Getting ready for the journey with jazz conference...

NOTE:  Dear old friends in the Cleveland area ~ please know that while I would love to see you all, it probably won't happen this time around as our schedule is very tight.  What's more, I am working this even hard for contacts related to my 2015 sabbatical so... if we can't squeeze drinks in I pray you will understand, ok?

Four members of our music team will join me this Wednesday in a trip to my old stomping grounds in Cleveland.  Our destination in the headquarters of the United Church of Christ and the "Jazz for the Journey" symposium. (check it out @ http://www.ucc.org/jazzjourney/) 

I try to stay on top of creative spirituality events but haven't been able to work on anything for a few years.  I would have made this year's IAM (International Arts Movement) Encounter in NYC but I was way too focused on the birth of my grandson. So I trust that this event will be valuable.  I want to make some connections with other United Church of Christ jazz people and also do some networking in anticipation of my sabbatical in 2015.

This morning I spent a few hours trying to articulate the rationale and design for my sabbatical.  This is what I've come up with so far:

Part A:  Program Rationale and Design (1)

This sabbatical is intended to:

·      Nourish my deeper knowledge and practice of “jazz spirituality”

·      Create an extended time and space for physical rest, exercise and spiritual renewal

After 30 years of full-time, ordained Christian ministry in the parish setting, I am tired physically and emotionally.  I have served four distinctive congregations during this time including urban and suburban faith communities in the desert southwest, the industrial American heartland and now small-town New England.  A central reality in each of these congregations involved conflict resolution as well as developing and implementing plans for congregational renewal.  And while this has been genuinely satisfying, it has also taken its toll.  Because I look forward to another 10 years of ministry, I sense the time has come for me to deepen my practices of self-care with an extended period of rest, reflection and renewal.

Throughout my ministry I have been drawn to music and the creative arts as my way of both expressing and encountering intimacy with the Spirit of God as well as sharing safe space for others to embrace their own creativity in the context of community.  This has included forming a variety of youth and mixed generation bands, choirs and ensembles, partnering with local visual artists to create informal galleries and workshops, using our various sanctuaries for community performances and art installations and serving on regional advisory boards that are committed to strengthening the creative economy.

I am the creative director (and guitarist/bassist/vocalist) for Between the Banks – our 8 person folk/rock/jazz church ensemble – and bass player for the Sister City Jazz Ambassadors – a 5 person ensemble exploring peace-making through music.  I currently serve on the Pittsfield Arts Advisory Board.  Additionally, I work in close collaboration on the creation of jazz liturgies with the Director of Music at First Church, Carlton Maaia II, who is an accomplished classical and jazz performer and arranger.

For the past five years, I have been drawn increasingly towards the jazz tradition for musical expression and spirituality. I have started to study performance on the upright bass as my primary instrument. I have begun to listen to the breadth and depth of jazz – sacred and secular – for music that nourishes the soul in worship.  And as jazz critic Stanley Crouch has written, I sense that jazz erases any distinction between the so-called sacred and secular in a uniquely American way. Nevertheless authentic jazz continues to be marginalized as a form of music suitable for worship in the United States much to the determent of a congregation’s worship aesthetic as well as their spiritual maturation.  Crouch puts it well:

I am quite sure that jazz is the highest American musical form because it is the most comprehensive, possessing an epic frame of emotional and intellectual reference, sensual clarity and spiritual radiance. But if it wasn’t for the blues, there would be no jazz as we know it, for the blues first broke most clearly with the light and maudlin nature of popular music... that is why it had such importance – not because it took wing on the breath, voice and fingers of an embattled ethnic group, but because the feelings of the form came to magnetize everything from slavery to war to exploration to Indian fighting to natural disaster, from the woes of the soul lost in unhappy love to the mysteries, terrors and celebrations of the life that stretched north from the backwoods to the steel and concrete monuments of the big city.  It became, therefore, the aesthetic hymn of the culture, the twentieth-century music that spoke of and to modern experience in a way that no music of European or Third World origin ever has. (Stanley Crouch, “Blues to Constitution:  A Long Look,” The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, p.160)

