Sid Smith III is a man on a mission to help church choirs and music ministries flourish.
He comes by this mission honestly, being the son of Sid Smith Jr., who was a pioneering Black church consultant in the Southern Baptist Convention — serving with the SBC Home Mission Board and Baptist Sunday School Board as well as the Florida Baptist Convention. The elder Smith set a standard for missional focus in churches that remains today.
Sid III also is an ordained minister who has been in vocational music ministry for 32 years, serving churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and Florida.
Sid Smith III
As an independent consultant, he shares the hard lessons he’s learned along the way and seeks to encourage renewal.
“My hope is to see a widespread resurrection of the church choir as a vital and vibrant part of the corporate worship experience and life of the local church,” he said. “People are looking for meaningful connection. People are looking for meaningful expression. No matter the genre, people are looking for meaningful soul and spirit affiliation.
“Some will even respond initially to the fulfilment found in merely singing together before fully realizing the salvation and liberation found as we grow in Christ. My hope is that the local church recognizes these profound needs and uses the church choir experience to help fill them to the glory of God.”
Smith’s own love of music began in childhood when he was fascinated by sound.
“I wanted to find out what made music captivate my ear, particularly the sounds of certain instruments,” he said. “Bass and rhythmic instruments have always drawn my attention. My parents were both accomplished musicians, and they flooded my life with all sorts of music constantly. When we got in our car, I never knew if we would be listening to the sounds of Edwin Hawkins and Andrae Crouch, or the Jackson Five and Isaac Hayes, or John Phillip Sousa and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, or Johann Sebastian Bach and Sergei Rachmaninov. I thought everyone experienced losing themselves in music like I did.”
“I finally discovered how combining the word of God with music was the ultimate expression.”
His curiosity became a passion by high school, when he began to understand how words could enhance musical expression. “During the summer before my sophomore year in college, while serving as a summer missionary in Nashville, I finally discovered how combining the word of God with music was the ultimate expression.”
After college, Smith moved back to San Francisco, where he was involved in music ministry in the footsteps of his grandfather — “singing the great anthems, hymns, spirituals, classics, and gospels of the Black Church,” he said.
“While working as a community organizer and political activist, I discovered I could augment my income by playing piano at other local churches. Door after door continued to open in piano playing and choir directing until I was lovingly forced by my Heavenly Father to consider music ministry as a vocational calling.”
Over time, he served churches in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and Florida.
Those experiences were full of both joy and pain, he said. “I am very familiar with church hurt. At times I’ve wanted to quit (and others have wanted me to quit), but through it all I’ve learned to trust in Jesus, I’ve learned to study God’s word, I’ve learned to yield to his Holy Spirit, and I’ve learned to love his people.”
His goal is not getting every church to sing in unison but to live in harmony.
“I love the process of bringing diverse groups of people together who listen to varied types of music on their car stereos.”
“I love the process of bringing diverse groups of people together who listen to varied types of music on their car stereos, together toward the good work of worshipping God and encouraging each other in the church choir. While church choirs can sometimes be messy, inefficient and distracted, when functioning well the church choir can and should be a healthy vehicle toward strong evangelism, discipleship, stewardship, Christian education and liberation within and beyond the church,” he asserted.
As a consultant, he begins with what a church has available.
“I use a church’s desire to begin, resurrect or shore up their choir to help them to assess what their immediate and long-term needs are,” he said. “Based upon those needs, I will design and implement a course of action with the church leadership. It is important that the representative leadership is substantially involved in the design and implementation of any course of action. That course of action usually comes in the form of me directly working with the choir or coaching the existing staff. My priority is not to build a strong ministry, but rather to build strong people who minister.”
He works with churches of all races, sizes and cultures.
One common problem, he believes, occurs when churches replace choirs with praise teams. He calls that a “short-sighted mistake.”
“Yes, there is and should be room for a variety of musical expressions including both choirs and praise teams,” he said. “But when we devalue, lose or sacrifice the wealth of opportunities that church choirs can provide out of a desire for efficiency, a narrowness of focus, or an inability to perceive the benefits of large groups united in propose and theme, we run the risk of impoverishing the worship experience.”
Editor’s not: Sid Smith III is a member of the Baptist News Global board of directors.