Garfield Harvey – Spotlight Story
Nominated for numerous awards throughout his music career, Garfield is a versatile composer and musician who studied Professional Music at Berklee College of Music. His years of experiences has led to his current vocation on the music staff at Christian Life Center in Fort Lauderdale, FL, where he oversees the orchestra as composer and conductor. He is also the music department developer for the new church campuses.
Beyond the music, Garfield is an educator and church planter with 19 years of experience in the field. In fact, he relocated from North Carolina to Florida in 2010 to plant a church with his brother after completing his second graduate degree from Liberty University; that church is still thriving in the Fort Lauderdale area. He also volunteered for several years as the coordinator for a program that served more than 65 homeless people daily and provided food to more 700 low income families each month.
While studying at Liberty University, Garfield developed a passion for global leadership. He had been traveling back and forth between America and Jamaica as a church planter but his passion for leadership emerged when he was asked to train church pastors and leader in Jamaica.
Garfield’s main drive is to teach everything he was taught with an aspiration that his trainees will “pay-it-forward.” He has a heart for smaller churches and believe it’s his mandate to train the leaders from those churches. His philosophy is simple, “I agree some churches launched prematurely but their failure also reflects a negative light on the church at large so let’s fix it by training those willing to learn.”
In an attempt to become culturally relevant and sharpen his skills as a global leader, Garfield is enrolled in the Doctor of Ministry program at George Fox Evangelical Seminary. His degree focuses on Leadership and Global Perspectives but his dissertation focuses on cultural integration and its effect on the church. The program affords the opportunity to visit other countries, study its culture and observe its engagement with religion. Last fall they visited Hong Kong and will visit England later this year. The faculty are also active leaders globally so they continue to provide fresh perspectives on global leadership.
As a Jamaican native, Garfield experienced the challenges when church leaders tried to assimilate him into the American culture instead of an integrative process. Music ministry is a great opportunity to integrate cultures so with Garfield’s music background, he launched Praize Keyz, a non-profit organization. He uses this organization as a platform to educate music ministry leaders and an opportunity to teach culturalintegration. Garfield understands that most smaller churches cannot afford to attend large conference so he reaches out to them to offer support.
Ask any of Garfield’s friends or colleagues and they’ll probably laugh and say, “Garfield has 50 Masters and he’s a teacher.” He really has three graduate degrees but he really loves to teach. He often says, “I just want to teach and you never have to ordain or give me a title as long as I get to teach.” Garfield actually teach piano and orchestra for the music school at his church and taught 6th grade math and music k-12 in the school system.
Garfield is very analytical and believes people are effective with structure and limited flexibility so his days mirrors a daily routine. He spends most of his spare doing five things.
- Garfield is a family guy so he’ll cancel any event (regardless of the money) just to spend more time with his family. The funny thing is that he doesn’t care if there’s nothing planned, he just love being with them. He’s only missed one family night in the last three years.
- He loves to write so he has several incomplete writing projects but he’s not sure what he’ll do with them. He writes daily…
- Garfield is a numbers guy so he’s always calculating something (from finances to the length of time for a stop light to change)
- He loves to share ideas so he’ll spend hours sharing ideas with anyone who will listen because he believes the more he talks, the more ideas he gets
- He loves watching action movies and doesn’t care about the story line
Like a few people, Garfield likes all his drinks room temperature and he doesn’t like carbonated drink. However, one of the most puzzling things about him is that he doesn’t like gravy on his food but he has no problem pouring barbecue sauce over the same gravy-less food. Garfield’s career is worth monitoring as he intends to make global impact.
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