Three church positions in a year?

It’s not that I can’t keep a job. Rather, for several years I have been dividing my time between my home in Boone, N.C., and that of my wife in Des Moines, Iowa. Conclusion: I can’t serve any one church regularly. So I have fun running around and helping this or that church from the organ bench week to week. I learn a lot about how folks are doing things – even if that research is sometimes horrifying. I’m glad for the education.

For much of this past spring semester 2025, I helped out as supply organist at First Baptist Church, Boone, N.C. Their organist retired, and I have enjoyed playing there and also spending some extra time with one of their problem choir members, otherwise known as my sister. The organ is a two-manual Reuter, Op. 2180, and the chapel houses the church’s former organ, a Möller double Artiste, Op. 10052. In the main church, there are no acoustics to speak of, and the padded pews do little more than foster a good nap, judging from the number of nappers I observe during sermons. But what a wonderful flock of music lovers and society servers. And if the Dear Reader has already been wondering how the words ‘Baptist’ and ‘organ’ can end up in the same sentence these days, wonder no more. This church has no screens and therefore no band and no intention of getting them (for now, that is. At present, the church is between pastors.). The choir loves to sing and learning how to sing better, and it keeps a stable of Appalachian State University students. The congregation is full of musical talent, and the handbell choir is healthy. And the church is the last one standing on the edge of the Appalachian State Univ. campus, and its student ministry is strong. Go check them out.

As of this writing, summer 2025, I am embarking on my first position in a cathedral. Through August 10, I’ll serve as interim organist for the Cathedral Church (Episcopal) of St. Paul in downtown Des Moines. Two Eucharists each Sunday and the privilege of working with a semi-professional choir. I am even official, having been assigned an email address on the Cathedral’s server! The organ is a sizeable Casavant, Op. 3719, and there is a 25-bell manual carillon. The Cathedral is searching for a director of music, so check them out, too. Dean, Bishop, and all clergy are welcoming and affirming, and there is a kind and music-loving congregation. There is also an attentive interim organist, who is seeing to some lingering maintenance issues with the organ and is composing a how-to manual for the next organist. St. Paul’s also has seasonal monthly Evensongs, society outreach, local beautification projects, Ascension service and soup dinner, etc. Downtown churches tend not to fare very well these days, so go and support them, if you’re around.

And then when I get back to western N.C. this fall, I’ll assume my annual seasonal duties as organist for All Saints Episcopal Mission in Linville, N.C., through their season that ends on the final Sunday of September. I just show up with a second musician of any flavor, play lots and lots of hymns and service music for Eucharist, and go to lunch. Another music- and organ-loving congregation, and I play on a sizeable Allen that has been expertly tended to and voiced by Jim Ingram. I have enjoyed visiting with guest clergy and celebrating far fewer than six degrees of separation most times. I even met Tom Roberts, son of the Rev. Thomas Roberts, who hired my mentor Richard Forrest Woods in Houston way back in 1972.

Now after all that, I wonder what will be next. Anyone need any help from the organ bench?

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 11

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.

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Life with Dick

During my tenure at St. John the Divine in Houston, we did the Fauré Requiem one Good Friday. Dick had studied the work during his time in Paris with Fauré’s pupil Nadia Boulanger, and he told me that ever since then, he had had a perfect performance of it in his head. But he knew that a perfect performance was not to be had. He knew that he and the choir could only strive for perfection yet never achieve it, but I don’t think he ever gave himself permission to be human. Nowadays, accepting our limitations and simply doing our very best in the presence of God are standard fare in books on church music, but Dick never quite got there on the acceptance-of-our-limitations part.

Dick also had a ‘perfect’ Holy Eucharist in his imagination, from prelude all the way through the liturgy and the postlude, but he was always disappointed week after week when it never was achieved. He was always a little peeved after church. I once asked him how he felt each Sunday after having led hundreds of people in traditional Episcopal liturgy. He thought that was a ridiculous question and sarcastically answered that it made him “feel on top of the world.” Although I still sympathize with him on the elements he accused of marring a perfect Eucharist [and there were always plenty, a few of which included the celebrant using the wrong words or otherwise stumbling over the liturgy, the choir missing a cue, the organ having a cipher, one of us playing a wrong note, the sermon being useless, a microphone not being turned up in time, a small child screaming, an old lady coughing for fifteen minutes before finally leaving the room, the crucifer not holding the cross straight, a candle burning out, etc.], today I would disagree with Dick over this hypothetically perfect – and fully unattainable – Eucharist. I think he was howling at the moon and that it just made him unnecessarily tired.

