Program Staff

Martha Schütz

Martha Schütz interviewed both Gretchen Jordan, Christian education director and Van Quinn, organist and choirmaster, for the June issue of Cross Roads.

Gretchen Jordan - Christian Education Director

If you have had the good fortune to attend her adult education sessions or take your children to an orientation at Binkley Baptist Church led by Gretchen Jordan, you will know something of the history and symbolism of the labyrinth.

Its message appeals equally to young and old, animating the lifelong nature of the search for God as an activity that, as Gretchen points out, has no wrong turns. The labyrinth provides a means to deeper understanding because, unlike a maze with "tricks or dead ends," its path is coherent, forward-flowing, unending. (Her own fascination in the form has led her through labyrinths at the Trinity Center in Salter Path at dusk and on the Omega Institute hilltop in New York.)

The labyrinth serves, as such, as the perfect tool for the guide/educator called to engage and instruct all ages. And it serves as a near perfect map of Gretchen's spiritual and professional path - which, on perfunctory inspection, has taken many twists and turns, but whose harmonious pattern, on stepping back, emerges.

Born in Pennsylvania, Gretchen's father was the Rev. Marlin T. Schaeffer, a United Church of Christ (UCC) minister serving parishes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina. She was reared mostly in Lexington, N.C., and attended UNC-CH, from which she earned a Bachelor's degree in psychology in 1972.

She then spent 13 years engaged in hospital social work, first in McCain and then in Pinehurst, N.C., serving as a liaison between physicians, families, and community agencies on a team of care professionals. In 1986, shebecame director of education at her Presbyterian church in Southern Pines, and in 1990 she was appointed minister of education at Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in Chapel Hill.

Along the way, she has taken coursework at Duke Divinity School and the Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, attended numerous conferences, and spent a month studying at Tantur Ecumenical Center in Jerusalem in June 2000.

Not long after a chance meeting of Gretchen and Stephen Elkins-Williams - at a Durham Jiffy Lube - in spring 2002, it became clear that her interests combined so completely with our parish's needs for a director of Christian education and the strong endorsements of her colleagues that the search process accelerated to hire her. She now ministers to an Episcopal parish.

After a lifetime of worshipping in Presbyterian, UCC, and American Baptist congregations, Gretchen has become a student of the Episcopal catechism. Her familiarity with the Anglican church began with her brother's attendance at a New York City choir school and service as organist in several Episcopal churches. (Dr. Stephen Schaeffer, Director of Music at the Cathedral of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama, since 1987, is a respected colleague of our organist-choirmaster, Van Quinn.)

Since arriving at the Chapel of the Cross, Gretchen has exhibited the labyrinthine skills required to bridge the gaps between juvenile and adult education and between the needs of worshipers on Sunday morning and all of the rest of the week. By inaugurating an intergenerational education series, she has drawn on all quarters of the church and several committees, principally social and environmental ministries.

As a result, the work of 5:15 worshipers, such as Fran Finney, is shared with Sunday morning regulars, who contribute to prison ministry at each annual social ministry event. And all ages and abilities have participated in caroling, an evening ethics series, sing-ins, vacation church school, Bible dramatizations, and the Lenten labyrinth, walked just this April by parishioners as young as three-year-old Isabel Balderson.

Whether under the stars at Salter Path, or in the waiting room of an auto mechanic, Gretchen possesses a gift for glimpsing pathways to God and for inviting and inciting us to join her.

Van Quinn - Organist and Choirmaster

The Episcopal hymnal contains 720 hymns, and organist and choirmaster Wylie ("Van") Quinn estimates that he has performed over 50% of them over the course of his 34 years at the Chapel of the Cross. He has directed the musical component of weekly worship for approximately 5,400 (!!) services and counting. Most significantly, since his arrival in 1970, our parish has been home, by the rector's reckoning, to as many as 20,000 worshipers, and Dr. Quinn, alone among the staff, has ministered to all of them.

As if this net had not been cast wide enough, Dr. Quinn has spread the "worship of the Lord through the beauty of holiness" through the community at large, organizing frequent opportunities for public attendance and participation, such as annual parish choir and junior choir concerts, the Sunday night compline services, and the performance of masterworks, including the St. John Passion, numerous cantatas by Bach, the Requiem by Gabriel Fauré, and large-scale settings of the canticles and mass.

He has also served as ambassador of the parish through the "commonwealth" of music, teaching religion, philosophy, and music from 1973 until 1998 at Saint Mary's College in Raleigh, where he was the Fletcher Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, and for four years at Saint Timothy's-Hale School in Raleigh, where he was chairman of the Department of Religion and Philosophy and organist-choirmaster at All Saints Chapel. During the 1983-84 academic year, he was Artist-in-Residence at Duke and conductor of the Duke University Chorale. On and off since 1978, he has convened a Bach's Lunch series to which regional organists are invited to perform on our organ (designed by Quinn in 1978 and 2001) and has been a frequent solo recitalist and conductor in the North Carolina Bach Festival and other venues.

Raised in Gastonia, N.C., Quinn undertook organ study in high school under John Morrison of Queens College, Charlotte, and has studied since under Charles Krigbaum, Robert Sutherland Lord, and Wilmer Welsh. After graduating in 1965 from Davidson College, Quinn received B.D. and M.S.T. (Master of sacred theology ) degrees from Yale University before earning a Ph.D. from Duke University in the field of philosophy of religion, supplying earthly credentials for celestial abilities. Along the way he married Margaret Johnston (another Yale Divinity graduate and accomplished chorister), with whom he raised Nathaniel and Molly, a trained vocalist and asset to both choirs.

For those of us fortunate to have grown up from the early 1970s at the Chapel of the Cross, Dr. Quinn's contribution of uncompromising excellence and his example of faith have been constants to which we refer in marking our spiritual formation.

And as he enters his fourth decade of service to the parish, he begins the process anew with the next generation: under his direction, daughters and sons of Dr. Quinn's first choristers prepare, through music, "a path for us to walk in." They sit just a choir stall or two away from the places in which their parents, as choristers and teenage acolytes, learned new levels of confidence and devotion on the strains of his organ voluntaries.

Seven-thousand-eight-hundred hymns later, he lifts our hearts and minds still. In the words of Stephen, our rector and sometime hymnodist, on Van's 30th anniversary at the Chapel of the Cross:

"Give thanks to God for what has been;

Give thanks for Dr. Wylie Quinn,

Who helps us lift our hearts above,

To grow in faith and hope and love."

Contact information and brief job descriptions of the parish staff may be found on the parish website, www.thechapelofthecross.org .