PAM Professionals Gathering 2011

February 3-6, 2011

theme: Servants of the Word - Creating Space for Transformation

Location: Nassau Presbyterian Church, Princeton, NJ

Presented by PAM in association with Princeton Theological Seminary and Nassau Presbyterian Church

 

Keynote Speaker: Jacqueline E. Lapsley Featuring Rick Boyer Sally Brown David Davis Jacqueline E. Lapsey Eric Plutz Martin Tel Noel Werner Bruce Neswick 2 lunchtime organ concerts Hymn Festival on the Word Choral Concert by The Westminster Choir The Westminster Choir College Handbells

Download the brochure (1.6 MB)

 

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PAM Certification

All workshops fulfill requirements for PAM Certification

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Latest News & Updates

7 December 2010 - We are pleased to announce that Bruce Neswick, Director of Cathedral Music & Organist at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine NYC, will be the organist for the Saturday evening Hymn Festival and lead a workshop entitled "Hymn Improvisation - The Organist as Servant of the Word". The Westminster Choir College Handbells will also play at the Hymn Festival.

Scroll to the bottom of this page for more details on Bruce Neswick and The Westminster Choir College Handbells.

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Lodging

Housing is not included in your registration fees and those arrangements need to be made separately. Housing options are available at the following locations.

Erdman Center
20 Library Place
Princeton, NJ 08540-6824
Phone: 800.622.6767, ext. 7990, or 609.497.7990
Email: coned@ptsem.edu

Single Private $65
Single Shared Bathroom $55
Double Room (1 double bed) $80
Suite (1 double bed/pull out couch) $85
Family Suite (1 double and 1 twin) $90

When making reservations identify yourself as attending the PAM Professionals Gathering.

Hyatt Place
3565 US Highway 1
Princeton, NJ 08540
609-720-0200

Single or Double $139.00

When making reservations identify yourself as attending the PAM Professionals Gathering.

scholarship information
For scholarship information, visit the PAM website at www.PresbyMusic.org,
or contact the PAM National Office at (888) 728-7228 xt 5288, or by email at pam@pcusa.org.

Prepare Yourself
In preparation for the conference you may wish to review some of the following documents

PDF file: Invitation to Christ - recovering the biblical fulness of the sacraments.

http://www.pcusa.org/resource/invitation-christ/

Video:Invitation to the Word http://www.pcusa.org/resource/invitation-worddiscipleship/

Invitation to the Word is just that — an invitation to Jesus Christ, the living Word, through scripture. It is an invitation for congregations, communities, small groups and individuals to be immersed in the Spirit through the Word. It is an invitation to five simple practices that can form us into Scripture-shaped communities, congregations and individuals. It is an invitation to read, pray, study, remember and live Scripture.
 
Read scripture
We can read scripture in a variety of contexts.

• In public worship, we encounter the Word read from the church’s Bible and hear it proclaimed through preaching.
• Bible study or prayer groups allow us to engage the Word in a more intimate setting, where friends in Christ can share personal reflections and discern together the will of God.
• For individuals, a daily, disciplined reading plan of some sort is beneficial; thus, using the daily lectionary readings or a program for reading through the Bible can be helpful to discipline individual reading.
• One of the great ways to read Scripture is to hear it read aloud — in worship, in small groups and even individually. Scripture takes on a whole new dimension when you can hear its rhythms, its cadences and its poetry, features often overlooked when only read silently.

Pray scripture

• Praying before and after reading Scripture underlines our dependence on God in order to hear, understand and respond to what the Spirit is saying to the church. The Book of Common Worship includes a number of prayers for illumination as well as psalm prayers and collects based on the Scriptures of the Christian year.
• Reading and singing prayers from Scripture is a way to deepen our prayer life. Using scriptural prayers such as the psalms, the Lord’s Prayer or the canticles (e.g., the prayer of Zechariah in Luke 1:68-79) can shape our own prayer life in profound ways.
• Lectio Divina is another way to read Scripture prayerfully or contemplatively, helping us to be open to hearing the words of Scripture as a personally enlivening and transforming Word from God.

