Whenever the Rev. Carlton Johnson talks about hymns from the heart of the Black church, he feels a responsibility to carry on the tradition of his ancestors. For their hymns are, as W.E.B. Du Bois observed, “the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing born on American soil.”
For a minister of music who’s also a choral music and conducting professor, Tom Trenney is a born storyteller.
During the fourth of his five Routley Lectures delivered to the Presbyterian Association of Musicians’ Worship and Music Conference, Trenney told this story about a man he’s long admired, the Presbyterian pastor and children’s television pioneer Fred Rogers.
The Rev. Dr. Neichelle Guidry opened a recent Festival of Homiletics worship service by singing a hymn she’s returned to often during the pandemic, “We’ll Understand It Better By and By”
LOUISVILLE — Whenever the Rev. Carlton Johnson talks about hymns from the heart of the Black church, he feels a responsibility to carry on the tradition of his ancestors. For their hymns are, as W.E.B. Du Bois observed, “the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing born on American soil.”
Meaningful worship doesn’t necessarily rely on the traditional Presbyterian Sunday morning centerpiece — a well-crafted and carefully-exegeted 20-minute sermon.
Beth Mueller got a note from a man who saw the virtual choir of international peacemakers video she created for the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program and had a question.
“He wanted to know how we got all those people from around the world to sing at the same time on Zoom,” Mueller said, laughing.
The Rev. Richard Avery, half of the Avery and Marsh songwriting duo along with his longtime collaborator Don Marsh, died March 15 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 85.
of Nebraska in 1949, Lois Kroehler heard about a short-term opportunity to travel to Cuba to work as an English language secretary for a Cuban church executive. She had planned to teach Spanish after college and reasoned that a couple years of translation work would improve her Spanish, particularly grammar and vocabulary.
“After those two years, the Cuban church invited me to stay,” Kroehler said in a 1998 interview with Democracy Now!, an independent nonprofit news organization in Washington, D.C. “So, I actually became a missionary at the invitation of the Cuban church.”
Missionary, music teacher and composer, choir director, Christian educator … Lois Kroehler embraced Cuba, and accompanying the Cuban people became her passion. Kroehler died Aug. 4 at age 91.
“Surely,” to quote the hymn composed in 2000 by John Weaver and written by Fred R. Anderson for and about the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church on the occasion of the rededication of its remodeled sanctuary, “the Lord is in this place.”
