Candice Chenault

Candice Chenault has been making music for most of her life. She began playing the piano at four, was accompanying a youth choir by the seventh grade, and has been at a church keyboard more or less ever since. Raised in the Methodist tradition at Huffman United Methodist Church in Birmingham, she grew up with a love of sacred music and worship that never let go.

It was the University of Montevallo that brought her to our corner of Oak and Plowman, and St. Andrew’s became her church home. Here she began serving as pianist and organist, the start of a music ministry that has spanned many years, several congregations, and more than a few choirs. She has remained deeply rooted in the Episcopal tradition she grew to love, and today she leads the choir and helps the whole congregation find its voice. She counts the members of St. Andrew’s as an extension of her own family. She is also active in Cursillo, the renewal movement that sends Christians home singing. De Colores!

The patience she brings to the choir loft comes honestly. Candice spent ten years in advertising before following a calling into education, earning her Master of Education and serving eleven years as a special education teacher. Today she is a Reading Interventionist at Thompson Intermediate School in the Alabaster City Schools, where she specializes in dyslexia intervention as a Certified Academic Language Therapist. Helping a struggling reader become a confident one, and helping a hesitant singer find the tune: it is the same gift, applied in two rooms.

Candice and her family have been active Episcopalians for many years, and she raised two sons in the church. One is in college at UAH; the other is a senior at Thompson High School, shares her love of music, and has served musically at St. Andrew’s himself. Away from the keyboard and the classroom she gardens, hikes, and cheers on the Alabama Crimson Tide.

She considers it a blessing to serve God through music and to worship alongside her St. Andrew’s family. If you sing, or have always wanted to, the choir would love to have you. You do not need to read music or know the hymn. Candice will make room.