Study scripture
Taking Scripture seriously demands that we devote serious attention to the text.

• The treasures of Scripture sometimes require hard work to mine. For this reason, it is valuable to read large sections of Scripture — sometimes entire books — in sequence to understand the larger context of the passage and its implications for the life of faith. Biblical commentaries (such as Feasting on the Word) and study guides can broaden our interpretive horizons as we are blessed and challenged by the insights of scholars and leaders of the church.
• Studying Scripture in community — especially in groups of people with different cultural backgrounds, life experiences or theological perspectives — is another way to enlarge and deepen our understanding of the Word. Seek out opportunities — within your congregation and beyond — to study Scripture with others.
• Church School is one place we can study Scripture in depth, using The Present Word) or other biblical curriculum. Tom Wright’s excellent For Everyone series can be used in small groups or adult school for study of New Testament Scripture.

Remember scripture
Scripture likewise calls us to hide its words in our hearts, a practice that we have often left only to children.

• Memorizing individual verses such as John 3:16, Jeremiah 29:11 or Proverbs 3:5 allows the words of Scripture to sink deeply in our hearts or on our lips at a moment’s notice.
• Memorizing longer passages such as Psalm 23 or John 1 gives us an even richer source of biblical wisdom deep in our souls, one that can sustain us in times of struggle.
• Learning Scripture through song is one of the best ways to memorize scripture. Michael Morgan’s Psalter for Christian Worship provides contemporary, paraphrase settings of the psalms to familiar hymn tunes. Some of the great hymns of the church (e.g., “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night” — a paraphrase of Luke 2) can also help us to hold Scripture in our hearts.

Live scripture
If we are to become Scripture-shaped communities and individuals, Scripture must transform the way we live. So the last practice is an invitation to live Scripture.

• This includes obeying the commands of the Scriptures, but also having our imaginations, our thoughts, our feelings shaped by the Word of God. It means being not only hearers of the Word but doers also.
• The daily practice of examen, a discipline of self-examination and repentance is one way to do this.
• It is here that we see how the Sprit works through our reading, praying, studying and memorizing of Scripture to make us into disciples. This is the most exciting, and scary, of the practices.

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Extra Information Not in the Brochure

Concert organist Bruce Neswick is one of America's major talents in the field of organ performance and is especially noted for his superb ability as an improvisateur, a craft which only a few organists in the United States have made their specialty. His playing is widely recognized for its incisiveness, vitality and expressiveness.

His refined skill at improvisation has won him three first prizes -- from the 1989 San Anselmo Organ Festival, the 1990 Boston American Guild of Organists' national convention and the 1992 Rochette Concours at the Conservatoire de Musique in Geneva, Switzerland. His compact disk recording, on the Raven label (available from Towerhill-Recordings), features an improvised organ suite.

Mr. Neswick is the newly appointed Director of Music at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. He was formerly the Organist and Choirmaster of St. Philip's Cathedral in Atlanta for many years. Prior to his appointment in Atlanta, he was the Assistant Organist-Choirmaster and Director of the Cathedral Girls' Choir at the Washington National Cathedral as well as the Director of Music at St. Albans School for boys and the National Cathedral School for Girls. These appointments followed tenures as Organist and Choirmaster at Christ Church Cathedral in Lexington, Kentucky, Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Geneva, Switzerland and St. Paul's Cathedral in Buffalo, New York. He is very active in the field of church music and is in great demand as a choral clinician with the Royal School of Church Music, for whom he has conducted several courses for boy and girl choristers. He has served on the faculties of several church music conferences and in the summer if 1997 will teach at the Master Schola in Massachusetts, Westminster Choir College Summer Session, the Montreat Conference and the regional convention of the American Guild of Organists held in Birmingham, Alabama.

