New Organ

Hello Friends!

Easter is almost here and it’s time to pull out the stops…literally! I want to spend a moment talking about our pipe organ, sharing some realities the Board of Worship has been trying to resolve, as well as some HUGE but GREAT news for St. Mark’s.

Over the last year as I’ve played our sanctuary organ for weekly worship, I’ve come to discover some not so great little surprises. Currently, our organ’s keyboards are being held together with cardboard pieces wedged inside the organ. The leather that had been there dried up and caused the keys to stick especially in high use areas, and needed to be removed. Our reed pipes couldn’t stay in tune more than a few weeks after the organ was tuned last October. The pistons (used for recalling registrations) forget to change all of the stops or revert to a previously set memory instead of the last set memory. Presently, we have 6 ranks of pipes (about 400 pipes give or take with some extensions) split between 2 keyboards and the pedals. Most of these pipes are doubled between the keyboards making it nearly impossible to set contrasting sounds on each keyboard. While our organ has served our community well for over 50 years, it requires a great deal of costly maintenance and would still continue to have significant limitations.

The Board of Worship has been in conversation about the organ’s shortcomings and failing mechanics over the last few months. Repairing the current organ would involve rebuilding the console (the part of the organ that has the keyboards); fully cleaning, repairing, and re-voicing the reed pipes; as well as rewiring the pedal board. All of this would have cost us tens of thousands of dollars, but we also know new organs aren’t cheap either. We patiently kept our eyes open, hoping and praying a solution might come to us before our current organ failed.

In late March we came across an amazing opportunity to purchase a used Rodgers Digital organ from a seller in Tennessee. This organ has 36 all digital ranks (equivalent to approximately 2500 pipes), over 100 piston combinations (we have 8 on our current organ), interfaces with our new carillon so we can play the carillon as a bell instrument, requires no annual tuning or maintenance, and the keyboards aren’t being held together with cardboard! The seller was passionate about selling this instrument to a church who would treasure it in traditional worship, and the price was unbelievably below market value as the organ was in someone’s home and they needed it gone quickly. We received a donation to cover approximately 70% of the organ and installation costs and the remaining funds were available in an organ escrow account, fully funding the purchase. After seeing and hearing the instrument, the Board of Worship unanimously voted to purchase the organ as the new lead instrument for traditional worship at St. Mark’s!

I am so incredibly excited to share this beautiful instrument with you in worship over the next few weeks. From the gentle flutes you’ll hear on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday through the resounding trumpet fanfares that will joyously ring throughout the sanctuary on Easter morning, I know you’ll feel the music come alive with each note from this instrument. I look forward to answering any questions you may have, and sharing the goodness of God through this new instrument!

Joyfully,

Patrick Marchant, Minister of Music