"A Marvelous Starting Point": Davenport's St. Mark Lutheran Church Celebrates New Organ with Concert

When the original pipe organ at St. Mark Evangelical Lutheran Church in Davenport was removed in 1969 and replaced with an electronic organ, the shift was meant to be temporary.

But the temporary has a way of taking hold, and the “interim” instrument lasted until 2003.

Now, as the culmination of a sanctuary renovation and a component of the church’s strategic-planning process, the congregation has a new pipe organ. The organ has been used in services since Palm Sunday and will be featured in a concert by Michael Burkhardt on Sunday, June 4.

 

Ellen Bowlin, the church’s director of music for the past 18 years, beamed as she called the organ a “dream come true.” Bowlin has two advanced degrees in organ performance, and her command of the instrument was evident when she sat down and played without sheet music on Friday. Any pipe organ dominates a sanctuary, but one that’s played well is transcendent – thunderous but also sublime.

“Worship is supposed to move people to deeper faith and a deeper sense of ministry,” Bowlin said, when asked about how the organ contributes to the church’s mission. “I think it can do that.”

Burkhardt’s performance will be an opportunity for the community to see the new organ in action, the first of a series of concerts showcasing the new instrument. Burkhardt, a composer and educator, has been praised for his “accessible” and “expressive” works, and his educational writing was called a “major contribution to the music curriculum for Christian schools and church choir education.”

This weekend’s concert, though, will be as much about the organ as the player. And the pipe organ has been a dream of many in the congregation for decades. The church organized an organ-study committee in 1992, but an organ fund dating to the mid-1980s already had $60,000 in it. The 1,251-pipe organ, built by Casavant Frères of Québec, cost $350,000.

The organ project doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The $900,000 sanctuary renovation – which included the installation of a $200,000 elevator – was an element of a strategic-planning process that rededicates the church to its neighborhood on Davenport’s west end. The church sits where Third and Telegraph streets meet Elmwood Avenue. (Reader Circulation Manager and Office Administrator Rick Martin is a member of the church.)

The Reverend Paul Tweeten, the church’s senior pastor, said St. Mark decided to focus on its original role as a missional congregation. “We need to reclaim that missional agenda for ourselves in the 21st Century,” he said. “That is to say, St. Mark Church [is] open to a transitional neighborhood, a changing neighborhood. ... St. Mark has got a neighborhood.”

He added that the church already has deep roots in the neighborhood and the community as a whole. “About half the town got married here,” Tweeten said. “They play in the gym. They vote in the gym. There’s a pre-school here that’s open to the neighborhood, that has been for 18 to 20 years. So there are some windows into the community which we need to exploit.” Furthermore, St. Mark has hosted a Churches United food pantry since the 1980s, he said.

Put another way, St. Mark looks at the neighborhood – and not just the church’s membership – as its constituency. “What a missional church means is that all the kids who are here [in western Davenport] are our kids,” Tweeten said. This summer, the church is partnering with Camp Shalom to provide a day-camp program for neighborhood children.

The neighborhood hasn’t always been St. Mark’s emphasis, said Tweeten, who came to the church in 1998. “In the recent history of the church, 50 years ... there were discussions about moving St. Mark out of here, to the northwest,” he said. One concern had been decreasing attendance over the past three decades, he said.

The strategic-planning process started in 1999 and was meant to “complete dreams that were in the picture for a long time,” he said. The church will begin revisiting the strategic plan this week, he added.

One of the goals of the strategic-planning process was to create a worship space that is uplifting and inspirational. “The other space was certainly adequate, but it was tired,” Tweeten said. All of the wood in the sanctuary was replaced, for example. The renovation began in 2003 and was finished within a year; in the meantime, the congregation held services in the gym.

The renovation has made a difference in the tone of worship, Bowlin said. “The singing is more lively,” she said, because of improved acoustics and having singing supported by the organ. “When you have better acoustics, people tend to sing more.”

“Some people are stunned ... by the beauty that surrounds them,” Tweeten said of the new sanctuary.

“The serenity,” Bowlin added.

“It becomes ... one of those places of awe ... the connection with the divine, with God,” Tweeten said. “It’s only a starting point, but it’s a marvelous starting point.”

The strategic-planning process was larger than cosmetic changes to the church, though. Other goals include focusing on youth and young adults and creating a shared approach to leadership, to “move away from pastor-centered functions to empowered laity to do ministry,” Tweeten said.

That includes the parish-visitor program, which was started three or four years ago and now inlcudes 24 members of the congregation who visit homebound people. Giving ministry roles to members of the congregation who aren’t clergy effectively expands the church’s reach.

Tweeten acknowledged that many churches are shifting away from traditional services, embracing praise bands, for instance, to appeal to younger people, while St. Mark installed a pipe organ. It’s important that the church understand that different people prefer different types of worship, he said, but he emphasized that St. Mark is first and foremost a traditional church.

“The church’s mission is not to appeal to the masses. ... It isn’t really to sell ourselves,” he said. “The thing about this [organ] is it’s going to outlast all the trends in the ebb and flow of trends over the next 100 years. ... And there will still be people who want to hear this.”

And Tweeten said that people who used to be active in the church are returning: “People who have been long on the rolls of the church, they’re coming back.”

Michael Burkhardt will perform at 4 p.m. on Sunday, June 4, on the new Casavant organ at St. Mark Evangelical Lutheran Church, 2363 West Third Street in Davenport. For more information, call (563)322-5318.