about billie bell

Music has been a significant part of my life since childhood.  Playing hymns for congregational singing at church starting at age 10 provided the stimulus for a lifelong interest in church music.   At age 18 during my first year of college, I became fascinated with classical organ repertoire, particularly J.S. Bach, organ music of the Renaissance, and 19th century music from the great French cathedrals. 

Although I was already on a career path in Business, the organ was my first love and by a stroke of luck, I was able to study organ for a year at Eastern Kentucky University with a very young organ teacher who later attained the acclaim she was due as a recitalist and renowned organist at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul Minnesota, Nancy Davis Lancaster.

My organ studies continued with private teachers for the rest of my life.  My process for selecting my next teacher has been to go to organ concerts, find someone who plays expressively and exhibits joy and humor in their performance, and then to approach them and beg them to take me as a student. As I approached retirement, it was important for me to continue learning.  Since I had longed to learn but had never formally studied jazz theory and keyboard styles, I enrolled in Berklee College of Music and earned a couple of certificates, and ultimately have come to play with a couple of jazz ensembles and a rock band.

For a number of years, I served as organist or music director on a part time basis.  I have served in a wide range of churches, both denominationally and geographically.  Being part of worship in the Christian Church, Presbyterian Church, Episcopal Church and UCC provides a wide range of church music styles and hymns.  I have played and led music in several churches in New Hampshire as well as Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Hawaii, as my family and I moved to accommodate career changes.

During this time, I balanced a music career with a business and accounting career that eventually led me to the software development business, where I spent 30 years as a financial systems analyst, software team manager, and program manager.   Now retired from that career, I find that the people management and change management skills I learned from working for good corporations (Intuit, Fidelity, and Software International) are invaluable in the Church Music Ministry domain. 

As a program manager, I led and coordinated the work of several people who were not my direct reports, and I find that is surprisingly similar to working with people in the church.  Change management is a ground zero skill in the software business, particularly in the decades since 1980 when having to learn a new technology every week was barely an exaggeration.   Being comfortable with and learning new technologies in music has never been more important than it has been in the past few months as we face the challenges of the pandemic.

To me, success of the Music Ministry is measured by these things:

·   The congregation sings hymns with enthusiasm

·   All meditative music opens the hearts of the congregation to spiritual enlightenment

·   Choir members of all generations cherish the contribution of themselves and others and value their development as musicians

·   The extended community views the church as synonymous with vitality, enrichment, and the energy of the Holy Spirit

In this life-altering time of the pandemic, new additional success criteria has emerged that will help us weather the current isolation and will also provide new ways of expressing our faith and connecting with our congregation beyond the church building:

·  The congregation finds new ways to express their faith through music during worship, incorporating new and rejuvenated skills and talents along with or in place of singing

·  We become stewards of technology and social media, discovering and promoting the use of new tools that help us communicate more broadly and more timely, compensating for the 2-dimension aspect of technology that can limit our personal interaction.

All in all, this is the best time of my life, and I feel that all of the people I have met and all of the things I have learned bring a joy to this time and place that can be discovered simply by engaging an open heart and mind.