The skills of a church musician are many, often involving many instruments, people, ideas, musical styles and challenges that change from year to year. The isolation and limited resources that characterize church music in many places place serious restrictions on any serious learning and development a church musician might undertake through a normal year.

Enter SICM, with its daily instruction in the traditional pillars of Christian worship music: organ and choir, including healthy singing and vocal coaching for choir leaders. Each year, the main guest organ and choral instructors form the core of a faculty team, which under the Director’s guidance seek to reinforce and extend the basic skills of students. Through anchoring upon core skills and colleagueship, SICM seeks to benefit both the students themselves and vicariously their ministry teams and congregations. 

SICM also encourages and assists students in branching out beyond their current skill set and past experience, and into a unique, expanded set of musical skills including piano and other instruments, musical composition and arranging for a congregation’s needs, hand bells, coping with multi-ethnic and other complicating forces affecting congregations in transition, and the benefits and pitfalls of new technologies for the performance, recording and administration of church music, like computers, overheads and MIDI.

Every year, SICM seeks also to acquaint students with international trends and resources in the creative use of organ, choir and other worship tools, and help discern and confront important issues in church music today. It’s goal is to send students home with a mixture of advancement of existing skills and samplings of church music tools and techniques which may be new to them and their congregations... and if we and they are lucky, a mixture of refreshment and inspiration.

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