Many individuals over the years have asked me what makes a good hymn — of course, both music and text. Melodies that last use a lot of stepwise movement, combined with the occasional leap of four or five notes. There is no better melody than “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” which opens with a drop of four notes and then runs back up the scale of that interval and then back down again — very easy to hear and very easy to sing. Not all melodies are created equal, and if a melody is weak and sentimental, we’ll enjoy it for awhile, but it won’t stick around.

But hymns that last also require good text that is multi-layered. I sang hymns like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and “The Church’s One Foundation” for many years without realizing their scriptural basis. But once I began to study that scriptural underpinning, every phrase began to take on extra meaning because it echoed with the scriptural context of the phrase.

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In early March 2005, the much-anticipated arrival of the Richards, Fowkes & Co. Opus 14 pipe organ became a reality.

Dozens of volunteers worked tirelessly for two days to unload pipes and the thousands of pieces that make up the case work and inner workings of the instrument from the large truck which had carried the precious cargo from Tennessee. A smaller truck had delivered hundreds of pipes the previous month, and it soon appeared that every nook and cranny of the sanctuary building held a portion of this magnificent instrument.

In less than a week, the framework of the case appeared on the wall, and in two weeks’ time, a few of the pipes were sounding.

The organ was played in public for the first on Easter Sunday, March 27, 2005, to escort the children out to their church school classes. From that humble beginning, the many different voices of the instrument began to emerge on an almost weekly basis as Bruce Fowkes painstakingly voiced each of the nearly 3,500 pipes. The culmination of this nearly year-long process occurred with the dedicatory recital on Jan. 15, 2006.
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