What the Pianist Can Do

A number of years ago I was asked by the East Pennsylvania Conference Committee whether I was willing to work with an evange­listic effort as pianist. I accepted, for I was glad to have even a small part in serving the Lord.

I was happy to accept any responsibilities other than that of pianist, such as passing out handbills, doing errands, and attending to other miscellaneous jobs that arose. One of my re­sponsibilities was that of tentmaster. This in­cluded sweeping the rostrum, cutting the grass, seeing that the stakes were well driven, and other duties. When I was not playing the piano for the meetings, my hours were filled with the tentmaster work.

In another place where we were to hold our meeting, there was a large auditorium about 150 feet long by 75 feet wide. Besides helping to prepare the auditorium for our meetings, I was asked to act as fireman for the meetings, as well as janitor. These tasks I gladly fulfilled, because I felt that in working for the Lord the small insignificant tasks were as important as the greater ones.

After I had worked in several evangelistic campaigns, the evangelist felt that I was capa­ble of accepting another responsibility, so he assigned me to the visitation of people. I was given a whole section of approximately a hun­dred names. These I endeavored to see each week. I encouraged them to attend our meet­ings and Bible classes, and explained some Bible texts from sermons of previous meetings, which were difficult for them to comprehend.

In the meantime we had a radio broadcast almost every day. As pianist, I had to be at the radio station for this program at the speci­fied time, and therefore had to plan my work accordingly.

In order to have a successful campaign, we must work together to accomplish our goal in winning souls for Christ. The main responsi­bility of the meetings lies with the evangelist, but if we can relieve him of the many outside details, he is then free to visit the interested people and help bring them to a decision. Thus our work will be a greater success than if the preacher did all this extra work, and we did nothing but play the piano or direct the choir.

I often think of the words once spoken to me by one of our leading song directors. He said, "My motto is to take as much routine responsibility off the evangelist's shoulders as I can, except, of course, the preaching." That is surely a fine motto to have, and that is what I have been striving to do. Of course, there are some duties that no one can accomplish so well as the evangelist himself. Nevertheless, there are many, many details in connection with an evangelistic effort. If the evangelist should ask us to perform some of these, let us do them with precision and dependability. Let us carry on our work in such a manner that the evange­list can rest assured the work he has given us to perform will be dispatched as he wished and in the time specified. We musicians should not think that we need to spend the entire day in practicing and playing the piano, or directing the choir.

Recently I worked with R. L. Boothby in the city of Richmond, Virginia. Playing the piano in the evenings for the meetings was only a part of my work. We had two radio programs every day but Sabbath, and this increased my duties, because I always played for the broad­casts. In some spare time during previous ef­forts my wife had taught me typing, and I was able to type the manuscripts for these broad­casts. I also had the announcements to type, as well as the music sheets showing the songs we were to sing, who was to sing them, the author and composer of them, and the owner of the songs. This material had to be in the radio station not later than twenty-four hours before we were to go on the air. At the same time I was asked to be circulation manager of the "Boothby-Mansell News," a small four-page newspaper. This included mailing approx­imately 5,750 papers to our near-by churches for distribution each week, besides the mailing to individuals.

Another phase of my work was taking care of the request cards for literature. These were signed by interested persons and gathered up. After work they were sorted for duplicates, and those who lived out of the city were segregated from those who lived in the city. This was done before the weekly workers' meeting, which was called every Monday morning at nine-thirty. The cards for those in the city were placed in alphabetical order; and those out of the city were sorted according to the towns, recorded in a book, and stamped as to the title of the lec­ture requested. After these request cards were classified, I distributed the Sunday night ser­mons, which were printed to be mailed out to people in near-by towns who had written for them. I also sent out the small-sized pictures of Christ Our Righteousness that we were of­fering free over the radio, and the "Know Your Bible" cards.

A record book was kept showing the date of the Sunday night meetings, the various ones attending, whether it was every Sunday night or only once. It was my work to keep this book up-to-date for use in the workers' meeting, besides answering all the telephone calls that came to our office. My working hours were usually 7 A.M. to 10:30 P.M.