Year 19: Taking the Stage

When 2019 began, we were prepared to fully engage our multiple campuses, recruit students to a global network of partner schools in Florida and California, advance the cause of Christ thorough music across stages near and far, and begin to see artists and bands tour the country and globe in our streams of influence and care. We were staging weekly concerts at Lafayette’s in Memphis (Madison Line Mondays), adding acting and dance to our curriculum and seeing plays and dances and movies become part of our ecosystem, and enjoying the Visible Worship group (soon to become Visible Worship Collective) lead across the US in multiple forms from Chicago and Dallas, and send graduates into many ministries with leadership and fervor.

We shut down for two weeks in early 2020.

Students hunkered down for online classes and faculty redesigned courses for continuous learning through the hardship of the pandemic. With multiple jurisdictions and small business education vulnerable in many ways through the US response to Covid-19, Visible worked long hours and then days and then weeks and then months to respond well to the sickness, grief, death, frustration, government wrangling, and emotional rollercoaster of 2019-2020 school year to graduate leaders, ministry partners, creative Christians, into a new world. Sometimes the loneliness founded new sounds and new collaborations.

Sometimes hard is good.

We worked on streaming music concerts, increased our Zoom network, and flowed into more online content and helping our remote students that already existed work through their creative outlets in new ways with remote band recordings and church participation. The old ways of training performance were modified into the same principles formatted for online and small audiences. In some ways, we rested more with the quieted schedules and worked around fear and into inspiration for the sweetest of worship times and the longest running video classes we’d seen yet. The resilience and perseverance of our staff and students this year was remarkable.

Our Visible people who love God made the best of a hard situation and, although it damaged the college foundationally, we worked through the trials and made great music and great memories of dozens of people on stage and bringing joy to the world through performance.