Living Into Legacy
By Nicholas Lewis, M.Div. ‘13
For the leadership team from Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ, the journey to the ISM Congregations Project Summer Seminar covered only a mile or two. Located in the heart of New Haven’s historic Dixwell neighborhood, the church edifice resides only a few blocks from the etched stone walls that encircle the central campus of Yale University. Named for the central thoroughfare that traverses the neighborhood, Dixwell is predominately an African-American community. Home to a wealth of church congregations from across the denominational spectrum, the Dixwell community is also one of the most economically under-resourced neighborhoods in New Haven.
Each of the three members of the Dixwell Avenue leadership team brought unique experiences of worship and music to the Seminar’s exploration of the 2013 theme, “Hark, the Glad sound: Inviting new and Returning Christians to Worship.” For the senior pastor, the Rev. Dr. Frederick “Jerry” Streets, the “glad sound” was first realized in the church of his childhood on the South Side of Chicago, where members of the youth choir would naturally grow up to become the “young adult choir.” Ultimately, if not inevitably, those very same choir members would ascend into the ranks of the adult choir, the music of the church serving as a vital point of commonality and contact across generational divides.
For Dr. Charles Warner, a longtime member of Dixwell Avenue Congregational UCC, the “glad sound” is evident in and through history, the central vehicle through which cultural vitality and social progress have been made and maintained in the life of his community. His decades-long career as a music educator in New Haven Public Schools has been informed by his reverence for history and his desire to preserve the performance practices of this particular musical culture.
For church musician Ronald Pollard, a skilled pianist, the “glad sound” is manifest in the richness of the myriad musical genres that constitute the corpus of repertoire on offer in the diverse churches of his upbringing and the range of congregations in the Dixwell neighborhood.
For all three, what stands central to their concept of the “glad sound” is the rich and vibrant tradition of black sacred music.
“Testimony can be given in words,” Summer Seminar faculty member Dorothy Bass noted in her opening remarks, “but it is also given presence in art, in song, in gesture.” For the leadership team from Dixwell Church, the vibrant musical legacy of the congregation, preserved and transmitted over time, is a “living testimony” to God and to its historic faith. Promoting black sacred music as a living legacy and testimony—that is, both historically and in contemporary practice—is what the leadership team from Dixwell Church is trying to do through their project.
“Living into Legacy” aims to “document, engage, and promote” the history and practices of black sacred music, as they exist in the various African-American congregational contexts within the broader Dixwell community. In a manner similar to “Story Corps,” Dixwell Church has already begun a process in which members of the congregation interview one other on camera, sharing stories of their own experiences with black sacred music. They also plan to interview musicians and members from other congregations within the community, and, if possible, to document various traditions of performance practice on video. Through the “Living into Legacy” project, Dixwell Church hopes to serve as a cultural curator to the living legacy of black sacred music.
During the Summer Seminar, the leadership team from Dixwell Church worked with Congregations Project faculty member Jimmie Abbington, a leading scholar of African American sacred music. Noting that historical identity is often shaped by what is permissible within a particular congregational context, Dr. Abbington encouraged the Dixwell team to use this project of cultural curatorship as an opportunity to explore processes of congregational identity formation in relation to its musical practices. Dixwell Church is historically somewhat traditional in its worship music, which emphasizes spirituals, anthems, and hymns and follows a policy of “no drums” in worship. This inherited pattern of implicit and explicit “rules” became an indispensable conversation starter about how the congregation positions itself theologically. What might it mean for such a congregation to include drums in its worship, perhaps as a gesture of hospitality to new and returning Christians? How might living into the tension between different kinds of worship music empower prophetic witness and open up avenues of interconnection with communities more broadly conceived?
For the leadership team from Dixwell Church, the ISM Congregations Project Summer Seminar served as an opportunity to gain greater clarity of purpose as they strive towards a greater role of stewardship for and service to the Dixwell community. As a project, “Living into Legacy” holds tremendous potential, not only as a pivotal point of commonality and contact across generational divides, but as a vehicle through which the cultural vitality of black sacred music can be preserved and shared within and for the life of the community.