Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Candid conversations for the church. Host is Ardin Beech of Windsor District Baptist Church, Sydney, Australia. Co-hosted by Jonathan Hoffman.
Well, just when you thought life couldn't get any better and you had an audio podcast to listen to every week, now we're going video
Jonathan:Video. Yes.
Ardin:And global.
Jonathan:As always, it's been a few weeks since we've gone global.
Ardin:Indeed. Yeah. Who have you got for us today?
Jonathan:Well, very, very excited to welcome on to This Week at Windsor, Jessica and Barry Schaefer. Jessica and Barry, welcome.
Barry:Well, thank you. Good to be with you guys.
Jessica:Thank you so much.
Jonathan:Jessica and I have a connection. Alright. We're related. So
Ardin:Just because you're both American doesn't mean you're related. I know that's like the stereotypical thing.
Jonathan:No. We are related. We we're cousins, and so we we have a lot of memories growing up together. I haven't seen each other in a while. I think when when did we see you guys last?
Jessica:It was probably three or four years ago when you came stateside, as it were, to Chicago for your Wheaton Reunion. Right?
Jonathan:That's right. That's right. That's right. This might be breaking news to Arden because I know you're so plugged into everything that's going on Yeah. Everything that's going on here.
Jonathan:But but Jessica is actually gonna be our featured guest for our Carol's program this year. Oh, wow. Yeah. And Barry's gonna be bringing the message, so it's it's gonna be it's gonna be an awesome time.
Ardin:And and what what skill set is she bringing?
Barry:I don't
Jonathan:know, Jessica. What skill set are you bringing?
Jessica:Well, I'm bringing my singing voice with me. Wow. It's in my luggage really well. So
Ardin:A star a star in our midst.
Jonathan:Yeah. We we had an opportunity this year. We've been so blessed over the years with a number of people in our church who who, you know, invest so much time in getting ready and just felt like this year people needed a bit of a break. And it opened up an opportunity to, have Jessica and and Barry come out, and, it's gonna be a it's gonna be a great time. Jessica, you are a international vocalist.
Jonathan:How do you title your like, what do you put on your resume, like, when you go interview for jobs?
Jessica:Yeah. Well, I refer to myself as an international opera singer or an international classical soprano.
Jonathan:Okay.
Jessica:My fourteen year old self dreamed of being an international opera singer. While I have sung a lot of opera, and that has certainly taken me around the world, I do a lot of classical concert repertoire as well, so that's not necessarily operatic, but, you know, that's like Handel's Messiah or Hayken's Creation. I actually interpret a lot of newly written classical music, and that's how I've made most of my career, both opera and concert.
Jonathan:That's a gig. Most people I I think when they think of opera, they they imagine, like, a woman in, like, a Viking outfit with, like, braided hair. The big horns. The big the big horns. But Plays for the for the for the uncultured among us.
Jonathan:Namely Arden. What attracted you to that? What does it look like to perform in that space? How is that kind of performance maybe different than, you know, what some of our pop stars sort of put out there?
Jessica:Yeah. Absolutely. So I think my love for music started when I was very young, even before I even knew what it was. And and one of our relatives, our great aunt Catherine, who was pop up's sister who had a degree in music from Peabody in Baltimore. She was an organist and a pianist.
Jessica:I think she was visiting, and I was singing. And she's like, hey. Did you know Jessica's could sing in tune? And I think that our family certainly appreciated music, but didn't really know from an educated perspective and as deeply as aunt Catherine did. So she encouraged the family to start me in some sort of music lessons.
Jessica:So I started piano at five and started voice lessons at nine. And around the age of 14, my voice teacher had given me an opera aria as part of the curriculum I was learning through the Music Teachers Association of California. I would go every year and prepare a certain amount of repertoire and sing that repertoire and then add another thing the next year. And at the same time, my mom, our grandmother, brought home a VHS tape of an operetta that she remembered from her childhood from our local library.
Barry:We all have one of those.
Jessica:Does anybody even remember what that is? You know, those big bricks? In it was featured two American opera singers who had made it big in Hollywood singing, and they were playing young opera singers. And I thought to myself, I wanna do that. I had been receiving the training, and I had the skill and the ability to pronounce the language as well.
Jessica:And so I decided that that's what I wanted to do. So that's what took me to college for both my undergrad and graduate degrees, and then started doing the apprentice artist thing, and then got my break at Los Angeles Opera. When I went on at the last minute, I was singing in the chorus but understudying the lead role and had to go on literally in the last dress rehearsals. And that earned me a position as the soprano at the Los Angeles Opera, the resident artist. So I spent three years there.
