A few years ago, the National Commission on Music Education issued a report entitled, Growing Up Complete: The Imperative for Music Education. An unprecedented coalition of music educators, performers and composers, retailers, manufacturers, technicians, and publishers had come together in an attempt to focus the nation's attention on the pressing need to include music and other arts at the center of the school curriculum. As they noted, a Core Curriculum without music and the arts is hollow at the core.

Their report stated: "The best teaching has always insisted that music and the other arts be present at the curricular center -- and for an excellent reason. We know that the long march to civilization has been nourished by the arts. The soul of every people is found in its songs, its images, its dances, its stories. Our best educators have always seen in them the energy that synthesizes true learning. The arts are the source of the metaphors that connect thought to experience. They illuminate the human prospect. They are basic to education because they are a universal language; to be illiterate here is to be blind, mute and deaf at the most fundamental level -- that of the spirit."

The report concludes that the way for America's people to "grow up complete" is to include music and the arts at the heart of education.

Now, it seems to me that the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, could easily have made a similar observation about religious faith and worship. For Wesley, the only way to "grow up complete" in the faith was to learn and sing the songs of the church. His brother Charles wrote hundreds and hundreds of hymns, whose purpose was to put theology and Christian faith into forms the people could sing. And in singing them, we grow in Christian maturity, learning more about what we believe as we sing than, some would say, we ever do from what we hear from the pulpit.

It's an observation that puts the relationship between the preacher and church musicians in proper perspective! That's why I'm not going to talk very long this morning. Today, we're asking our choirs and organist to truly invite us to "worship complete." Some have observed, tongue in cheek, that it's perhaps rather cruel to make our choirs work even harder on the day we're thanking them! But, so be it! We love them so much, don't we, that we can never get enough.

Music is at the heart of who we are at FUMC. Our music tells our story. Our music uplifts our spirits. Our music teaches and rebukes. Our music convicts and invites us into prayer. Our music draws us closer to the heart of the Holy of Holies and, in moments of sheer beauty and ecstasy, sometimes even parts the heavens to offer us a glimpse of the face of God.

Without our marvelous musicians, we would not "worship complete." Thanks be to God for them, each and every one, each member of each choir, each bell ringer and instrumentalist, each page turner and choir robe launderer. Our musicians help us worship complete, and today we thank them, we honor them, and now we eagerly await more music, knowing that our spirits will be lifted up and we will leave this place healed, comforted, inspired and restored.

Thanks be to God who gives the gift of music and longs for his people to worship complete, in spirit and in truth. Amen.

NOTES
1. Growing Up Complete: The Imperative for Music Education. The Report of the National Commission on Music Education, March 1991. Music Educators National Conference, Reston, Virginia.