Does your church's main service feature an organ?
We are blessed to have a faithful organist who has been serving our church since before my time (I have been here 31 years). But when she is no longer able to play, I suspect our organ will be rarely played. What is your church’s “organ situation?” Will the organ become a novelty instrument, much like the accordion is in disuse in the popular genre?
Poll Results
Does your church’s main service feature an organ?
We enjoy the organ weekly or most weeks and are commited to organ accompaniment in the future. Votes: 14
Our service features an organ many or most Sundays, but the future is up for grabs. Votes: 4
We sometimes or often use the organ sound on our keyboard, but not a real organ. Votes: 2
We use an organ on rare occasions. Votes: 1
Organs are dionsaurs, period. Votes: 3
Other Votes: 2
- 2 views
we just replaced our third organ in the last 30 years.
Hoping to shed more light than heat..
We don’t have an organ, so we don’t use one ever. But, we would like to have one.
Mark,
I have a small spinet style organ that we would be happy to donate to your church if you can figure out a way to get it to KS from AZ. It looks something like the one pictured here. It belonged to my wife’s grandfather and was given to her as a college present. We used it for many years, hauling it to Hawaii and back again in the process. My wife even began teaching our oldest to play piano on it before several family members purchased an upright piano for us to use. Now we have no use for the organ and it sits sadly under cover in the garage.
Why is it that my voice always seems to be loudest when I am saying the dumbest things?
I too chose “other” since we do not have an organ, nor do we have anyone who could play an organ (which is why we got rid of our old organ a few years back). We don’t really consider an organ to be a dinosaur, and if we have someone to play one and had one worth playing, we would use it.
Sorry, Chip, but we aren’t likely to transport your organ from KS to WI.
I appreciate that.
Let me look into it to see if getting the organ is feasible.
The organ is more complicated to play than a piano. In the hands of a skilled organist, a good organ is a tremendous enhancer of public worship. But a poor instrument or an unskilled organist is a detriment to public worship.
Often churches don’t have much “bench depth”. How many young people are interested in playing the organ?!
4th just lost a fine organist - she retired and moved N to Brainard. Our loss is that church’s gain. But we have bench depth - I think 2 or 3 that are skilled with the instrument.
(At a former church, we had heavy footed old Mrs ____________ (now with the Lord) whose playing overpowered the audience)
Our organ was purchased by the church in 1976 for $12,000 (I have no idea if it was new or used at the time). I have no idea what maintenance it has had or requires.
It sounds wonderful; I love hearing it. The ladies who alternate playing it probably average 70 years old or more…
Not just organ players, but piano players. But people will line up to play guitar. Any thought why? I think the lack of piano skills are one of the reasons for the preference for guitar praise and worship songs over the older sounds. People lack the “ear” for listening to piano music. They are used to the guitar sound.
Probably most people here at SI would not have run into this, but MANY contemporary worship songs are of course, guitar based. Even when you buy the music (for these songs) for piano it is obvious that the music writer is guitar centric and writes piano parts like they are guitar players….
Discussion