While composing this biography, as I reflected on Dick’s stated desire for that elusive, perfect Eucharist, I realized that St. John the Divine was actually quite liturgically conservative in those days, just like Dick – perhaps more than he admitted. The clergy and servers took liturgy seriously; their movements and actions were well planned and smoothly executed. With very few exceptions, they were always vested and fully clothed underneath; long-sleeved shirts, ties, dresses, no jeans, no sandals. Celebrants celebrated with all the right words for the most part, usually missing only a word or two when they tried to recite liturgy from memory without having practiced first. Celebrants began Eucharist with the opening acclamation rather than with that most maddeningly human-centered and garden-party-oriented ‘Good morning.’ Even at the announcements following the Peace, rector Larry Hall never said, ‘Good morning.’ Rather, he always welcomed the assembly in the name of Jesus Christ. Neither did he use announcement time following the Peace to read out announcements that were already in print. He underscored the important ones, encouraged everyone to digest the others on their own time, and got back to the liturgy (exceptions noted at the end of this post). Upon reflection on those days, I truly appreciate that rector’s approach to liturgy. Everything was quite proper. Even the contemporary service, then just in its infancy, was faithful to every word of Rite II, with only the music, dress code, and sense of complete propriety relaxed.

Dick and I agreed that ‘Good morning’ betrays an unsettling willingness to interrupt timeless liturgy with temporal tripe. The first words out of the celebrant’s mouth, whether ‘Blessed be God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit,’ or, ‘Good morning!’ will set the tone for the rest of the hour, like it or not. Even the congregation of liturgically rock-solid Rite I Christ Church Cathedral in Houston in those days proved that just about any congregation may eventually go where it is consistently steered. During the 1990s, the Cathedral had gotten a new dean, who was into the ‘good morning’ nonsense. It wasn’t long before he began waiting for a response in kind – and got it. Before you know it, the Cathedral congregation was responding enthusiastically, “Good morning!” to begin Rite I each week, and never batting an eye. They also absorbed without a whimper that dean’s affinity for Rite II, which he not-so-subtly sneaked in the back door by celebrating Holy Baptism as often as possible, thereby forcing Holy Communion into Rite II on those Sundays. Dick would have blown a gasket to see liturgy turned into such a personal playground. Clyde Holloway and Bruce Power at the Cathedral fixed it for themselves by retiring/resigning, and one of them even returned after that dean was gone.

But I digress.

Another example of congregations being willingly misled is in the printing of hymn texts in service leaflets or projected onto screens, diabolical practices that started in the late 1990s in churches everywhere. Hymn texts alone were now printed or projected as some sort of perceived convenience. But musical notation and a multitude of additional information for each hymn were now absent, and congregations everywhere who followed this practice began to regress into the most musically ignorant in modern Christianity.

Dick would have lost his mind at all this, and I nearly have. I have maintained all along that musical ignorance aside, there is little that looks more ridiculous than a white-collar congregation singing sturdy hymns of the faith not from the sturdy repository of music called the hymnal but rather from a flimsy service pamphlet they are going to throw away upon exiting the building.

But I digress again.

Despite the propriety of the liturgy on a general level at St. John’s, the time of announcements following the Peace was often a cringeworthy wild card. We never knew what was coming, whether a small troupe doing a silly Rally Day skit or the Senior Warden singing a stylized rendition of Happy Birthday to the rector. [True story. In 1992, the Senior Warden sang ‘He’s turning 50 in the morning’ to the tune ‘Get me to the church on time.’] Apparently, we musicians were the only ones bothered by that shift in tone during otherwise fairly respectable liturgy. Since the liturgy was so dignified and the shenanigans so base, the contrast was that much more cringeworthy. I often wanted to slip out of the room or crawl under something. And both Dick and I felt extra-conspicuous to be observing all that silliness while vested. We felt like we had shown up at a crawfish boil in tuxedos.

Next time: Dick’s complaints

I work among freaks, apparently

I once heard from a prospective student from Virginia. He had been looking for a college in Virginia where he could double major in statistics and organ. He found more than one, but they never returned his messages of inquiry. So he started looking across the state line and found me. The rest is history – he came to Appalachian and double majored as planned.

What I didn’t know at the time is that all other things being equal, what tipped his scales toward Appalachian was that not only did I respond to his inquiry, but I also responded the same day. Well, imagine that. E-mail – what a concept. I told this story to my colleagues in a full faculty meeting one day, to illustrate our ongoing commitment to students and to encourage everyone that just answering a freaking email could get some fine students coming our way. What a surprise.

In this age of enhanced, instant and constant communication, how is it that messages still go unanswered? How can a college expect to survive if it doesn’t respond to tuition-paying business knocking on the door? How can a college hate teaching so much that it ignores prospective students coming in?

