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In this conversation with Dr. John Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, we talk about making change in our churches in a week-by-week process, the importance of resources to validate aspects of ministry that aren’t currently supported, and – the big one – how important teachability and curiosity is to leadership.
About John Witvliet:
John D. Witvliet is director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and professor of worship, theology, & congregational and ministry studies at Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary. He is editor for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship Liturgical Studies Series (Eerdmans), author of The Biblical Psalms in Christian Worship: A Brief Introduction and Guide to Resources (Eerdmans), Worship Seeking Understanding: Windows into Christian Practice (Baker Academic), and collaborating editor for several hymnals, children’s books, and scholarly books, including Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice (University of Notre Dame Press).
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A Transcript of Strengthening Congregational Song with John Witvliet, on Music and the Church Ep. 43
Teachability in Church Leadership
Sarah Bereza: Let’s talk about the wealth of resources for church musicians out there.
John Witvliet: So many different areas of study in a really robust worship conference or a robust academic conference a on church music that can inform the life of a church musician. It’s the the story of a hymn that you might not sing next Sunday. People have reflected on performance practice of a favorite style of music. It’s people who reflect deeply on how people receive music and how people find music to be healing and the role of music and pastoral care. And you know, how many different disciplines can strengthen the life of a church musician – it’s ethnomusicology, it’s also music education, music therapy, history of music, history of liturgical music, it’s so many different areas of reflection.
Sarah Bereza: I’m hearing this and thinking and yet so often for a church musician, there’s only one area that they have very much exposure to.
John Witvliet: Exactly right. Yeah. And actually for any of us, I think there can be fear and trepidation to learn from areas where we feel less strong. We feel not sure of ourselves.
Sarah Bereza: It can be scary to be the newbie.
John Witvliet: It is. And in perhaps it’s a willingness to grow, a desire to grow, a kind of curiosity – you know, a growth mindset. It’s true in every area of life, but certainly in church leadership where a desire to grow and a spirit of being teachable might be one of the top criteria. Churches would be healthier places if teachability were one of the key criteria for every single leadership position.
Sarah Bereza: So we just need to end the podcast right there because there’s the message.
John Witvliet: Right, right.
What are your church’s crucial areas of growth?
Sarah Bereza: You have been part of the grants program at the Calvin Institute of Worship for quite a while now. And so you’ve gotten a different, maybe a different kind of angle on growth and music in churches because you’re looking at it from not just an academic perspective, but a grantor perspective, not just as a practitioner in the church. Can you tell us about that?
John Witvliet: Sure. So it is a great joy every year to receive grant applications from teams in worshipping communities. These are collaboratively produced proposals. And they really represent the deep yearnings of a church. There’s a pastoral discernment process that goes into a grant application. Essentially, we’re inviting churches ask the question, “What is a an especially crucial area of growth that you feel God is calling your congregation to pursue over time, in a sustained way, something that can’t be achieved with a single conference or in a single weekend, but that, over the course of a year, your community could grow in.” And that could be any number of things. That might be singing, let’s just use music as an example. Singing more intergenerationally. Singing in ways that expands the cultural range and palate and sense of cultural hospitality in a given place that sings a broader range of scriptural themes, you know, that is willing to sing the full spectrum of kinds of songs reflected in the biblical sounds. What do those songs have to teach us about resistance and protest and anger and lament alongside or parties and repentance. So congregations when it comes to music can aim toward deepening in so many different directions, but it’s a remarkable thing to see what emerges from churches across cultures and the denominational range – people who’ve really thought prayerfully about some topic they want to work on over time, and regardless of whether a community ever pursues a grant, I think that is a wonderful question to ask for all of us, you know, “what is God calling us to grow into in our work together?”
Working for Long-term Change
Sarah Bereza: I’m curious what you’ve learned in working with these churches so that the time that they have is productive? And then, how that affects them down the road. Do you have any sense of change 10 years down the road?
John Witvliet: That’s great question. Sometimes the changes that are envisioned come to fruition. Sometimes churches say we want to become more robustly intergenerationally, and they actually are five or 10 years later. We’re also delightfully surprised when a congregation pursues a given learning area and then discovers that it can be applied in other areas. So we’ve had some wonderful grants that have been related to congregations seeking to expand opportunities for ministry, not just two but alongside of, and with persons across the spectrum of ability and disability. And a church that really thinks deeply and pursues that vision winds up being a more hospitable place, cross culturally, cross generationally. The hospitality and ministry with muscle gets developed. And then it turns out there are all kinds of ways to apply it. And then another thing we notice is that 10 years later, it may be that a church is not singing in a way that’s all that different, but that it was the leadership lessons learned in a given grant that are the most important. And candidly, we’ve also had where an especially gifted project director was involved with a grant, but where the people involved developed some wonderful leadership skills that they then applied in another context. Honestly they had to leave. And we don’t see those stories as just negative, not to minimize the pain involved. But to say that, you know, maybe God had something else in mind that it was through the growth and leap collaborative leadership capacity that could be applied in other settings. Good that came out of it.
