Maestros of Ministry: Their Legacy in the Department of Music and Worship

28  |  MAESTROS of MINI STRY BACKGROUND In spite of living a mere 100 miles from Cedarville University all his life, Charles Clevenger never heard of Cedarville until he was working on a Masters program at the University of Cincinnati. Matson had brought Cedarville’s Concert Chorale to his church to perform. Clevenger was very impressed with the quality of the choir and with the director. Several years later, while working on his doctorate, his advisor called Matson at Cedarville about a possible job for Clevenger. To make a long story short, he was hired by Chair Matson in 1982 and began teaching piano at age thirty-two, completing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the College-Con- servatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati in 1985. He completed a full teaching load by teaching Music Theory and Aural Skills. When Clevenger first came, he planned to stay for only two years. However, he was so impressed with the high level of artistic goals of the Department and by the encouragement of personal ministry to students that he stayed for thirty-five years, extending his expertise for decades. He reflected on the moment, “I was attracted by the fact that we were doing music better than our constituencies wanted.…We were on a trajectory to be better. This put us into a position to be much more than we were.” MINISTRY Dr. Clevenger’s passion for the fine arts and his burden to educate evangelical Christians about the value of studying the arts became one of his significant contribu- tions to the University. When Matson passed the Intro- duction to Humanities baton to Clevenger, he took off with it. He had been hoping for a chance to build a very respectable fine arts program in the context of evangel- ical Christianity. His vision for the general education Introduction to Humanities course was to create a fasci- nating set of videos that would rival The History Channel in quality and interest. In the late 2000s, after eight or nine years of coordination with the Center for Teaching