Building instruments of worship

To see Myrna's WORLD Watch report, click here:

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Thursday, May 26th. We’re so glad you’ve joined us for The World and Everything in It.

Good morning. I’m Paul Butler.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Coming next: a musical craftsman.

There are lots of people who make musical instruments, but today we meet a man who—like the Psalmist—also encourages worship from the heart.

BUTLER: WORLD’s Myrna Brown is here with his story now and she says it all began with a dream, a run down building, and some good old fashion tenacity.

HANK TEUTON: I meet a dozen new people everyday, they’ll just walk in and they’ll say what is this place? You live here? No… you can’t live here.

MYRNA BROWN CORRESPONDENT: Hank Teuton lives in the middle of history. His living room used to be a baggage house for the city’s first railroad depot.

HANK TEUTON: Back in the day when this was open there were 40 passenger trains every single day. It was a hopping place.

As passenger rail gave way to interstate travel, the baggage house, built in 1897, was abandoned for decades until Teuton used his retirement savings to purchase it.

HANK TEUTON: It was exactly what I was looking for. What Betsy and I had talked about…

Teuton’s late wife, Betsy believed the retired Coast Guard officer would not only learn how to build guitars, he would also one day teach others and create spaces for worship. Before he retired, Teuton spent three years learning how to be a Luthier, a builder of stringed instruments.

HANK: When I was stationed in New Orleans, I met a man named Jimmy Foster. He was building arch-top, seven-string jazz guitars. And I approached him and asked if I could apprentice with him. He was resistant at first, but eventually we became good friends and I would spend about 20 hours a week in his shop.

Teuton says his late wife also had ideas about finding just the right location.

HANK: We'll find an old grist mill or some fun place to be and the students will come and hang out with you and then you can do discipleship training there. And so, I fell in love with the building. I flew down from Philadelphia to look at it and made an offer that day.

AUDIO: [WALKING UP STAIRS]

AUDIO: What was this? This was eight offices, a breakroom and two little bathrooms were up here.

It took more than a year for Teuton to knock down walls, replace floors and repurpose his 19th century baggage house. Today he lives on the top half of the historic building. The bottom level is where he runs Baruch Guitars. It’s where he says real transformation happens. Baruch is Hebrew for blessing.

HANK: I build worship instruments. Some of them are wood and some of them are flesh. So the idea is to put worship in the hearts of people. S0 that they may bless, “baruch” God.

Teuton welcomed his first two luthiers in 2019.

HANK: One was from South Africa and the other was from Israel and they came over on tourist visas and they spent three months with me and they each built a guitar and went back with beautiful instruments.

65–year-old luthier, Randy Anderson met Teuton at church.

RANDY ANDERSON: One day he invited me down to the shop, told me what he did. It intrigued me and over a brief period of time, he talked me into starting a guitar.

But within that first year, Teuton’s dream was threatened by a medical emergency.

HANK: We were walking back from a Friday morning prayer breakfast up at church, and I said things don’t feel just right, and I got one of them to take me over to Maxwell Airforce Base to the Infirmary. They looked at me and said you need to be in the hospital. And they did bypass surgery.

Teuton recovered, but then COVID hit and everything slowed down again. Unable to continue what he’d started, 67-year-old Teuton shifted the vision and began building instruments for local charities.

HANK: Raised a quarter of a million dollars. WIth that one guitar? With that one guitar.

Determined to keep his late wife’s dream alive, he’s started teaching again. 15-year-old Evan is a homeschooled student learning how to sand down a pickguard and thanks to Teuton he’s able to recognize when the edges around his own life need smoothing out.

HANK TO EVAN: Right now you’re sanding out all of the flaw of this piece of wood so that it will sparkle and shine and just be beautiful. How has God done that in your life? What’s been the sand paper that’s gotten rid of the bumps and the creases?
EVAN: Well, there’s one big thing is moving around a lot because we’re military.

Randy Anderson is also back, showing off the fretboard Teuton encouraged him to create. Each position on that part of his guitar tells the story of Anderson’s 48 years of ministry.

RANDY ANDERSON: We served six years in a church in Joplin, Missouri where my son was born and then we went to New Mexico….

Working in his living room, listening to the familiar sound of freight trains making their way across the tracks, Teuton hopes he’ll be just as resilient.

HANK: There’s a number of things that I desire in this place. One that it be a place of worship. I would love for there to be worship teams down here sharing with one another, cooperating , sharing worship songs and writing music together. So that’s one of my dreams.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Myrna Brown in Montgomery, Alabama.

REICHARD: If you’d like to see Hank Teuton in his studio, Myrna also filed a video report today on WORLD Watch. We’ve included a link in today’s transcript.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.