What does your local “economy” support in your church?
Sarah Bereza: Can we talk about what a grant can do? Like this isn’t necessarily an episode about “here’s how to apply for a grant.” But I’m thinking really about money in the general sense. Sometimes a church is like, “Well, why should we spend money on something? Can’t you just can’t you just learn that yourself, you go figure it out and give it to us? And we’ll be paying your salary and done.” But I think you’re kind of making an argument by doing this, that financial resources can support a certain kind of thing.
John Witvliet: Well, there’s several dimensions here. One of the questions we love to ask are, you know, what are the kinds of activities that for whatever reason, the local market economy is not supporting? Local market economy supports things that tend to match cultural values. But there might be some aspects of a given culture’s values and given congregation’s values, a given city’s values, given region’s values, that actually need some growth, some sanctification to use Christian language that we can personally support. You know, a congregation might only really typically bless a musician who does events and ministries in ways that bring in more people. The economy is all oriented to the bringing in more people. But suppose that that musician said my passion is to really bringing deeper healing to people on the margins. The economy may not support that question. But a grant can support it temporarily. A grant can also provide a kind of external validation, where in effect, someone outside the community is saying “this is really important.” And it can give time then for that community to pause to pay attention to that undervalued dimension of ministry, and then it’s be the prayer of people who apply and those of us who are involved in the awarding the grant, but you know, something will stick and something will bear fruit out of that.
Sarah Bereza: It seems that some of this is less about content, and more about the practice.
John Witvliet: There’s a lot about the process here. And we try to guide that as the program is shaped. The grant application process that we’ve set up consists of answering several questions. One of the earliest of those questions is “Describe the collaborative process that you use to put together this grant”. Well, that’s already cueing that kind conversation. But this is not just about a grant proposal. It’s really about a way of life and community. Lone Ranger leadership is typically not healthy leadership in Christianity. So those kinds of questions that we ask create the context for a journey. Congregations of many different kinds can take this journey, pursuing many different ends. But there is a lot of learning that has come out of prior grants, and a wonderfully dynamic and collaborative advisory board where we keep asking how can we keep improving the process that we invite people into. And then it’s a joy for us to convene all these grant recipients so people can meet each other across cultural contexts, denominational lines, geographic region. And often there’s a second level of learning that happens there. That is comparable.
Finding Resources without Overwhelm
Sarah Bereza: You’ve talked about church folks having a wealth of resources, almost so much that you can’t begin to process all the resources that we each have. And one thing you’re suggesting for folks leading in ministry, is to think about why they’re beginning their questioning, or why they’re looking for something.
John Witvliet: Well, I think one of the things we see is that many of the most fruitful grant proposals and projects emerge when people simply stop and ask the question, “What are the immediate needs God has placed in before us? And what are remarkable opportunities that God has placed in before us.” There’s a balance there. Need and opportunity. And then pause to ask, “Where is the deepest vein of wisdom that could inform how we reflect on it.” I think that language is important: vein of wisdom. That language gets that something that’s a little deeper than quick fix technique. And often if people begin to ask the question, “Where is the deepest vein of wisdom,” and you start asking that collaboratively? Often that’s a way to get to, over time, some of the best materials that are available. And we all live in this information age with millions of podcasts, millions of websites, thousands of books, and we can’t pay attention to even a tiny percentage. The danger is when we find it also overwhelming, we really in effect, shut down the learning process. And if all of us at any given time are continuing to learn something that we are especially good at and love, and then also always thinking what’s one weak side, and we’re doing a little bit of that all the time. That’s that’s pretty fruitful in these grant projects, we see it, but I think just as a way of life for all of us.
Sarah Bereza: I’m wondering if you have any words for folks who find that incredibly scary and intimidating?
John Witvliet: Well, just to say that, again, to come back to that theme of teachability. There is such great freedom in learning to ask the question like, “what are veins of wisdom that can enrich my ministry.” It’s an enriching question.
