Nicholas Carrington ’10 serves as Associate Professor of Communication. He earned his PhD in technical communication and rhetoric from Texas Tech University. He sang and ran sound for the jazz band, toured with the Cedarville orchestra, and led chapel bands. The ability to learn through collaboration with other students and mentors made him feel more confident in his abilities. “Cedarville is full of incredibly talented people. I loved getting involved and learning by doing,” he explained. Other students join one of the traveling bands: HeartSong, Resonance, or Rekindle. These groups provide worship sets for churches, camps, and events. Campbell has sung with HeartSong and Resonance and served as the choir director for All the People, a gospel choir organization on campus. “The diversity of what the Lord has given me to do has been so helpful,” she said. She recounted a time on HeartSong where an acoustic set at a Christian camp led to an unplanned and extended time of prayer among the campers and counselors. “I was in awe that the Lord allowed me to have stewardship of singing those words that people needed to hear in that moment.” While the chances to lead on campus are numerous and beneficial, working in a church setting is different. Once worship majors get to senior year, they complete a required internship under the tutelage of a seasoned worship leader in a local church. Chilcote feels this part of the program is vital to preparing students for the church setting. “It’s essential to put into practice what we’ve talked about in the program. Cedarville has a strong worship culture, but it’s not a church worship culture,” he said. “You’ll never have volunteers and musicians the way you do here; you’ll never have systems and structures the way they are here. It’s just different.” In the required internship, students see the three aspects of the program in action. But that experience also reinforces the greatest exhortation from their studies: to lead worship well, students must become lead worshipers. That idea has been at the core of the worship program since the beginning, when it first started to grow from fertile soil. Now that the undergraduate major is in full bloom and graduate programs have also been added, the emphasis on being a strong worshiper remains the heartbeat. “Music is the biggest skill you’re going to use, but it’s not going to be the foundation,” Chilcote said. “You don’t want people to be better musicians because of how you lead worship; you want people to be better worshipers.” In the required internship, students see the three aspects of the program in action. But that experience also reinforces the greatest exhortation from their studies: to lead worship well, students must become lead worshipers. 29
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