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When Wanda Alger lived in Harrisonburg in the 1980s, she was known for launching two very different music initiatives.<\/p>\nWhen Wanda Alger lived in Harrisonburg in the 1980s, she was known for launching two very different music initiatives.<\/p>\n
In 1981, she founded the Shenandoah Valley Suzuki String program for children aged 3 to 18. Over the next seven years, her program grew six-fold, from 13 to 85 students.<\/p>\n
In 1985, she became one of the founders of Cornerstone Mennonite Fellowship (now the non-denominational Cornerstone Church of Broadway), training worship musicians and teams through coaching, seminars and conferences.<\/p>\n
\u201cCornerstone was, at that time, one of the few Mennonite churches doing \u2018praise and worship\u2019 music \u2013 it was a drawing card for young adults and young families looking for something more contemporary and experiential,\u201d Wanda recalled in an 11\/20\/10 e-mail to Crossroads.<\/p>\n
In 1988, she sold her Suzuki string program to her alma mater, and it became EMU\u2019s Shenandoah Valley Preparatory Music Program. It has grown to serve 500 students, some as young as babies in the Musikgarten program, through high school seniors taking private lessons and in the Shenandoah Valley Youth Symphony. EMU is now the official provider of strings instruction in the local public schools.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started teaching violin in the first place because the schools didn\u2019t offer anything,\u201d Wanda wrote in her e-mail. \u201cI never dreamed it would come full circle!\u201d<\/p>\n
Concurrently with selling her Suzuki string program, Wanda married Robert \u201cBobby\u201d Alger (whose maternal grandfather was John L. Stauffer, the third president of EMU), and they enrolled in Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with Wanda pursuing a master\u2019s in church music and Bobby a master\u2019s in divinity.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy experience in Tulsa was tremendous, musically,\u201d she said.\u00a0\u201cI was principal second violinist in one of the two major professional orchestras, joined the union, and had many opportunities for performing music in the community.<\/p>\n
\u201cTulsa\u2019s music culture knew the value of trained musicians and paid accordingly (even in the church) \u2013 very different from my previous experiences!\u00a0I also interned at a large Methodist church in the city and had a taste of being involved in a large ministry of over 2,000 congregants.\u00a0It would have been very easy to stay, but God had other plans.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1991, the Algers returned to Broadway, Virginia, \u201cto continue growing the Cornerstone ministry,\u201d Wanda said. \u201cAt its peak, Cornerstone\u2019s annual rallies drew almost 1,500 people.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1998, the Algers \u201csensed a call to do church planting\u201d and they moved an hour north to Winchester, Virginia, with four other families. From gathering in the basement of the Alger home, their Crossroads Community Church has grown to 125-175 attendees on a Sunday morning, including 40-50 children and teens. They now gather in a 10,000- square-foot renovated warehouse in a strip mall near I-81 on the northern edge of Winchester. They are affiliated with Dove Christian Fellowship International, a church-planting movement based in Lititz, Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur aim is to reach the next generation through worship that is relevant, inspirational and participatory,\u201d she said. As a result, Wanda plays less classical violin these days and more electronic keyboard, accompanied by guitars and drums. She is training young men and women \u2013 including her three teenaged children, Rachel, Nathan and Josh \u2013 to produce the praise-and-worship music favored by her church. All musicians help lead the singing, while the congregation follows along, reading words projected onto a screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wanda Teague Alger \u201981 When Wanda Alger lived in Harrisonburg in the 1980s, she was known for launching two very different music initiatives. In 1981, she founded the Shenandoah Valley Suzuki String program for children aged 3 to 18. Over the next seven years, her program grew six-fold, from 13 to 85 students. In 1985, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[148,192],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fallwinter-2010-11","category-magazine","tag-music","tag-wanda-teague-alger","issues-fallwinter-2010-11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/81"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":957,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions\/957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/crossroads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}