Wednesday, February 5, 2025
4:45 – 8:00 pm, check in opens at 4:30 pm
Westmont College
Global Leadership Center
955 La Paz Rd., Santa Barbara
Westmont Music Department invites you to join us for dinner, worship and conversation on the theology of worship. Following dinner, pastoral colleagues will discuss how to support worship leadership in the local church and enjoy a time of worship ourselves. This will be followed up by a concert from Steve Bell, the award winning Christian artist and Malcolm Guite, an Anglican Priest, poet, theologian and Chaplain at Cambridge University.
Zig Reichwald, Ph.D.
Adams Professor of Music and Worship
Zig Reichwald teaches music history and serves on the Chapel team at Westmont College. Over the past 25 years, his research has focused on exploring the crevices between the siloed approaches to spirituality and the anachronistic division of sacred and secular spaces in 19th-century music, focusing on the works of Felix Mendelssohn. Having begun his career in church music, his position at Westmont allows him to once again explore worship as an essential part of the human experience.
Eben Drost
Eben Drost is a pastoral musician serving in both the Music Department and Campus Pastor’s Office at Westmont. His primary instrument is piano, and he has a background in jazz, classical, and popular music. He studied music at Westmont and earned a Masters in Theology at Fuller Seminary. He is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Worship Studies at The Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies. Read More
Evening Format
4:45-5:30 pm Steve Bell lecture on the "Theology of Worship"
5:30-6:30 pm Dinner
6:30-6:45 pm Worship
6:45-7:15 pm Discuss ideas for supporting Worship Leaders in the Church
7:15-8:00 pm Concert with Steve Bell and Malcolm Guite
Steve Bell
Steve Bell is a Canadian Christian songwriter and storyteller. He is a dear friend of Westmont who has blessed us in many settings with his deeply personal and uplifting performances. Steve has produced 21 solo CDs and won numerous music-industry awards, including Gospel Music Association of Canada Covenant Awards: 2018 Album of the Year (Where the Good Way Lies); 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award; 2018 Collaboration of the Year (Where The Good Way Lies); and 2018 Inspirational Song of the Year (Wait Alone in Stillness). He has performed more than 2,000 concerts to more than a half million people in 15 countries. In 2020, Steve released Wouldn't You Love to Know? He released No Words: The Guitar Instrumentals 1995-2023 and his most recent release is called is A Glad Surprise. In addition to a book he's co-authored on the Psalms, he's authored a seven-book series on the spirituality of the Christian calendar year called Pilgrim Year accompanied by a 2 CD compilation set of the music highlighting the Christian calendar year songs that Steve has produced over his career.
Watch Steve perform at Westmont's Chapel (beginning at 6:10)
Malcolm Guite
Malcolm Guite is an English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest, and academic. He is Life Fellow, and former Chaplain, of Girton College (Cambridge) where he also teaches for the Divinity Faculty. He lectures widely in England and North America on theology and literature. Guite has published poetry, theology, and literary criticism, and worked as a librettist. His books include Word in the Wilderness, Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, and Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He has written seven collections of poetry, including The Singing Bowl, and Sounding the Seasons. Guite has a decisively simple, formalist style in poems, many of which are sonnets. Guite earned degrees from University of Cambridge (BA, MA) and Durham University (PhD).
A Poet for ‘Bruised Evangelicals’ (Christianity Today)
Poem on Matthew 12: What If
"Releasing Grace and Beauty in the Most Unlikely Places" (59:25)
Malcolm at Westmont (2:36)
The Psalms (Wheaton) (1:09:36)
Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year
The Singing Bowl
Contact
You are our guest -- dinner has been generously sponsored by a donor with a heart for helping Westmont serve the church through music and worship. If you have questions regarding the dinner or concert, please contact Clay Wakefield.