Our choir singers had made their choice obvious. Sabbath after church just
didn't fit for a rehearsal time. There were also choices happening with the Wednesday rehearsals. Singers who originally had
said they couldn't get to the 5:45 rehearsal were coming to that rehearsal. Even Joycelyn, whose job had made the early rehearsal
impossible, made arrangements to leave work early on Wednesdays. No one was staying
for the 8:00 to 9:00 PM rehearsal. Perhaps this was a very obvious type of voting. People were telling me that after church
was not in their plans and after prayer meeting was too late; but they were willing to make an effort for the earlier rehearsal.
The
geometry experiment had accomplished two things. It had proven when the majority of the singers wanted to rehearse. And it
showed that there were church members who wanted a choir enough to be thinking about the choir's needs.
I still didn't think my leadership was creating a choir anywhere near our potential, so I sent out an SOS
to musicians that I knew had started Adventist choirs "from scratch." Perhaps they could send some advice that was helpful.
One of the pieces of advice that stood out was the statement, "Once a spirit of
camaraderie, commitment and love
is developed among the members, all other areas including the singing will fall into place," from Audrey Dean-Wright. I thought about it, and realized that I had been rehearsing the music but hadn't been
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promoting the people and the spiritual
journey that praising God together can bring. I wrote emails to all the choir members asking them
for their prayers.
Another piece
of advice came from Don Land. His church choir was the result of a dedicated member who called choir members every week to get an attendance commitment
and who took care of all the music and other paperwork. I would have loved to have this type of luxury, and looked for someone
to make attendance commitment calls, but didn't follow through because it appeared that the faithful choir members were
a bit insulted by the idea. Again I realized that different approaches work for different groups.
Joelle Gouel responded with lots of philosophy and some practical suggestions. "If you don't have a rehearsal room at church, use the kitchen,"
and "if you don't have any music: adapt, arrange."
Tiffany, the
choir director from our neighboring church had several useful suggestions; the most prominent was "ego has to go." Oh dear!
This one might be a problem. My question was, "Is my ego getting in the way?" Had I made decisions based on
my own ego? I felt as though I'd had tripped on so many pitfalls in the short life of our little choir, that I wondered if
I had any ego left—let alone enough to get in the way. Then again, the appearance of being egotistical can also be a
problem; so I decided to work on both my ego and the appearance of ego, anyway. It was a subject for prayer—lots of
prayer.
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