Jessica:So after I kind of graduated from those three years, I embarked on an freelance operatic career. So I got hired by opera companies and symphony orchestras around the world to perform with them, to sing opera or concert repertoire. And so I've sung really on some of the greatest stages of the world. The LA Philharmonic has the Disney Hall in Los Angeles, and that's really kind of where I got my start and also at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. And then I've sung Carnegie Hall in New York City, Royal Albert Hall in London with the Berlin Philharmonie.
Jonathan:Wow. You're capping it off with Windsor.
Jessica:You know? Right. Absolutely. And no. Hey.
Jessica:You might be my next launching point. So I happened to Australia to sing. I was in Adelaide for a month singing at the festival that happens there. This is probably, I don't know, fifteen years ago, singing an opera that I recorded with the Atlanta Symphony, which won two of the three Grammys it was nominated for. So I went on the road and and was able to sing there.
Jessica:And but I have yet to sing in Sydney. So I mean, we do have an opera house.
Barry:So yeah. So it's Windsor, and then the next stop, Sydney Opera House. Yeah.
Jonathan:Right. Now, Barry, we don't wanna leave you in the we we don't wanna sort of leave you to the side there. You guys are married, obviously. Tell us a bit about your background. What what what have you spent most of your working life doing?
Barry:Yeah. Yeah. You know, by the way, a quick opera comment. One of the things from a layperson, you know, from an opera standpoint, one of the differences between an operatic voice and say musical theater, it's so precise and so technical. It's like it's like landing something on a pinhead every time.
Barry:You know? And so that's just something I've kind of just come to appreciate in a big way. So my personal background, I was in ministry, Started in in youth ministry way back in a galaxy far, far away, and and and and that was really my my gateway into ministry. But from that, became real convicted about how kids were biblically illiterate. The church was biblically illiterate.
Barry:And so from that, I I began to write some material that helped kids study scripture on their own and use some inductive tools. And and so out of that, grew a ministry, n word, inw0rd,nword.org. So that I've been I've been working on that, leading that for
Jessica:Almost thirty years.
Barry:Yeah. Almost thirty years now. Right. We're not that But all that too being driven just by helping people engage in scripture. Now we're now creating content that's more adult based in helping people learn how to study more individually and just have truly engage in scripture in a in a deeper way.
Barry:So I've been in I've been in the in and around ministry. I've helped pastor churches. I've just done different leadership aspects and working as a lay elder now with our church and just been involved in all kinds of little different ministry things at that point, but mainly writing, teaching.
Jessica:He's currently also a chaplain.
Barry:And working as a hospice chaplain. You know, side gig. Yeah. Working as a hospice chaplain. Yeah.
Barry:And that that came about from several years ago when Jessica and I were as we're now married and now having kiddos and and now having health insurance issues that are beyond our control. You know? And so one of us needed a job with health benefits, and that was me. I got a position as a at the hospital, a local hospital working as a patient rep, and and that was interesting, which is basically the complaint department for a hospital.
Jonathan:So there's none of those there.
Barry:Yeah. You're
Jonathan:right. Yeah.
Jessica:He was hired for his pastoral ex I think that is pastoral experience.
Barry:I think that is what got him the job, you know, complaint management, you know, pastoral ministry. He wouldn't know anything about that. You know, definitely. And from that, moved into hospice chaplain work. And that's part time, and now Inward is is part time as well.
Barry:So we got a couple of two full time, have part time gigs, I guess you might say. Yeah.
Ardin:Awesome. Just for you, Jess, who who would be your your heroes in in the in the opera world? Pav Pavarotti comes to mind, but who are the who are the greats as far as you're concerned?
Jessica:Well, you know, one of the one of the cool coolest experiences I've had in in the opera world is when I was in graduate school, there was a friend of mine from my high school youth group who knew that I wanted to be a singer and knew that I went off to college to study music. And she was at another university who had ties to the three tenors concert that was at the Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles. And she called me up and said, I know you love this music, and I have an opportunity to be a VIP usher, and I wanted to invite you to come and join us to do that. So I got to sit through the dress rehearsal and listen to Paparazzi sing, you know, Nasundorma and Carreras and and Domingo to sing their songs. And I was just like, oh my gosh.
Jessica:This is amazing. But I think one of my all time favorite heroes and someone who has become someone of a mentor to me because I had an opportunity to understudy her a couple times is Renee Fleming. She is probably one of the most probably the most well known soprano of our generation.
Barry:Singing this national anthem at the Super Bowl three or four years ago.
Jessica:Yes. He did. And that's when that's when Barry and I figured out, you know, the connection between music and sports.
Jonathan:That's the that's the meeting ground right there. That's the
Jessica:Yeah. Yeah. But, certainly, you know, have a lot of favorites over the years. I've collected some really beautiful voices in my ear to try and, emulate. I mean, everybody's voice is as unique as their own DNA, so and their own structure, and we are fearfully and wonderfully made in that really unique way.
