Southwestern PhD student Kaitlyn Bennett finds program’s flexibility fits her life

Kaitlyn Bennett wanted to pursue a doctoral degree in church music, but didn’t want to leave her small Pennsylvania community. So it was surprising that she found a solution at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

Bennett had fallen in love with music as a child in North Carolina, beginning piano lessons around the age of 6. When she was 12, the lessons “really caught on … I really started taking practices a bit more seriously and realized that it wasn’t just an extracurricular that I enjoyed, but that it was also something that I was quite good at and really loved,” she said.

The music minister at her church, University Hills Baptist Church near the University of North Carolina campus in Charlotte, “gave me a lot of opportunities, even as a fairly young musician, with worship leadership, playing piano, and stuff like that,” she said. Around the age of 15, she started teaching piano to the younger children in her church and had more than a dozen students by the time she graduated high school.

After high school, Bennett attended Grove City College, a private, Christian liberal arts school in western Pennsylvania, where she studied music and philosophy. She went on to attend the University of Oxford as a recipient of the John and Daria Barry Scholarship, a prestigious research fellowship hosted by the Canterbury Institute in Oxford. She earned a Master of Philosophy in music performance from the university in 2023.

Bennett said the degree “allowed me to sort of rediscover and investigate in a fresh way the more academic side of music, and that was really important for me, because it ultimately helped me to decide that I didn’t want to become a concert pianist, and I didn’t want to try and be a performer full time.” She said the program made her realize she loves the academic study of music, specifically sacred music, and credits it with her decision to pursue a doctoral program in that field.

After earning her master’s degree at Oxford, Bennett and her husband wanted to return to Grove City where he is involved in youth ministry and both work at the college: he as a cross-country coach and she as a part-time piano instructor.

“So I was looking for programs in church music, … and there are not a lot of academic programs that are flexible. That was the number one priority for me,” she said.

Bennett said she wrestled with the decision to continue her studies and even considered giving up the idea of earning a PhD, adding, “that’s hard, because I would like to be a professor.” Through Southwestern, she found “a viable path towards further research and study that [offers] a semblance of a cohort and community.”

Bennett is pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy in church music and worship through the SCMW’s online program and feels a sort of kinship with her degree supervisor, Joshua Waggener, professor of church music and worship, who earned his doctorate at Durham University in England.

“He is both interested in musicology and the music itself, but also in biblical worship and biblical studies,” she said, adding she believes that’s important for a field like worship studies and church music because of the many potential areas of concentration.

“So I appreciate that Dr. Waggener is willing to jump into all of those different areas and has a lot of background knowledge and expertise in just a really wide variety of sources, like historical and contemporary, because I think that’s really important for this particular field of study, given that it can be like an octopus, you know, like having something in every sort of field that’s possibly related to church music,” Bennett said.

Waggener also gave high marks to Bennett, saying she adds a lot to the school’s PhD program.

“Kaitlyn brings fantastic insights to our seminar discussions that are both scholarly and pedagogical, informed by her work as a piano instructor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania,” he said. “I applaud her accomplishments in presenting a paper at the Eastern ETS Conference last year and having a paper accepted for the upcoming meeting of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music conference in 2026.”

Bennett also returned to England earlier this year for the Christian Congregational Music Conference, presenting a paper based on research she conducted for her master’s thesis at Oxford.

Bennett said her degree supervisor at Oxford was the national advisor on matters of liturgy for the Church of England. They began talking about various spaces in which music is used in the church, and Bennett said she found it particularly interesting how contemporary funeral trends are moving toward “celebration of life” models that focus more on the biography of the person who passed away. Oftentimes, she said, the funeral service is centered around music, with families choosing songs the deceased loved or that remind them of the person.

Bennett’s research examined how it sounds to sing lament. “I looked at that in the context of contemporary Church of England funerals, which was wonderful given that I was there in Oxford and that my supervisor had connections,” she said.

Joe Crider, SCMW dean, said the school is “honored to have students such as Kaitlyn Bennett as a PhD student. … She is a light for Christ in the broader scope of academic scholarship. Her research presentation at Oxford and other conferences around the U.S. reflect the quality of her research.”

Bennett is unsure when she will graduate with her PhD, “But my plan is to do my comprehensive exams and submit my prospectus next fall and then see how fast I can write [my dissertation],” she said.

Though studying remotely, she has visited Southwestern’s campus a couple of times, which she said is beautiful.

“I am sad that I do not live in the music library,” she added with a smile. “The librarians have been magnificent when I need things like scanning chapters and stuff. But the music library, in particular, at Southwestern is truly a gem. It’s incredibly well equipped, … with historic [materials] and primary sources and also just scores, like in most of the most recent music literature. It is a very, very good library. I loved it both times I’ve seen it.”

Bennett, who once thought she might have to give up on her goal to earn a PhD, said she is grateful to have found the opportunity through Southwestern.

Having “the privilege of continuing to work in academia and to pursue a terminal degree, I think that that still sometimes blows my mind, that it’s all happening, right? It’s a lot to process,” she said.