Church Planting and Redevelopment Second Tuesdays: October 2024

We invite you to join us during our monthly, online connection points. On “Second Tuesdays,” we invite a conversation partner to explore topics related to new ministry, church planting and/or redevelopment. On “Third Thursdays” we host a ProAction Cafe, designed to help leaders clarify their idea and refine action steps.

Tuesday, October 8: “Reimagining Church Music in Church Planting and Revitalization Settings” with Michael Smith, minister of music at St. Thomas’ Church, Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania.

2 p.m. Eastern (1 p.m. Central, 12 p.m. Mountain, 11 a.m. Pacific)

One of the defining aspects of the Anglican and Episcopal traditions is our music and hymnody. Yet, as we are reimagining liturgy, polity, and what it means to be the church for a changing world, it only makes sense that music and the way we sing together is evolving as well. Where are you seeing opportunity and resistance to change in our church’s musical spaces? 

New church-starts and redeveloping congregations, which often lack the tools for traditional Episcopal music (like pipe organs, paid music directors, etc.), provide provocative space in which to ask questions about what music means to us and how it might evolve to continue helping us worship God and love our neighbor.

Michael Smith was raised on the Gospel music and revival songs of his Southern Baptist childhood before taking an organist job at an Anglo-Catholic parish in Birmingham, Alabama (where he first met Katie Nakamura Rengers, staff officer for Church Planting). He is a graduate of Samford University and Yale University.