied ASL to begin integrating simple sign language interpretations of some canticles, songs, and prayers of our community into worship on a regular basis.  

Incorporating elements of sign language into worship is one way we can support the participation of visual and kinesthetic learners, pre-literate and pre-verbal children, and people who are hard of hearing in our liturgies.  

I've found that "echo songs" are often a good place to start inviting congregational participation in singing and signing prayers. 

Ana Hernández is a composer, workshop facilitator, song leader, and co-founder of the Dallas/Fort Worth Threshold choir. She's been a presenter with MMC since 2010, and has composed many beautiful songs over the years that are beloved by the MMC network.

Tell Me

Why should it be my loneliness,
Why should it be my song,
Why should it be my dream
deferred
overlong?

-Langston Hughes

In his book The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wrote “Color is not a human or a personal reality. It is a political reality.” I combined my tune If God is Love with Langston Hughes’ Tell Me to encourage us in the real work that is necessary to create a new political reality of love. As a culture we prefer avoidance of conflict and a kind of naïve cynicism; the repetitions of platitudes that make us feel clever. What if the repetitions can be used for more than merely making us feel better and dismissing conflict? What if by learning to sing together we can hone the skills we need to work through the things that divide us? What if we were to more intentionally imagine our part in healing the nations?

Of course, this might initially seem to cause more conflict, but will ultimately move us toward deeper understanding and empathy as we come closer to one another from different worldviews. I know in my heart that there are no “others” – only us, and our refusals to engage one another at the deep levels of respect and love keep us stuck, fighting for freedom, and justice for all.

The poet, activist, and public intellectual June Jordan wrote and sang this:

We have come too far
We can’t turn ‘round
We’ll flood the streets with justice
We are freedom bound.

There’s a video of it being sung in the streets here (the tune begins at 3:34). It’s also lovely done as a round.

Zachary Walter is a recent graduate of Union Theological Seminary, where he studied preaching and worship, and is a co-founder of Yes And Ministry. He's been an MMC Presenter since 2014.



On May 14th at St Lydia’s church in Brooklyn, Yes And Ministry and Music that Makes Community will gather together to sing and share songs. I’m a co-founder of Yes And, and I’m here on the MMC blog today to tell you about who we are and what we do and what we have planned for Saturday.

It is no secret that in the United States we do not learn foreign languages easily.

This week, my community, Yes And Ministry,  is celebrating the day of Pentecost, which commemorates the Holy Spirit granting powers of language. This is an opportunity to celebrate the gifts of language,  and ignite a conversation about how our churches can often be monolingual spaces.

Written music has its own language, and can intimidate musicians without formal training. Churches and communities with a culture of musical literacy often miss opportunities to engage natural musicians without formal training. By singing written hymns that are only in English, we might be discouraging non-English speakers from full participation.