Sarah Bereza: It’s a positive question because it assumes there’s something already that’s good there.
John Witvliet: And that God has likely provided in the breadth of the church, the people with experiences that can instruct them, teach us. So many of us are formed to have answers – we stand in front of a choir, those of us who direct choirs , and we are formed to have the answers. We’re told, prepare the score, choose the music wisely, prepare that rehearsal so that you can be in command, in charge, that you have the answers. And I understand it. A well led choir rehearsal is led by a person who has a sense of knowing what they’re doin. There’s a confidence that inspires confidence in music making. But there’s a sort of deep internal need to always have the right answers, in the end, I think that can be a kind of frustrating way to live. There’s a ton of pressure in that way of life, and to actually relinquish having all the answers and to say, “here are some questions that I want to ask and and that I’m genuinely curious about,” can be one of the I think most freeing disciplines for people who are formed to be in charge. It can be really life giving.
Sarah Bereza: It seems like it’s also a certain kind of theological position – something about God or faith that there is always more than I could know. And infinitely knowable. Versus like, “Well, I have I have this bounded collection of texts and, and I personally can know it all. I can have all the answers.” No different way of thinking about faith.
John Witvliet: I know. I think so. You know, there’s something finite about the our human scale, the finiteness of being human, that I think we have to receive as gift. And maybe I think, you know, at the deep level we tend to go in two opposite directions. We either aspire to this place of universal knowledge of being in command of having a sense of control. Or we slip into a sense of despair. But you know, what if life, in the fullness of the coming Kingdom, consists of our own finiteness on a journey of continued growth, continued learning? You know, the famous C.S. Lewis line “further up further in” as he described. We’re taping this not far from where C.S. Lewis lived and wrote that line probably. And it’s a beautiful image.
Strengthening Congregational Song
Sarah Bereza: Do you to want to talk about strengthening congregational song for practitioners and scholars?
John Witvliet: I think it is a great question for all of us who lead music or have responsibilities for music in a given congregation to simply ask, “what other capacities do I long for my congregation to have a year from now that they do not have currently and what are the steps over time – 52 small steps one week at a time – that could be put in place to help that be possible.” I think for some of us, it might be helping a church sing for absolutely fabulous pastorally significant, theologically significant hymns or songs that our church currently doesn’t know. And the first time we sing them, people will resist. And then thinking, what’s the 52-week journey that will get us not only to be able to sing it, but to love it?
And, you know, it might be step number one is sending the link to four choir members to say “I just discovered a new song.” And the week after that it might be learning the story of a songwriter and contacting them wherever they are in the world to ask about the story behind the song and then it’s introducing it at a choir rehearsal or a church staff meeting. So it’s a journey over time. And it might be then with respect to a given bit of repertoire. Or it might be with respect to some other aspect.
A church we worked with several years ago, really put great intention into how music should function in its pastoral care ministries. They identified four or five songs that they chose, as songs that should be listened to, in hospital rooms, nursing home rooms, care facilities. And they said, “What can we do in the breath of our church community to learn to love these five songs that can bring such healing, hope, sense of God’s sustaining presence,” and then really making that a matter of intentional practice. So here was a minister of music that did work not just in the church choir but with people who are involved in pastoral visitation ministries, the music of ministry, extended through people who did visits, who didn’t themselves like to sing, but could come into that into that visit with, you know, playing a recording or a podcast of members of their own community, their own church choir singing that song to them. That’s powerful!
You start doing that, and the whole context and meaning of what’s going on in the musical life of a church could change. One of the things we are also excited about is a new dimension of our grants program, which is a grants program to teacher-scholars. So we are awarding per year about 50 grants to congregations, and then about 15 to teacher-scholars in a variety of disciplines. And these would be to teacher-scholars who longed to serve and strengthen the life of congregations
Sarah Bereza: And tell me what you mean by teacher scholars.
John Witvliet: So these might people who teach in colleges seminaries, universities, people of faith who want to serve congregations, but they might be serving not only in Christian colleges and seminaries, but in any academic context, but whose work in sociology or ethnomusicology or theology or political science or the sciences has something to say about congregational life and especially the worship life of the community. And part of what we’re interested in there is to create context in which scholars can really reflect on what it means to have the church as their audience and then again, creating the conditions under which people in congregations can learn to listen to church-loving scholars for deep wisdom. And there’s a lot of communication that we need to learn how to have those conversations more robustly.
Sarah Bereza: Thank you for this conversation.
John Witvliet: Thanks so much.