He has composed for several performers and churches throughout the United States, and his organ and choral music is published by Paraclete, Augsburg-Fortress, Selah, Vivace, Plymouth and St. James' presses. A great deal of his service music, hymns and hymn-arrangements appear in hymnals found in churches of many denominations.

Mr. Neswick graduated from the Pacific Lutheran University in his native Washington state and from the Yale School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music. His teachers have included Robert Baker, David Dahl, Gerre Hancock, Margaret Irwin-Brandon and Lionel Rogg.

A Fellow of the American Guild of Organists, Mr. Neswick has served the Guild in many capacities, including chapter dean, regional education coordinator, member of the national nominating committee and member of the national improvisation competition committee.

As a recitalist, Mr. Neswick has performed extensively throughout the United States and Europe and has been a featured performer at national and regional conventions of the American Guild of Organists. In July, 1994, he played the opening convocation for the national AGO convention held in Dallas, Texas, and he was a featured artist at the 2000 national convention in Seattle.

 
The Westminster Concert Bell Choir is composed of students at Rider University’s Westminster Choir College, which was the first institutionin the world to develop such a program.

Hailed for its virtuosity, the ensemble performs on the largest range of handbells in the world – 8 octaves, from C1 to C9. Many of the bells are made of bronze and range in weight from four ounces to 11 pounds; the Choir also uses the large “Basso Profundo” aluminum-cast bells that are a new phenomenon in handbell ringing. The Choir supplements its handbells with a six-octave set of Malmark Choirchime® instruments from C2 to C8 – the widest range in existence.

The Westminster Concert Bell Choir has appeared on Public Television’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and several holiday broadcasts of the Today show, including one in which the ensemble was joined for a performance by NBC television hosts Katie Couric and Willard Scott. Its holiday performances have been heard annually on National Public Radio’s Performance Today, and it is included on NPR’s Christmas Around The Country II recording. The choir has performed at Carnegie Hall twice during the Christmas season. Most recently, the choir was featured on New Jersey Network’s State Of The Arts program.

In December 2002 the ensemble joined Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Charlotte Church and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for a critically acclaimed 15-city tour entitled “A Royal Christmas.” The Choir has made nine solo recordings. Its 2010-2011 season includes a series of performances in Princeton, a tour of the Midwest and the release of its newest recording, A Time to Dance.

Director of the Westminster Concert Bell Choir, Kathleen Ebling Shaw is a graduate of Westminster Choir College. She is a member of the sacred music department at Westminster Choir College of Rider University, where she teaches classes in handbell training and conducts a second handbell choir. Ms. Ebling Shaw is also director of sales and marketing at Malmark, Inc. - Bellcraftsmen in Plumsteadville, Pa. She is also the artistic director of Reverberation, a handbell choir based in Bucks County, PA. The choir was founded in September, 2003 and is composed of professional musicians.

Well known as a handbell clinician, Ms. Ebling Shaw has conducted sessions for the American Guild of English Handbell Ringers both on the local and national levels. Other engagements have included sessions for the American Guild of Organists, Music Educators National Conferences; the New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Texas Music Educators Conferences; Presbyterian Association of Musicians Conferences, the St. Olaf Church Music Conference, the Eighth International Handbell Symposium in Japan, the Ninth International Handbell Symposium in England and the Tenth International Handbell Symposium in Korea.

In December 2002, she traveled with the Westminster Concert Bell Choir on a 15-city North American tour as part of “A Royal Christmas” performing with Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Charlotte Church and the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra where they were met with wide acclaim.

Choirs under the direction of Ms. Ebling Shaw have performed at Carnegie Hall, the World Financial Center’s Festival of Light and Sound, Lifetime Television, QVC, NBC’s “Today” show and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” She has also produced four recordings with the Westminster Concert Bell Choir: Westminster Rings!, Praise And Adoration, Christmas At Westminster and By Request.

In May 2003, Ms. Ebling Shaw received the Alumni Merit Award from Westminster Choir College of Rider University for her dedication to the art of handbell ringing and her enthusiasm and accomplishments in the classroom as well as the concert hall.