Pedde Shares Vision for Campus Worship
Dave Pedde, director of Bluefield College’s Center for the Worship Arts, came to BC with a vision and passion for cultivating worship on campus. Along with this passion, Pedde brought many skills and wisdom from years of experience and personal growth for the program and the college community.
Prior to coming to the college, Pedde served as a worship director at North Central University. He also developed a two-year worship and discipleship training program called Sanctus School for Worshipers, and he also composed and produced music. Yet, worship leading for Pedde is more than just a vocation. It is a way of life.
“Worship is relationship with Christ,” he said. “It’s relationship with the Trinity, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s being with Him and responding appropriately. It’s being in Christ, not just singing songs or playing music, but a life lived out with Him 168 hours a week.”
Starting in 2018, Pedde developed the worship arts program with that in mind. He has built a team whose focus is glorifying God and serving the student body. For Pedde, building the worship team is more than just developing their musical skills. He doesn’t just focus on growing their talents, but focuses on the nurturing of their faith, health, and overall personal well-being. Pedde meets weekly with them to mentor and pour into their hearts and lives.
Pedde not only hopes that the team would grow together in worship, but desires the same for the whole student body, faculty, and staff. He views worship as a family gathering, meeting together with God and each other.
“Worship,” Pedde explained, “is getting together and remembering who God is and who we are. That’s the family of God. We get together and remind ourselves and each other how valuable we are because Christ died for us.”
When discussing chapel worship, Pedde voiced that his focus is each individual encountering God and His presence, united together in love. He desires that each person would deeply know they are loved and sought after by God.
“The main goal is for every single person to have a meeting with God,” Pedde said. “Everything we do, we are trying to intentionally do so that can happen — that every person will encounter God. And the best way we will is if each of us will love the other.”
Several worship team members, including Mason West and Amaya Brooks, expressed their agreement with this vision and discussed their own hearts toward worship.
“To me, there is something powerful about chapel services where we can lift His name up together and make the central focus of our lives and college experience about Jesus,” West said. “My desire is to see a community of focused worship (and worshippers) on this campus, continually, in which a constant dialogue with God is happening in everything we do, acknowledging His presence from the classroom to the chapel itself, seeing how He can move in our everyday lives and situations when we turn our hearts toward Him.”
Brooks said she strives to share God’s love with others through daily acts of obedience. She said her heart is “simply just to love on Jesus through (her) lifestyle.” Worship, she added, is just one way she can do that and one way she can show who God is to others.
“My hope for campus worship is to simply get people introduced to who [God] is,” she said. “We just want to introduce and re-introduce a loving God to people. So many of us are hurting and desperately trying to find a way out of our hopelessness, and we want to tell everyone that this is it.”
As the team progresses and grows, Pedde hopes that the worship arts program can serve as a resource to surrounding communities, serving local churches and youth groups. Pedde’s main vision moving forward in cultivating campus worship is rooted in love.
“My main hope moving forward is that every person recognize so much that they are loved by God,” said Pedde, “and that our worship then would be a celebration of that fact. Imagine this campus full of people responding to the fact that they are loved by God. That’s heaven.”