This application, therefore, proposes the following three-part plan for rest, reflection and renewal:

·      Part One includes two weeks of travel, rest, worship and conversation at three jazz and liturgy centers:  a) Scarritt-Bennett Conference Center in Nashville, TN where my Director of Music, Carlton Maaia II, has been part of a three year experiment with weekly jazz vespers (http://www. scarrittbennett.org/programs/ves.aspx ; b) Canterbury, House in Ann Arbor, MI where a Jazz Mass has been taking place for the past 20 years (http://www. canterburyhouse.org/) ; and c) St. Peter’s Church in New York City, the ‘Jazz Church” that has been integrating jazz and liturgy since the 1960s. http://www.Saint peters.org/ jazz/jazz-vespers/ )

·      Part Two is a three month residency in Montreal for the study and practice of the upright bass. My goal is to listen, learn about and practice music from the depth of the jazz tradition.  Using recordings and live performances – including the Montreal Jazz Festival – I will saturate myself in this art form aesthetically and prayerfully. It is my goal to become a more accomplished bass player while enriching my knowledge of jazz resources for use in worship and spiritual growth.

·      Part Three embraces the spiritual disciplines of prayer, rest and exercise in my favorite North American city: Montreal.  It is not fully clear to me why I am energized and nourished by this place, but it is true.  I am fascinated with their commitment to intentional bilingual living. I am eager to experience living and speaking in a culture outside my own. I am intrigued by the profound artistic vitality which includes the longest running Jazz Festival in North America. And I am curious how the churches have adapted to the rapid secularization that has presented blessings and curses since the Quiet Revolution disestablished the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s.  In a word, this place makes my soul sing.

Part A:  Program Rationale and Design (2)

In over thirty years of ministry I have never experienced an extended time away for rest and renewal.  I am ready.  In 2002, while serving Rincon Congregational United Church of Christ, I began the Doctor of Ministry program at San Francisco Theological Seminary which included two six week residencies at San Anselmo, CA.  This time away from my congregation, however, included vacation time. So, while I valued this experience, it did not afford me time for inten-tional rest and renewal. 

Upon completion of my dissertation – While My Guitar Gently Weeps: A Spirituality of Rock and Roll – I concluded my ministry in Arizona and began serving the congregation in Pittsfield, MA. As a part of our negotiated contract, both the church leadership and I agreed that after seven years of service a sabbatical would be valuable.  So, now that I am entering my seventh year at First Church, we have initiated conversation and planning for my renewal time to take place in 2015.

When I first arrived in Pittsfield, the congregation was struggling for an identity for the future.  Once the theological and cultural home of the community’s elite, changes in culture, demo-graphics and regional business needs rendered the old identity as moot:  what was the Spirit saying to this congregation in the 21^st century?  With careful attention to spiritual growth and a reinvention of Sunday worship – utilizing the integration of the performing arts in worship and community service – First Church is no longer adrift.  With 80-100 people regularly participating in worship, we now have a new story and mission in our changing community.  Worship is now driven by a radical blending of music, art, poetry, hymns and Scripture that includes jazz, pop, rock, folk as well as the sacred music of world culture.

Each year we also host three unique music and poetry celebrations for the Pittsfield region that celebrate and support key local community ministries (i.e. Pittsfield Area Council of Congregation’s Emergency Fuel Assistance program, the Berkshire Environmental Action Team’s Housatonic River clean-up workdays and the Christian Center’s emergency food program.) These concerts include local church youth along with some of the finest local jazz and folk musicians in the Berkshires. We are a strong, growing and vibrant community of faith with a clear understanding of current mission.

There is more to write - and next week some of this team will meet with me to do some dreaming and writing concerning the congregation's goals for this sabbatical.  More as it unfolds...