Articles for Church Newsletter

For Christmas Music Sunday in 2011, our Sanctuary Choir sang two choir pieces written by D. Buxtehude and J.S. Bach. These great composers are important musicians to me for two reasons. J.S. Bach is the greatest composer in western music history, as many people may agree, and Buxtehude may be the most important one Bach learned a lot from. He once traveled 300 miles to listen to Buxtehude’s music on a couple of weeks of vacation and stayed there for some months instead! This was very unusua...

When I played for funeral services, sometimes I heard Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 read, which is about a time for everything. Whenever I listened to these verses, it let me think about where I stand at the moment, and it gave me a kind of mysterious comfort. According to this message, we don’t have to be too sad and hopeless when we are in trouble. On the other hand, we should not be arrogant when we are successful.

When I started serving First Presbyterian Church in 2011, I was in a difficult tim...

Music is around us all the time. We celebrate our birthdays with music and send our people to heaven with music. We sing and play instruments when we are happy and we do the same thing when we are sad. God wants us to praise Him with music and God wants to communicate with us through music as well.

While writing this article, I am looking forward to Music Dedication Sunday on September 23. Our Celebration Ringers and Sanctuary Choir will play and sing during service. We will also introduce ...

While letting a fun summer go, another fruitful autumn is ahead of us! Are we ready to enjoy this beginning of the new church year?

Our first choir rehearsal will be on Wednesday, September 5. I am in the middle of selecting music for both Celebration and Sanctuary Choirs. Planning is a time-consuming job, but it’s a most happy and imagination-filled job for me. Actually, the good results of our music ministry usually starts with this planning process. Without careful and sincere planning...

Summer seems to be divided into three parts to me: exciting entrance in June, peak of enjoyment in July, and closing the season in August. Now, we are entering the phase of closing and preparing for coming seasons of school, work, and church year.

I have enjoyed some out-of-state activities in June and July this year: Handbell Festival in Rochester, MN with our bell choir members, and American Guild of Organists National Convention in Kansas City, MO with Miah. As a non-musical activity, I ...

I was in Rochester, MN June 22-24 with our Celebration Ringers participating in the Area 7 Handbell Festival Conference. This event happens every other year, and our ringers’ enthusiasm for this event has always been strong. After 2014, this year is my second time going to the event, and I enjoyed it again with our ringers. Learning some new things about the instrument and technique may be important, but personally, learning to be a player in a group, in this case a BIG group of about 400, ...

When I think of a break, there are two types in my mind. One is productive and voluntary. The other one is wasting and passive. In the scriptures, we can find these two examples. Jesus often took breaks in between his very busy ministries during his last years on earth. When he withdrew from his disciples and the people, he took time to pray and rest to recharge Himself for the next steps in teaching and leading the people around Him. The other case of break I found is when all of Jesus’ di...

Last Sunday (April 22), our choirs and I finally gave our annual Spring Concert. More than any other year, we encountered some unexpected obstacles during our preparation for the concert. The most shocking one was that our beloved Skinner pipe organ suddenly stopped working a few weeks before the concert. Luckily, I had planned a way to have the concert without using the main pieces that greatly needed the organ this year. But, we still needed our organ for Bach’s cantata and some other pie...

It was a cold and snowy day when I was alone playing the piano in our sanctuary, working on J.C. Bach’s piano quartet in G major, one of the pieces for our 2018 Spring Concert. Johann Christian Bach is one of Johann Sebastian’s sons. I was so happy when I found this piece while preparing this year’s Spring Concert. This piece is like an amazing combination of his father’s Baroque style and the style of the next generation, the Classical period.

I recognized, in the middle of playing...