faith! - Bill & Victoria Logan

Lifelong musicians find home in embracing a new spiritual tradition.

Chances are if you have attended one of the 5 p.m. services where St. Martin’s “SayLove” band sings, you’ve already met Victoria and Bill Logan.

They are among the band’s five members who sing and play instruments once a month during the evening service. (Other members are Gordon Schell, a St. John’s member who helped get the group together, and Lucy and Christi Mahon, both St. Martin’s members along with Victoria and Bill. Christi often plays the violin.)

Spiritual music has long been a part of the Logans’ lives. New to the Episcopal Church, the couple grew up in the Presbyterian tradition that is part of the evangelical movement. Bill’s mother is a pastor and the couple’s lives were deeply entwined with that work until moving to Columbia in 2019.

Because Bill had been introduced to the Book of Common prayer for his personal daily prayer work, he was fond of the Episcopal approach to prayer. As a physician with the Veteran’s Administration in the area of palliative care, Bill soon met the Rev. Chuck Petit, a former assistant priest at St. Martin’s, and as a result was introduced to the parish as the couple was seeking a new church home.

“Even though this Episcopal tradition was not something we had been familiar with, we were both very ready for a change,” said Bill, who along with Victoria was confirmed at St. Martin’s in November.

The couple, both 58, had attended a few services just before the COVID shutdown and were impressed with what they experienced, but a clergy call from the Rev. Mitch Smith is what really helped them start to call St. Martin’s home.

Bill experienced serious complications during a routine medical procedure. Victoria felt very alone as the situation amplified because the procedure had been so routine, they had told no family members.

“I was sitting on the back porch and didn’t know a soul,” she recalled. “It was the scariest feeling in the world and the phone rings and it’s Mitch. He said, ‘What can we do?’ and I was bowled over by that … I thought, I don’t understand all this liturgy stuff, but I’m all in.”

Bill explained that in their entire adult lives of being heavily involved in the life of several evangelical churches, they had never received a pastoral call. Calls to volunteer or make financial contributions, yes. Calls to see how they were? Not once.

“I deeply love Mitch and Caitlyn because of the way they walked through that time in our lives with us,” Bill said.

After Bill recovered, he became part of the group of medical experts in the parish to advise and assist Mitch and Caitlyn in the parish’s COVID response.

And then as they began to get to know folks better, Mitch and Caitlyn learned about their musical background. Bill had played classical piano until his teen years, and played in the praise and renewal movement of churches for many years. Musicians such as Bob Hinley of the Billy Graham Crusade and other Christian musicians such as Phil Keaggy and Randy Stonehill were personal friends and strong musical influences.

From a very early age, Bill said, “I loved prayer and worship, always have.”

Victoria grew up strongly influenced by her involvement in summer Christian camp life.

“Music was always a part of that,” she said.

Her relationship with church music deepened after her father died when she was 14 and a young woman leading music at the

camp that summer invited her

to take part. She began

taking voice lessons and later

attended Columbia International University where she took voice for two years.

“I think, similar to Bill, for me music is the environment that gave me a place of belonging,” she said.

That place of belonging has involved 38 years of the couple’s lives – 36 of which they have been married.

So to take part in the music that is more praise oriented at the 5 p.m. service is a natural fit for the Logans. They feel deeply honored to be part of the group with Gordon, Christi and Lucy.

“When I pick up my guitar and begin to really release myself in the act of worship, there is a tangible presence I cannot deny,” Bill said.

It is much the same for Victoria.

“The word that comes to mind is ‘holy,’ ” Victoria said of her experience with singing in worship settings. “I experience a calmness that I can’t account for, and I feel like I could stay here awhile.”

Bill said the experience of singing in worship for him is similar to his work in palliative care with a patient where “you leave a little piece of your soul at the bedside. I feel the same way with music.”