Fall 2009 | Volume 68, No. 1

Worship: surrender not style - Robert Elkins

by Southwestern News Staff

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Worship Pastor | FBC Euless, Texas
Master of Music (1999)

Growing up in “small-town North Carolina,” Robert Elkins was first introduced to music ministry in his home church through “the standard three hymns and a choir special.”

This was different than his initial preferences. “Jazz was my music of choice, but I was in rock bands as well. I grew up in the ’80s, and so I was into the ’80s pop music and the rock music and the hair bands.”

Elkins felt the most fulfilled while serving God’s people in his local church through music ministry, and his desire to become more equipped to serve a church brought him to Southwestern.

“I didn’t get the typical counterpoint, orchestration, traditional harmony, history of music, all that stuff in my undergraduate like most people get. So when I was thinking about serving in a church and starting to lead choirs and starting to do hymns and do some of the ancient, I guess you could say, repertoire of the church, I did not have a lot of knowledge in that. I knew that was what seminary was there for.”

Elkins earned his Master of Music from Southwestern in 1999, specializing in music theory. He also earned a B.A. in Music, piano performance, from Berklee College of Music in Boston.

It was at Southwestern that he started to develop his philosophy of worship as a minister. Specifically, his studies in the Old Testament helped him enunciate his convictions.

“Worship was God’s idea,” Elkins says.  “He created us to be that way, to worship. … He knew that’s how we were made, and that in Him only we would find our satisfaction and fulfillment.”

Southwestern is also special to him because it is where he met and married his wife, fellow Southwestern graduate Angie (MM 1999), who was the first person he met during the music school’s orientation.

Elkins proposed to her in the same practice room where he had first asked her out on a date, and the two were married during Elkin’s second year at seminary. Their family serves First Baptist Church in Euless, Texas, where Elkins is the worship pastor.

As a minister, his role is to be a “shepherd” who is responsible to help “get people’s eyes off themselves and their prefe-rences, understanding [that] when we come to worship, we come to surrender,” he says.

“That’s got to be our heartbeat when we come to worship, we need to say, ‘I surrender … Lord, I trust You, I’m all Yours, period.’”

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