“Hello, bienvenidos, you must be Michael, you can teach piano right?” Those were our Ecuadorian ministry host’s first words to me.
Honestly, it kinda creeped me out. I wasn’t aware that AIM sent our profile information to all our ministry hosts. Doing music ministry for 2 months in a row now made more sense.
The first month, I was very half-hearted about music ministry. I was teaching one child, and I saw this as “free piano lessons” instead of a ministry opportunity, and I treated it as such. However, those words, spoken with such emphasis and excitement, struck a chord in my heart. I didn’t understand why he was so excited. To me, it was just notes on an instrument, no more.
The following Sunday, I attended their church and participated in worship. It was then that I started to put the pieces together. They were playing songs that I recognized. Songs from Hillsong and Bethel and some older music.
Later that week I noticed that they weren’t preparing their music like we do in the States. Personally, I listen to Pandora till I find a song that sounds good, buy the sheet music, and within a day I have a worship song ready to roll. If it didn’t work, I’d just play some Bethel in the background and ad lib the rest of it. My piano student was using Youtube tutorials, the pastor/guitarist referenced the song on Youtube.
They really wanted to worship, but their only means of doing so was to copy, as best as possible, what other artists had already done; tough luck if the song hadn’t already been translated into Spanish and the chords adjusted accordingly.
At that moment this ministry became real to me. I wasn’t “teaching piano to kids”, I was enabling others to lead their churches in worship. I had been struggling with whether the extremely basic worship keyboarding patterns were really “bringing my best” in worship; and if this was actually a ministry or if they just didn’t have anywhere else to put me. However, when I saw how hard they were working to get something that has been so easily accessible to me, I was humbled.
Lord, let the song of my heart be pleasing to your ears.
