Music Director, Students Attend Urbana

Eben Drost, director of music and worship at Westmont, will serve as music director for the worship band at Urbana 2018, a major Christian student missions conference for approximately 16,000 college students Dec. 27-31 in St. Louis.

“I am looking forward to hearing the testimonies of people from around the world who are striving to be faithful witnesses to Christ, sometimes in very difficult and dangerous settings, and are seeing God’s faithfulness in whatever situations they are in,” Drost says. “I am also looking forward to people (including myself) encountering God in worship, and being empowered to bear faithful witness to Christ.”

The Urbana conference is important for students to attend, Drost says, because it can expand our vision for what God is doing in the world and help us see ourselves as part of God’s unfolding story. “Generations of students have heard a transformational calling from God at Urbana,” he says. “Others like me didn’t have a dramatic, sudden life-changing experience, but can look back and see that their experience at Urbana shaped them in significant ways and altered the trajectory of their lives.”

Drost, a Westmont alumnus who attended Urbana in 2012 and 2015, will be playing keyboard on the worship team and serving as the musical director of the band. “I’ll be finalizing arrangements of songs and helping lead the band in executing the arrangements,” he says. “On a more trivial note, I am pretty excited to play music through a world class sound system in the stadium where the Rams used to play football.”

Westmont senior Lucas Viera, a philosophy and religious studies double major, will write about his experiences at Urbana for Words of Warriors, a Westmont student blog.