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