Jessica:So but there's certainly some voices that I just gravitate towards because they're so beautiful. And what Barry says, their precision, being able to execute, you know, on such a high level, high art that is, like, crazy fantastic.
Jonathan:So we've joked about sort of you guys and sort of the sort of the the the high high end international touring performing world. And as Barry described, it's sort of the layman's world where we're, you know, talking about football games and and whatnot. I happen to know a bit of your backstory, but I wonder if you'd be comfortable sharing a little bit about how you guys came together and and maybe God's hand in that. I know it's a big story, but if you don't mind just opening the the door and giving us a little bit of a window in, that'd be great.
Jessica:Yeah. Sure. We can we can help the short version.
Barry:Short version shots. Can I give the short version? I know. Well, so I have been widowed, and my late wife Dana passed in o nine of, breast cancer. And, about a year and a half into widowhood, I got a, call from a a good friend who's out in LA, who said, hey.
Barry:I have this good friend. She's an opera soprano. How close are you to Cincinnati? And, you know, I'm about an hour from Cincinnati. She said, well, she's singing with the Cincinnati Opera.
Barry:I think you guys would enjoy coffee, maybe dinner, and she insisted this was not a setup. She said, I just think you guys would would would enjoy each other. And so so I took her up on that, and our our little line is we we met for supper, so we did meet. And then she's there for the month of June, so we met for June, and then we met for life. So we were we were married three months and two days from the day we met, you know, not the day we knew of each other, the day we met.
Jonathan:Oh, wow.
Barry:And I I say leave that to the trained professionals. Yeah. Right.
Jessica:Well and I think Lois, our friend who connected us, you know, she had emailed me as well and said, hey. I have this friend in in the Cincinnati area, and I know you would enjoy connecting, but I would really love it if you could offer him some tickets to the opera because I wanna make sure he's getting out of the house. You know, she had also been widowed. So I felt like it was her widow ministry, you know, to take care of fellow widows and just make know understanding their journey and making sure that they were being cared for. And, you know, that's one of the charges and, you know, take care of the widows and the orphans.
Jessica:Right? And so I think because she had a personal experience with that. And, of course, since I felt like she god had truly placed her in my life for some really important mentorship that I was like, of course, you know, whatever. You know? But she's still to this day, she says, Barry, I told you you could have coffee with a soprano, not marry her.
Jessica:So I she really did not have the intention that we were supposed to be, you know, together for life. She's like, why would I let you marry her and move her out of Los Angeles to Ohio? But, you know, god is funny that way.
Barry:Yeah. And and so And what's what's crazy too about that time, you know, during in my journey, not only in the journey of breast cancer fighting, but then also, loss, There were so many things what things what we've called god stamps. You know, those, those things that happen that are so very unique. The phrase that I've determined or that I've used was it's it's so evident that god stamp is all over them. And for me in that journey, it was rainbow.
Barry:It was deer. So many interesting things happening with that. And then when Jessica and I had these, you know, few months of interaction, all these things started showing up as well, including a heart cloud of know, a true cloud a true heart in the sky. Yeah. And we got to the point to where I'm like, well, it's good thing I like you because I I think I'm supposed to marry you.
Barry:You know?
Ardin:It helps.
Barry:Every pointing that it's like if you god's doing these arrows here. Here. Here. Yeah. So So
Jessica:that's why we we weren't so concerned with the rapidness of the timing because we were getting very clear signs that this was it.
Jonathan:I wanted to talk about your faith, Jessica, for for a minute because I think, you know, as someone who's who was sort of watching your star ascend at the same time, you know, I was growing closer to the Lord. I I kinda looked from afar and I thought, how do you with such instability, being in a place, not being sort of locked into a even a I know you have a home church, but, like, just traveling all the time, being in a performing circles. And how did God keep your faith intact through that time? And were there any key moments for you where, you know, you felt like, yeah, Jesus, you were right there and and you learned to to trust him deeply.
Jessica:Yeah. Absolutely. Well, you know, growing up in the church, I was singing all the time there, but I I really feel like, you know, I'm getting to know who Jesus was. And I think that, you know, my I always have known and that my talent is from the Lord. It's God given and for his purposes.
Jessica:And so I I've always felt called to go wherever it is that he has asked me to go to use that gift. And there was certainly a time where I had some reservation about whether I was supposed to do that in the world, you know, like, in a secular genre, or if I was supposed to just keep it in the church or, but I knew my voice was unique, and I knew that that 14 year old girl who decided she wanted to be an opera singer really was being led in that direction. And, actually, it was when I was a sophomore in high school, so a couple years later. I'd switched high schools that year, and we had also switched churches. And the church that we were new to was planning to do a show for their Christmas celebration, and it was actually an opera called A Mall and the Night Visitors.
