Sing to Him, sing praises to Him; speak of all His wonders… (I Chronicles 16:9)

    

One of the things I miss most about gathering together with our church body is the ability to lift our voices together to sing praises to our God.

    

I’m very thankful for our vocalist and musicians who have been leading us in worship during our Live Stream services over the past two months, but for me there is nothing like joining together with the church body to praise our Great God.

    

One of the areas that God has gifted our church in is the area of Worship Ministry. I am continually amazed by the amount of gifted musicians, vocalists, and drama participants that we have at PHBC. We truly have a small army of gifted servants in our Worship and Arts Ministry and they are a tremendous blessing to our church body.

    

Before the COVID-19 Pandemic began, our Leadership team had started to have conversations about the possibility of bringing on a part-time Worship Director who would help add depth to our Worship and Arts Ministry, especially in the areas of planning our services and shepherding our Worship Teams.

    

For the better part of two years, we have had wonderful high-level volunteers serve in these areas and all of them have done a tremendous job in keeping our Worship Ministry moving forward. As a church, we budgeted for a potential Worship Director position for this year and were preparing for the potential of bringing someone aboard.

   

Once we entered into this COVID-19 world, the need for a high quality Live Stream service became an immediate necessity and once again, our gifted people went into action. Because schools and colleges across the country came to a sudden halt, many of our students came home early. One such student who came home early just happened to be the person we had been talking about to potentially serve as our part-time Worship Director for the next year.

    

Jake Hunsicker is known by many in our congregation and has grown up at PHBC. Just this past week, Jake completed his Bachelor of Arts in Worship from Judson University in Elgin, IL, and will be pursing his graduate degree beginning next year. Jake served as a worship intern for us last summer and has been involved in leading in various capacities for the past several years.

    

Originally we thought the bulk of Jake’s 25 hours a week would be spent on worship planning and coordinating our various worship teams in the church. While these will be areas of focus over this next year, he will also be continuing to lead the production of our streamed services that we are producing on our YouTube channel. Jake volunteered his time in the month of April for us in this area and has done a tremendous job in helping us raise the level of our service production.

    

Based upon our Pastoral staff recommendation and Deacon Board approval, we are excited to announce that we have hired Jake Hunsicker to be our part-time Worship Director for this next year. In the coming weeks we will be introducing Jake to our congregation via the Sunday morning Live Stream services, but I wanted to be able to announce the news as we begin the month of May. This is a one-year position that we will be reevaluated as we move forward. We are excited about this next year and beyond and are very excited that the Lord has opened up this door for us to bring on Jake in this role.

    

Please be in prayer for Jake and our Worship Ministry as we move forward. Jake is currently working alongside all of us as we think about our “Reopening” plan and how our worship gatherings will be constructed once we are able to start meeting again.

    

I now join many of you by saying, I can’t wait for all of us to be together again soon!

 

Better Together,

Pastor Shane