Liturgy and Music for Mission — Archpriest Sergei Glagolev
The following article closely follows the text of two keynote lectures given by the author in the late 1980s at the Summer Liturgical Institute of Music and Pastoral Practice, an annual event held at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York, between the years 1978 and 2008. With the flourishing of new Orthodox missions in North America, the problems and solutions addressed in this article are as relevant today as they were forty years ago.
When David Drillock and I first met with Fr. Alexander Schmemann ten years ago to lay out a plan for the Summer Liturgical Institute, we had in mind particularly a gathering of people already engaged in parochial responsibilities—pastors, educators, administrators, musicians—for the purpose of intensely sharing their parish realities in an atmosphere of worship and theological reflection. We proposed having a “keynote” theme for the main lectures, agreeing that the “practical” sessions for the rest of the day must be rooted in the theological insights that would reveal the applications of a given lnstitute’s central theme to the specific areas of concern.
Well and good! We hear a keynote aspect of the theme; then the pastors go off to discuss pastoring, musicians go off to sing, and the people in the middle have to decide which of the two tracks might be for them—hoping not to blunder, because the rule was that one can’t switch tracks in midstream.
This year I was invited to give one of the main theme lectures. Thus, I’m not talking just to the musically gifted or the singing specialists. The challenge is exciting because I don’t ever remember talking about church music as anything other than a liturgical discipline in a theological context. The way we worship inevitably raises issues that pastors and educators must grapple with in order to grasp what sacred singing is all about; what we sing, why we sing, the way we sing, who sings, and where—these are liturgical problems of considerable pastoral, didactic and parochial proportions. Certainly this is the case in new missions! Singing is a sonant image that reflects a perception of ourselves in church. This is a matter of iconological concern. Given the confusion of cultures in an absence of an indigenous Orthodox culture in North America, liturgy for mission must approach music as an intensely pastoral question. Pastors and educators cannot leave music to be the specialty solely of musicians.
