Music Matters to Pastors-Part 7

Music Matters to Pastors-Part 7

            So far in our discussions of “Music Matters to Pastors” we have considered the larger church that has a regular music staff including a minister of music, pianist, organist, keyboards, and instrumentalists.  These professional musicians need mentoring and personal attention of the pastor.  The church musicians of a small congregation, who are most often volunteers, need even more pastoral attention.  They need musical and spiritual mentoring.  If a pastor is going to mentor these volunteer church musicians who are in many situations also amateur musicians, he is going to need to know more about music than the names of the lines and spaces on a musical score.

             Pastors of a small church will find that their two to four hours of music taken in Bible College or Seminary will grow thin under such conditions.  The fact that most Bible College and Seminary degree programs include so few hours of music sets the pastor of the small church up for failure.  Sacred music is not a priority in the minds of most Department chair persons who develop these programs.

             Also, I wish to add that the few hours of music and or church music classes that formerly were required in degree programs are now often being replaced with fine arts credits like art, drama, and music appreciation.  Although these classes contain nice-to-know information, they are now precluding Music Philosophy in Christian Perspective, Music in the Bible, and many other church music classes which are much more germane to what these pastoral graduates will be doing on the job than the aforementioned fine arts classes.   Would you rather have a pastor who had a deep understanding of music in the Bible and music philosophy in Christian perspective or one who understood sculpture and the history of visual art? 

           What these chair persons fail to realize is that the majority of their ministerial graduates will not pastor a super church or even a large church.  If one were to look at twenty-first century church statistics, most churches now fall in the small to medium size class.  It is also my belief that they fail to recognize that that a Christian university or Bible college education needs to be different than a secular University education.  Although a Christian higher education should have high educational standards, it should be different in that it is permeated with Christian educational thought that is especially relevant to the church.