Jessica:And it's about this young boy who was crippled, and he and his mom were very poor. And the wise men, you know, the kings come to visit him on their way to go see Jesus and the newborn king. And so I thought, wow. This is such a cool opportunity. And I went in and auditioned not really what knowing what I was auditioning for, but I sang a classical piece, and they start looking at me and measuring me and trying to figure out what are you and I'm like, what are they doing?
Jessica:And I got a call later that week that I had the lead, which is to play Amal, which is normally sung by a boy soprano, you know, before their voice changes. So I got to play the part of Amal, and I got to invite all of my high school friends that I was in choir with. And I had just switched from a private Christian school to a public high school. And and I thought, well, this is one of the ways that I can actually share my faith in what I'm doing because I do believe that I'm called to to use this gift for that. There was a time when I was singing at the LA Opera in my resident artist position that I got a call from a college mate of mine who had driven from Los Angeles to Nashville the day after we graduated college to go into contemporary Christian music.
Jessica:And he called me up and he said, you know, Jessica, I've talked to all the guys here. We really wanna talk to you about, you know, being the next Sandy Patty. And I'm like, I covered all her tunes in church, you know, in college. And love her. And actually, just about a year and a half ago, had an opportunity to meet her and sing on the same concert with her.
Jessica:And it was just it was actually very life affirming because she came up to me after we were in the rehearsal together, and she said, you have the most exquisite voice, and we are just I'm so delighted. And I was like, that's even continued affirmation that all the way back then when my friend thought I could be the next Sandy Patty. I'm like, listen. There's only one Sandy Patty, and she's amazing. But I had to say, well, Lord, if you're leading me in that direction, I'm gonna still follow through.
Jessica:And I went to Nashville. I recorded a demo. I played it for my two best friends from graduate school, and they're like, that's beautiful. Who is that? I'm like, exact.
Jessica:Especially when I'm trying to heal my body. You know, I also had a bout with breast cancer. I did a holistic path to healing with that, and that actually taught me a lot lot about how to take care of my body from a physical standpoint. As far as taking care of your voice, you just have to be diligent. I just treat myself like a vocal athlete.
Jessica:And just like any football player who is, you know, playing professionally is going to take care of their body. They're gonna do the right things so that they can have that they can perform at that game to the best of their ability. I really try to do the same, and I cannot stress enough how important that is. And I have to keep stressing it to myself because, you know, life gets really busy, and and you wanna do some of those things. I have FOMO of, like, you know, going to a concert and screaming.
Jessica:Again, don't do that. Or screaming on a roller coaster or, you know, being in a loud place, you know, to go dancing or something like that. But I feel the weight of that responsibility. You know? I feel like I've been given a gift, and so I really need to make sure that it's in prime performance shape when I'm called on to do that.
Jonathan:Well, we are so excited to have you both. Thank you for joining us today.
Barry:One other thing I wanna say, Jonathan, we we can't wait to be with you guys and with the with the church. And for me personally, I think I've mentioned this to you, but it's like a a bit of a personal pilgrimage, you know, with my my family, my grandparents having been church planters in the Sydney area back in the fifties and sixties. You know? And and it was one of those situations where their sending organization was the church of God out of Anderson, and their their sending blessing was, well, we've you have our blessing, but we have no money to give you. And so they actually did the old sell everything and came.
Barry:You know, my my grandpa, his brother, and then many of our family members would come over over the years and just help and do things. And so it'll be neat just to kinda check that area out. That church is it's I think the building's being sold. I don't know where the work is right now. But, yeah, we just need to kinda have that, personal connection there at that point as well.
Barry:Yeah. Can't wait to be with you guys.
Jessica:Yeah. And Barry did say to me a while back, he said, isn't it interesting that we have so many connections individually that help complete circles in each other's lives? And that's you, you know, Jonathan, being on the other side of the world, you know, where Barry's family has gone before and then you helping, you know, bring that circle
Barry:Yeah.
Jessica:Complete because Barry's never been to Sydney and and same. Cool.
Ardin:Well, thank you so much for joining us this morning or evening for you.
Barry:Yeah. We're good. Thank you. Good to connect with you guys very much.
Jessica:Thank you. Yeah. We'll see you shortly.
Ardin:Yeah. It sounds like it's gonna be a good Carol's.
Jonathan:It's gonna be great. I think people are gonna be really, really blessed.
Ardin:Anything that takes the limelight off you is gonna be good for us.
Jonathan:It's gonna be great.