Brad Schultz

Dr. Brad Schultz is our Minister of Music. Contact Brad with questions about our music program or pipe organ, joining the choir, or scheduling a recording session in our sanctuary. 

A native of Minnesota, Brad’s musical background includes vocal and instrumental performance and conducting, church and community music making, university teaching and public musicology.

Brad joined the staff at St. Stephen’s in July 2023, having previously served United Methodist, Unitarian Universalist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian congregations in Oregon, Iowa, Minnesota, Idaho, and Georgia. He holds a Ph.D in Musicology from the University of Oregon. His dissertation focuses on the keyboard works of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, a composer active in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, through the lenses of embodied cognition, rhetoric, and organology (the study of musical instruments). 

At St. Stephen’s, Brad directs the Sanctuary Choir, leads worship from the Frobenius Pipe Organ, and organizes our concert series. Brad is also the Artistic Director of the Contra Costa Chorale, a community-based ensemble in the East Bay, and the summer Consort Chorale, which rehearses and performs at St. Stephen’s. He is also an associate faculty member in the music and lifelong learning departments at Santa Rosa Junior College where he teaches courses on keyboard instruments and music & the brain. 

Brad also teaches online music courses for the University of Oregon and previously served on the faculty of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He performs regularly as an organist, collaborative keyboardist and continuo player, and conductor, and enjoys making music with other musicians in the Bay Area. He received a Master’s of Sacred Music degree in organ performance from Emory University and Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, GA, and a Bachelor’s degree in tuba performance from Luther College. He lives in San Rafael with his husband Matt, an advertising consultant.