ELCA Assembly Welcomes Peter Mayer, Buffett’s Lead Guitarist

MINNEAPOLIS (ELCA) – Peter Mayer, lead guitarist for Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band, sees his involvement at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s (ELCA) Churchwide Assembly as evidence that he’s “not your usual rock and roll entertainer.”
Mayer was at the assembly Aug. 21 to perform a concert, with proceeds to benefit the ELCA HIV and AIDS Strategy and the Lutheran Malaria Initiative (LMI). The assembly affirmed both earlier in the week. He said he feels “privileged to be involved” in the concert.
The churchwide assembly, the chief legislative authority of the ELCA, is meeting here Aug. 17-23 at the Minneapolis Convention Center. About 2,000 people are participating, including 1,045 ELCA voting members. The theme for the biennial assembly is “God’s work. Our hands.”
Born in India to Lutheran missionary parents, Mayer currently lives in Nashville, where he and his family attend First Evangelical Lutheran Church.
“The music industry can be very self-centered [and] tends to break people down,” said Mayer, who added that the concert “gives me a chance to be part of a larger context and give back -- to give in ways we don’t usually have the means to do as musicians.”
It’s not so much that he’s simply helping with the HIV and AIDS strategy, and LMI, he said, “but that they involve people reaching across church bodies to help.”
He added that the drummer in his band asked if they might be performing other benefit concerts for the future.
Mayer also led an assembly Bible study with the Rev. Ronald Glusenkamp of Cherry Hills Village, Colo. They are co-authors of three studies on Proverbs for the ELCA’s Book of Faith initiative.
Last month, Mayer led the house band for the 2009 ELCA Youth Gathering in New Orleans, as he had also done for the 2006 gathering.
That was “an incredible experience,” he recalled. “When you’re in a room with 37,000 kids, there’s nothing like that kind of energy.” He said he found it “enriching” that organizers asked him to include a woman and people of color in his gathering band.
Mayer first became involved at the churchwide level several years ago when Lutheran Men in Mission Director Douglas “Doug” Haugen invited him to perform at the organization’s gathering.
Although he “mulled it over” for some time, Mayer admitted that “it ended up feeling like a homecoming.”
“I was fiercely involved in the music industry, but this gave me my first opportunity to give back,” said Mayer. His involvement with Lutheran Men in Mission led him to record Christian music, beginning with the CD titled “Stirrin’ Up the Water: Songs of Faith.”
In 1988, under the name PM, Mayer cut and released his first album. It included his single, “Pieces of Eight,” which hit number eight on the Billboard chart.
Mayer was eight years old when his family moved from India to the United States.
“It was an incredible world to grow up in,” he said of those years in Tamil Nadu, at the southernmost tip of the Indian peninsula.
He recalled that “since we were about 20 years behind ... we had no TV, we ... made up our own activities and interacted daily with the people in the poorest neighborhoods. In this country, we tend to shield ourselves from what we saw [as children] every day.”
Such images, which also included Indian musicians giving Christmas concerts in his parents’ home, are reflected in Mayer’s music today.
“This is not the usual rock ‘n’ roll image,” he concluded, “but I’m not your usual rock ‘n’ roll person.”
---
Information about the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly can be found at http://www.elca.org/assembly/ on the Web.

For information contact:
John Brooks, Director (773) 380-2958 or news@elca.org
http://www.elca.org/news
ELCA News Blog: http://www.elca.org/news/blog