This is an exciting time for music at St. Stephen’s. The old pipe organ is being carefully removed from the chamber and is on its way to a new home at the Sawyer residence. In addition, the Allen electronic organ that served as our interim instrument this past year, has been sold and is off to a new church to continue its service in aiding the worship of God.

At the same time, the new Rodgers instrument has arrived and is currently being voiced to suit our space. The customized voicing process is an amazingly complex process by which every note for every single set of pipes (it may be a digital instrument, but it still has virtual “pipes”) is adjusted for volume, tone, attack (the huffing noise that precedes the actual note, caused in a real organ by the air first hitting the pipe), and tuning.

Communications is vital for any community, and that is especially true churches such as our own because it allows us to stay connected with one another, share important information about aspects of our common life, spread the word about upcoming events and programs, and most importantly, it is how we tell the story of our sacred community to each other and to the world.

The first parish phone tree left something to be desired.

It used to be that all you needed for good church communications was to drop a newsletter in the mail on a regular basis (once a month, or even once a week for large parishes), and maybe put together a phone tree if you had news that needed to get out quickly.

Times have changed, however. Newsletters take a lot of staff time to write and produce, and with tighter budgets and fewer hours, it is time that staff simply doesn’t have. The cost of postage increases, making the price per communication grow. Further people are often inundated with junk mail and bills so that churches can no longer count on people reading the newsletters that they send.