Parish News

Now that our pipe organ has officially arrived here in Holland, Michigan, we know that many parishioners are excited to finally hear it played at Mass!

In the weeks following Easter, the pipe organ is scheduled for assembly. Our workers will transport all the pipes and casework from the shipping container into our Sanctuary. All the pieces will then be set up and arranged as they are meant to be.

The instrument will be tuned in mid-May. Our workers will take their time properly situating each pipe so that it plays the correct notes.

We are expecting our pipe organ to be fully ready to play by June 2025!

On Thursday, April 3, our pipe organ arrived at Our Lady of the Lake in Holland, Michigan! See photos below of its arrival!

As of the first weekend in March 2025, our organ officially shipped! Packing delays in the Netherlands pushed back our shipping date several times, but it is now officially on its way to America! We expect it to take about a month to travel from the Netherlands to Michigan, followed by several weeks for installation and tuning before the instrument is ready to play. See photos below of the organ being packed and shipped in the Netherlands!

Our new organ will be located by the choir area along the North wall of our Sanctuary. As you walk into our Sanctuary, the organ will be left of the altar and right of the stained glass window.

Before the organ arrives, we will make some modifications to the choir area in the sanctuary. We will extend the top step to make room for the organ and use insulation beneath the floor to protect the instrument from the radiant heat beneath the tile. The choir seats will be shifted to the side, with new choir risers built out of wood and the addition of new choir microphones. The piano will move to where our electronic organ currently sits.

Several parishioners have inquired about the differences between this new organ and our current one. One of the primary differences is in the way each instrument produces sound. Our current organ is an electronic Allen organ built in the early 1980s. All of the sounds that you hear are prerecorded and amplified by speakers. In contrast, a pipe organ generates its sound in the same manner as the human voice: by putting air through pipes. Pipe organs move pressurized air through hundreds or thousands of pipes to produce various tones and pitches. Our new organ will have 840 pipes.

To understand this difference further, consider our lovely grand piano. When one of its keys is pressed, a hammer inside the piano strikes the strings, causing them to vibrate and produce sound. This creates a warm and rich sound with natural acoustics. If we had an electronic keyboard instead of our grand piano, we could still play the same music. However, the sound quality would be drastically different, as the electronic keyboard is a simulation of a real piano. Likewise, this is the difference between an electronic organ and a pipe organ. While the two types of organs can play the same music, a pipe organ will produce a more pure and natural sound.

Sanctuary Modification Costs



Our electronic organ has served us well for around 40 years. In February of 2025, it was moved out and donated to another local church, Harbor Church. While we wait for our pipe organ to arrive and be installed, we will use the piano exclusively during Mass.

According to the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council, “The pipe organ is to be held in high esteem in the Latin Church, since it is its traditional instrument, the sound of which can add a wonderful splendor to the Church’s ceremonies and powerfully lift up men’s minds to God and higher things.” At Our Lady of the Lake, we are excited to announce that we are on the verge of acquiring our very own pipe organ to replace our current electric organ and elevate the beauty of our liturgies.

This unique opportunity first came to our attention more than a year and a half ago. We heard about an available organ that was created by a family workshop in the Netherlands that also built the organ in Dimnent Chapel at Hope College. Buying such an organ would ordinarily be prohibitively expensive for our parish. However, though the organ is in excellent condition, it is technically “used,” since it was originally built for a music school in France that has since gone out of business. As a result, we are able to purchase it at a significant discount. It is relatively small for a pipe organ, meaning it will fit well in the sanctuary of our church. When we got in contact with the family that built the organ, they were excited for it to go to Holland, MI, near the one their grandfather built for Hope.

After discussing this opportunity with Audrey Gorman and our pastoral and finance councils, Fr. Michael sought permission to purchase the organ from our bishop. Bishop Walkowiak encouraged us to proceed. OLL has now signed a contract with the workshop, which is planning to disassemble the organ, ship it to the U.S., reassemble it, and install it beginning in January 2025. The installation will take about six weeks.