All my colleagues and I love hearing from students new and former. We are committed to them and to their success. We say so in our vision/mission statements, and we practice what we preach. And when any of us travel and visit with counterparts at other institutions, we are always alarmed by their situation and simultaneously amazed at our own. How did we all land in a place where upper administration listens to its faculty and where our dean supports us with every fiber, every word, and every dollar available? That’s probably not answerable, so we just enjoy it and exercise it and keep paying it forward.

I have lost track of the number of times someone has expressed pleasantly-surprised thanks that I returned their email or phone call so promptly. Honestly, I just don’t know any other way to do business. Communication is king, and I insist on it from all students. I have blogged before about not receiving return messages in the other direction – that’s not so pleasant.

My school of music just had its ten-year review for reaccreditation. I told the reviewers, “The most truthful thing we should (but can’t) put into our recruiting materials is, ‘Come major in music here, because we’re nowhere NEAR as dysfunctional as everybody else.’”

That is what keeps me showing up for work. Truly I work among freaks. And my colleagues work with one, too.

on Richard Forrest Woods – Part 10

This is one of many installments of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.

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The Choir of St. John the Divine, Houston

My first experience with the choir was at my first regular Thursday evening rehearsal in 1990. From day one, I saw how dedicated they were to Dick. I saw how dedicated they were to great music. I saw how dedicated they were to fine liturgy. And I saw how dedicated they remained, even as ‘renewal music’ gained ground all around them. This choir was a collective workhorse, and their love for each other and for all that Dick taught them never flagged:

"[It was quite the] … impact that Richard Woods’s friendship, example, musicianship, and professionalism made on a 23-year-old fresh out of LSU grad school. It seems like yesterday. I’m always happy to share interactions about Dick Woods. He was a force!”

“What a talented, dedicated, humorous combination of a man he was. I miss him … and all of the individual choir members we were blessed to spend time with praising God, sharing beautiful music, and nurturing souls. … I am always saddened when I remember how sick and how heartbroken Dick was at the end. He gave so much and loved so much. … No one that was fortunate enough to know him can ever forget him. He shaped all of our lives, for the better, and made us all better musicians along the way. What beautiful music we made. I always felt like he deserved so much more than we were able to give him in return. I truly loved that man.”

“Dick was able to get more out of a choir, perhaps even beyond his own technical abilities. It was just the way he brought everyone together around the music.” 

The sextons always had coffee prepared for Thursday evening choir rehearsal. The choir would arrive early to chat and visit, and then Dick would call out, “Let’s go, please!” to begin rehearsal. [“Let’s go, please!” was going to be the subtitle of this biography, if published.] There was a break about midway through for more coffee and conversation, and then the second half. Dick was all business during rehearsal but was all in for the visiting before, in between, and following. Dinner with the inner circle often followed rehearsal. I was honored to have been invited.

Dick insisted on a clear, vibrato-free sound from his sopranos and altos. He also required a certain dress code when the choir processed in the aisle: black flat shoes for the women, no dangly earrings, and modest hairstyles. He put in writing these and other policies prescribing how to process, how to hold one’s folder, how much space to leave between pairs in procession, how to acknowledge the altar and turn into the stalls somewhat sharply, etc. I have followed suit with similar rules for my own choirs.

Dick and the choir stayed busy. They went on tours to England in 1982 and to Eastern Europe in 1990, the repertoire for each of which they recorded stateside. They also presented occasional Evensong at sister parishes in Houston and sang a major work every Good Friday. This choir embodied the fact that a church choir is probably going to be their director’s Sunday School – and this choir was that perfect Sunday School class. They embodied the importance of gathering in church with other human beings and to having fellowship one with another. Worshipping God was one thing, but doing so among kindred spirits was indispensable, and they knew that.

The choir was populated by many strong personalities who wasted no time making their approvals and disapprovals known to the rector. They didn’t care so much how the choir was treated, but they were quite the watchdogs for Dick’s treatment. They stood up for him, and I know he appreciated that. Thanks to Dick, they were also respectably well-versed in liturgical matters, and they deserved – as the tithing parishioners most of them were – to be heard as lay experts in such matters.

Dick and others of us would go out for dinner and drinks after Thursday rehearsals and for lunch after church on Sundays. I developed a ravenous craving not only for the food but also for that fellowship, and I have never stopped organizing similar small groups in my succeeding positions. Every time I go out with folks following a rehearsal or performance or service, I think of the St. John’s choir. Every time I go to a British pub or to get Mexican, I think of those days. That is no exaggeration.

Next time: Life with Dick