Becoming Minister of Music at Prince of Peace Church, Sacramento, in 1981, he brought their choral music program to new heights. This choir performed regularly for the community and staged children's musicals. At the same time, he began work at the Sacramento Job Corps Center in south Sacramento, a facility funded by the Department of Labor to help young adolescents receive their high school equivalency and learn a trade. There he became a full time counselor to teenagers. At Prince of Peace Church he also founded The Bells of Peace, a handbell choir, in 1984. During this same time he began teaching music full time at the James Rutter Middle School (JRMS), in the Elk Grove Unified School District, instructing band, chorus, handbells and general music. He founded The Concert Carillons Handbell Choir, the school's handbell choir, and the only handbell program in secondary school in all of northern California. He is currently a co-department leader of the arts at JRMS.

In the fall of 1987, Paul married Susan Elizabeth Coddington, a bell ringer and bass clarinetist whom he met at a handbell performance. From 1980 to 1988, he played low brass with The El Dorado Brass Band of Old Sacramento, a group of eighteen "Civil War" musicians, principally featuring brass music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also played first trombonist with the American River College Symphonic Band, under the direction of Dr. Lester Lehr, composing and arranging some of their performance pieces. Paul is active in many community music affairs. He has been an annual director of the Sacramento Recorder Society, as well as a member of their Board of Directors. Since 1985, he has been Coordinator of the Sacramento Area Handbell Directors Association (HANDS), often their mass director and, with his wife, coordinator of their annual Spring Ring, a gathering of more than thirty handbell choirs from the area performing handbell music.

Paul composes as time allows, spending most of his time in this regard on advanced music for handbells, specifically for RiverBells. Among many other works, he has had Carol for the Child/Lament for the Lamb published by National Music, and A Simple Sonata published by The American Guild of English Handbell Ringers (AGEHR). Sonore Sonette premiered at the Tenth Annual Spring Ring on March 27, 1993, and Éloge (dedicated to his father) premiered June 20, 1994 at the Area XII Handbell Festival in Visalia, California. A breakthrough in the handbell art was his Rhapsody for Band and Bells, an unusually long and difficult composition for 5-octave handbell choir and full symphonic band - the first composition for such an array of musical forces. Paul has been published by Bronze f/x, Laurendale Press, National and Allen-Myers Musicals.

Paul is often called to conduct handbell workshops. He served on the Board of Directors for Area XXII, AGEHR from 1994 to 1996. In 1999 he earned his Master of Music in Music Composition. Many of the works composed during his three years of graduate study at CSUS were performed by the 59th Army National Guard Band and the Bel Tempo Handbell Ensemble at his graduate composition recital on the CSUS campus. In 2000, he was admitted into the membership of the Delta Xi Chapter of Pi Kappa Lambda, a national honor society for music. He was elected president of the newly formed Sacramento Symphonic Winds in 2002, under the continuing direction of Dr. Lehr. In the fall of 1998 he founded RiverBells, a community handbell ensemble, originally sponsored by Cosumnes River College and later by the Elk Grove Unified School District. This new ensemble, featuring some of the best adult ringers in the area, has twice performed with the American River College Symphonic Band. They plan future performances with the Sacramento Symphonic Winds, and in command performances at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts and the Vacaville Center for the Performing Arts.