I am the “faith integration mentor” for the School of Music at Azusa Pacific University, where I teach music theory, composition, commercial music and music technology.
I have several problems to solve in this role:
1) How to do it (faith integration in music) myself!
2) How to help my fellow music faculty navigate the institutional pressures to do this in some recognizable way while retaining their own personal integrity and professionalism in teaching.
3) How to communicate to faculty from other disciplines that, for the most part, approaches to faith/learning integration they’ve used won’t work in music, or will work to music’s detriment.
Along the way, some related issues arise:
What IS faith integration in music? Is this any different than the use of music as an evangelistic tool? Or is it just a theology of music?
There seem to be lots of people who are willing to say what faith integration is NOT, but aren’t willing to say just what it IS. Why is this?
Over the next weeks, I expect to put several small postings here, discussing various aspects of all of this.
A starting supposition from which I’ll proceed: music is utterly unique in the disciplines, in several ways, that make it unable to profit very much from approaches to faith integration that are used in other disciplines. Music is already so inherently integrative an activity (more about this in later posts) that in comparsion to already fragmented disciplines, music looks very integrated from the top.
We’ll see how this goes… consider it an experiment in blogging.
I hope I don’t blog down too soon.
