The Recovering Choir Director

Someone has just accepted my position—he will be starting on the first of next month. He’s an evangelical Christian who will be thrust into liturgical worship, and I have a lot of hope for him precisely because he’s an “outsider” to a lot of the musical “worship wars”, etc.

I’m supposed to be meeting him sometime next week to “lay hands on his head”, so to speak. I’ve never handed a job over to someone before, so I’ve been brainstorming for things to share with him before I leave. I want to give him the essentials without bias. (My inner cynic says to me, “Yeah, good luck there, kid.”) Here’s a list of items I’ve come up with.

• Order of Mass (Sundays and Triduum)
• Order of Evening Prayer
• Schedule of liturgies and rehearsals
• NPM Planning Calendar website and OCP LitPlan software
• Volunteer roster, e-mail addresses, listserves
• Fair warning about editing errors
• Official liturgy documents and implementation guidelines
• The “playlist” from the last couple of years (since it’s a constantly changing community, repertoire is learned every year by different people)

Anything else?