Hey, church pianists and organists, do you happen to know just how unique you are?
Music ministers statewide agree that finding good church pianists and especially organists is not an easy job anymore.
“An organist is next to impossible to find,” said Keith Hibbs, director of the office of worship leadership and church music for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM). “It’s like you’re a specialty item. You can almost name your own ticket anywhere anybody needs one.”
Rick Willis, music minister for 25 years at Bellevue Baptist Church, Gadsden, said, “If you’re a [church] that uses piano and has a pianist play congregational music, the good ones are getting fewer and fewer and harder and harder to find.”
“It’s getting harder and harder to find people that can just come in and play a variety of music and can do it well,” he said. “I’ve heard this all over the state.”
But according to Hibbs, the reason is simple.
“There are fewer people taking piano lessons than when I was growing up,” he said.
Willis agreed.
“It concerns me even in our own church,” he said. “We have just a few (youth) that are even taking piano lessons. That’s kind of sad because of course, you can pretty much do a whole worship service and have your whole services prerecorded, and we do a lot of that. But I still like live music.”
The SBOM is concerned enough about live worship music to hold an annual keyboard festival each November in locations all over Alabama.
Participants, who range from school age to young adult, play hymns, scales and other things typically studied with a piano teacher for a judge who gives them feedback.
“It’s not a competition. It’s an encouragement … if they’re taking piano to use their talent in a worship setting in a local church,” Hibbs said.
For more information about the festival, visit www.alsbom.org or call 1-800-264-1225.
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