Staff Profile: Celebration Pastor Krista-Dawn Kimsey
As our Sunday morning musical worship leader, Krista-Dawn Kimsey is a familiar face to anyone who has attended celebration services at The River over the past year. While musical worship is Krista-Dawn's most visible role, it's just one of many aspects of Sunday morning experience that she oversees
"Authentic worship stems from authentic expression," says Krista-Dawn when asked about her thoughts on worship. "I want people to bring all of who they are when they come to church to worship: their family lives, work lives, and cultural values."
It's this philosophy that spurs the creative incorporation of media and art that we experience together on Sunday morning and elsewhere in the church. Recent examples include the River's Advent retreat where artists created installations to help participants enter into the hope and longing of Advent and the inclusion photos of River members' workplaces as part of the worship experience in our "Loving Monday" Sunday morning series on the workplace.
Krista-Dawn grew up in Edmonton, Alberta and is proud to be a Canadian. She has been married to her husband Joel, a missions coordinator for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship for eight years and they have a fearless 22 month-old son, Judah. A lover of hockey, coffee, and her husband's cooking, she also has a guilty soft-spot for reality TV.
Throughout her life, the themes of spirituality and artistic expression have been interwoven. Born into a staunchly Lutheran family, Krista-Dawn grew up faithfully attending services at a small, evangelical Lutheran church. Born also into a staunchly musical family, Krista-Dawn's musical talent was identified early on and her parents groomed her to be a concert pianist. These worlds constantly overlapped as her father, the director of the musical ministries at their church, gave her many opportunities to participate in musical worship.
Krista-Dawn describes her participation in church and music in this time as a "following in the footsteps of those who went before." Both church and music were simply facts of her life and she pursued them because they were the right things to do. By the time she went to study piano performance at the University of Washington, however, this manner of life was wearing on her soul. Worn down by the incessant competition of the classical music world and the solitary life of a practice room, Krista-Dawn came across a campus fellowship group called Intervarsity Christian Fellowship where for the first time, she met people for whom faith was a living relationship with Jesus.
Abandoning her plans to become a concert pianist, Krista-Dawn joined Intervarsity as a staff worker following her graduation. It was there where she discovered that her years of musical study had set the stage for ministry in musical worship. "I discovered that my proficiency on the piano allowed me to communicate clearly through music and that I was able to quickly learn new styles of music which created an avenue to embrace other cultures."
After nine years with Intervarsity, Krista-Dawn received a call to come to The River in December 2005. "While my time ministering to students was richly rewarding, I realized that I wanted to bring greater focus to the passion I feel in fostering authentic worship," she says. In the short time she has been on staff, her pastoral leadership, artistic creativity, positive energy has had a significant impact on our community.