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Robert Nordling is a conductor, composer, arranger, and educator who says, “Music has been a central part of my life since age three.” He has held music ministry positions in churches in California, Washington, and England. Nordling also serves as resource development specialist for orchestral music for Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.
From 2002 through 2007, Nordling and his wife, Cherith Fee Nordling, worked as co-directors of Christian formation at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He also served as Calvin’s orchestra conductor from 2002 through 2012. Nordling left Calvin to join his wife in metro Chicago, where she teaches theology at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Illinois.
In December 2012, Robert Nordling gave an extended interview. In this edited excerpt, he talks about humility as a key to Christian leadership and formation during college.
Nordling says that Christians have for centuries debated whether music is inherently powerful or whether powerful response to music comes from learned experience in a particular context. In this edited excerpt, he explains why humility and authenticity have always been necessary to resolve church music and worship disagreements.
| Read about how Robert Nordling and Cherith Fee Nordling nurtured spiritual formation at Calvin College. |
Robert Nordling on Orchestras as Models of Christian Formation
Chris Snyder on Adoro Music Publishing
Showcase – Leadership in Times of Change
Why and how did psalm singing become such a hallmark of Reformed worship? Join Dr. Karin Maag for a fascinating journey through time, from Reformation Geneva to Scotland and from the Netherlands to New England, exploring the roots and impact of metrical psalm singing. Along the way, we will hear the voices of early modern Christians as they learned how to sing the psalms, both in unison and in harmony.
Sister Kathleen Harmon of the community of the Ohio province of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Dayton, invites us to be transformed by the psalms and experience them as the whole story God is revealing to us. As we keep praying and singing them, the psalms interpret us, and that’s when the transformation comes.
Vinroy D. Brown Jr.—conductor, musicologist, educator, and minister of creative worship and music at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City—explores the vibrant intersection of Black sacred music and the psalms. He talks about Black composers and how they have reimagined the psalms through choral music, spirituals, and the gospel tradition for the benefit of everyone.
Why and how did psalm singing become such a hallmark of Reformed worship? Join Dr. Karin Maag for a fascinating journey through time, from Reformation Geneva to Scotland and from the Netherlands to New England, exploring the roots and impact of metrical psalm singing. Along the way, we will hear the voices of early modern Christians as they learned how to sing the psalms, both in unison and in harmony.
Sister Kathleen Harmon of the community of the Ohio province of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Dayton, invites us to be transformed by the psalms and experience them as the whole story God is revealing to us. As we keep praying and singing them, the psalms interpret us, and that’s when the transformation comes.
Vinroy D. Brown Jr.—conductor, musicologist, educator, and minister of creative worship and music at the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City—explores the vibrant intersection of Black sacred music and the psalms. He talks about Black composers and how they have reimagined the psalms through choral music, spirituals, and the gospel tradition for the benefit of everyone.
John Goldingay, an Anglican priest and the senior professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, posits the psalms are the densest material in the entire Old Testament. They expound the nature of God as the compassionate, faithful, and committed one, but also as the one who makes demands upon us. The psalms help us talk to God, even about difficult things—and when we do, we are talking to someone who is in a position to do something about it.
