Internship with COTLG

 Hi, my name is Steven Hines, and I had the pleasure of interning at the church or the living God located in Peoria Il, for the fall semester of 2024. The Church of the Living God or (COTLG) was the church that I grew up in. The director for the choir, Diane Hines, has been the director for the choir for over 30 years. She is also my mother. So it was a no brainer to ask her and our pastor if I could intern and shadow her for the semester.

As an intern I was assigned the position of Assistant Music director for the Gospel Choir and Praise Team.  My duties consisted of picking out songs for both groups, teaching the songs to the groups, working with the band and sound team, and attend Sunday services along with any other performances the church accepted. Each week I would have to create a list of songs that I would be able teach both groups. After getting approval from the director I would send the songs out to the musicians to learn and to the group members a few days before to learn as well. The director and the pastor also had songs suggestions they wanted the choir and praise team to learn, so I learned them and integrated them into my list. Both groups rehearsed on Tuesdays to prepare to sing on Sundays. 

One challenge that I ran into during this process was finding creative was to teach songs. The members of the COTLG praise team and choir are made up of volunteer members of the church and a lot of them don’t have a background in Music and don’t use sheet music to learn. To overcome this challenge, I would make sure to send out recordings of each song a few days before the rehearsals for them to listen too. I would type and print out lyrics for the songs and, if necessary, record separate voice tracks for each song depending on the difficulty level of the song. This process seemed to be really effective during the teaching process. 

My teaching plan consisted of  teaching the praise team 3-4 songs per rehearsal and the choir 5-6 songs per rehearsal. On Sundays, the praise team usually sings 2 songs and the choir sings 2-3 songs. By outlining my rehearsals this way, I was able to keep new songs in rotation for each Sunday while only recycling song a few times over the semester. During rehearsals the first half of rehearsal would be spent doing warmup’s drills and reviewing the songs we would sing on the upcoming Sunday, while the second half would be used learning newer songs. The turnaround for singing these songs were pretty quick, so my goal was 2 rehearsals or 2 weeks before performing  newer songs during service. This was not always the case but for the most part this outline was really successful for both groups. 

Overall this experience taught me a lot about running a music department for a Church. I learned that time management is extremely important during rehearsals. Knowing what songs to focus on and knowing how long to rehearse them was a key element to this process. Communication between the musicians, sound team, director and pastor was also critical to the success of this process as well. I really enjoyed this experience and I plan to continue interning with the church in the future!