Pentecost

I am a church musician in a church that follows the liturgical calendar. According to the tradition of the church, this Sunday is Pentecost Sunday. It marks the time forty days after the resurrection of Christ, when the Holy Spirit came and the church was established.

A lot of sermons will be preached this weekend about Pentecost, and many will focus on the attributes commonly ascribed to the Holy Spirit. When I was growing up in the 1970s, a lot of churches were struggling as they determined how to react to a rise in "Pentecostalism". People were exhibiting the more spectacular of the "gifts" of the Holy Spirit. They were speaking in unknown tongues, prophecying, seeing visions, and all sorts of "gifts" that made the people who were sitting near them in church pretty uncomfortable.

As music educators and church musicians, we deal with the idea of "giftedness" on a daily basis. We advocate musical training and understanding for everyone, but we also recognize that some people possess musical gifts, or talents, that make them "VIPs" within our musical organizations. Many within the church believe that those talents, or gifts, have come from the Holy Spirit, and should be used to glorify God.

I think Pentecost gives us a good reminder that our time might be well-spent if, instead of looking for spectacular and controversial exhibitions of the arrival and presence of the Holy Spirit, we sought to identify the musical giftedness of the people in our congregations. Once identified, they give us the opportunity to practice good stewardship of those gifts as we lead and teach the gifted. Our Pentecost celebration takes place on one Sunday each calendar, but our stewardship of the gifts the Holy Spirit gives must be our task throughout the year.

As church musicians our real task is stewardship. We are mistaken if we think that our job is determining the musical taste of the congregation, although if you listen to our conversations with one another, you might think that musical taste is our primary concern. God has been worshiped for many millennia before modern musical understandings, and will continue to be worshiped when our current ideas have faded.

Our task is more rewarding and healthy for us and for the church if we strive to identify the musical gifts of the congregation, and create an environment in which the church learns to be excellent stewards of those gifts. And it is likely that a side-effect of that effort will be a steady rise in the appreciation of musical compositions we consider to be of high quality and profound meaning. Promoting good stewardship of our church's gifts is God-centered. Promoting our own musical taste is self-centered.