What brought you to Cedarville? I grew up in a pastor's home in the 1960s, an interesting time with all that was going on culturally there. I grew up in a time when externals became very important because we [the church] didn't want to be like what was going on in the culture. So you have to work really hard at doing all the right things and looking right. But out of that backdrop of emphasizing externals, I still heard the Gospel and put my faith in Christ. I knew Christ, but there was a lot of confusion about what that looked like. I was still somewhat confused when a friend of mine said, “You gotta come to this place called Cedarville." So my wife and I packed everything up in a U-Haul, and here we came. And when I got here, for me, it was a significant change. It was just a real breath of fresh air for me. How did you grow spiritually at Cedarville? My wife and I basically have just spiritually grown up here. This was the early 1980s, but still, at that time, Cedarville was striving to be biblically conservative, but to be culturally relevant and engage culture, not to be afraid and to separate from culture, which is what I grew up in. And I began to grow and learn about grace. How has worship at Cedarville evolved during your time here, and how have you evolved with it? Well, you know, when I came here, chapel was a piano and an organ and a hymn, one hymn every day, and then we would have what we called back then special music. It was that way for decades until it began to change over 20 years ago when the Student Government Association (SGA) began to use bands. Because of what was going on in our culture, churches began to shift from piano- and organ-driven music to bands with what they called the praise and worship movement. Basically, in chapel we are trying to minister to 18- to 22-year-olds. And so we try to have a musical language that is going to be a common language for that congregation here. When we are talking about the worship culture, most people are thinking music, and I think it's dangerous to say worship equals music because what happens is we begin to worship styles and forms, and that's why music is always controversial. So I think for me, in my 40 years here, it's been an ongoing seeking and struggling to say “What does it really, truly mean to exclusively worship God and not styles and forms?" They'll change. But what is non-negotiable about worship? And so the search is to find that out. 22
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