Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 14, 1993 TAG: 9311120012
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: FRANCES STEBBINS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
When Powell leaves First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) on Nov. 18 after more than 17 years at the downtown congregation, he takes with him mementoes such as a certificate making him a "Doctor of Jazzology" at Radford University.
He got that in 1990 for his years of emceeing "Jazz Notes," a Friday night program heard for eight years over WVRU, 89.1 FM. The show, which is being considered for syndication, probably will continue with reruns for a while, Powell said.
In 1989 it won an Armstrong Award, a national honor reserved for college radio shows.
The pastor still isn't sure whether he'll be leaving the New River Valley. He's seeking work in "a different form of ministry" from a pastorate. With his only child and two grandchildren in Gastonia, N.C., he said he's thinking of relocating in a more Southern state since his separation from his wife several months ago.
"It's just time for me to end my ministry here," Powell said. "The church is in good shape. I think most of the things we've started will go on."
Some of those things are a vacation Bible school involving five different denominations; a youth program in which Powell taught teens of different faiths; the annual baccalaureate service that high school seniors plan themselves; and the American Music Fair, a project of the Fine Arts Center of the New River Valley.
Maynard Powell played a big part in all those events.
But unless he finds a late-life career teaching in a community college or working as an institutional chaplain nearby, Powell, 55, will be absent from Mountain Magic, a folk music duo he has shared for four years with Sherry Vaughn. Married and the mother of two, Vaughn had an act with several students before she joined Powell's church.
They have entertained at schools, churches and festivals and have played regularly in summers at Mountain Lake resort. With a theme of "Finding God in Secular Experience," Powell has played his folk guitar and talked about music and God to groups including Bible school and fellow clergy.
He loves audience participation, and the stories the group tells invariably have surprise endings. Not solemn church stuff at all, Powell says with his big booming laugh filling the room.
Reared in Fredericksburg, Powell entered Virginia Tech more than 30 years ago to become a civil engineer. Before his undergraduate days were over he had been introduced to a significant book, "Christianity and Existentialism," by a visiting lecturer, the Rev. Al Kershaw. One chapter, by the eminent theologian Paul Tillich, changed his thinking forever.
"Taking off from Tillich's ideas about drawing from our own experience of God, I began to think of creative improvisation as a spiritual experience . . . to be challenged in how the arts can be used to reveal Christian truth," he said.
About this time, Powell took up music. By the time he had completed Garrett Theological Seminary in Chicago and had a pastorate in Blackstone, he was developing his thinking and skills as a broad-based Christian entertainer.
His next pastorate in the early 1970s at the old downtown Roanoke First Christian Church brought him into a wide ecumenical and interfaith community which appreciated his musical innovations. Always an ecumenist, he said he learned a lot from a musical Roman Catholic priest and a Unitarian minister.
As president of the Roanoke clergy group of mainstream clergy, Powell led a move to bring non-Christians and lay professionals into its membership. He was a founding member of Roanoke Area Ministries, the Roanoke Valley's interfaith service agency now nearly 20 years old.
When he came to Pulaski in 1976, some of his Roanoke friends said he'd soon move on to a bigger city. Instead he involved himself deeply in the religious life of the town, concentrating especially on children and youth. Little ones now cluster before him each Sunday for childrens' sermon where once there were none.
Wherever he goes, he said, he'll take his contemporary Christianity and music. It fits the secular as well as the church, the old as well as the young.
by CNB