My story is about why I started a youth gospel choir.

It was back in 1994, I was in my local Catholic church. It was the 1st communion day for children. The 1st communion day is a special day in the catholic church when children aged 7/8yrs take their next step forward to continue to live in the beliefs of the catholic church. It is the 1st day the children are allowed to receive the (bread and wine) known as the Eucharist.

I was standing by the door as the parish priest was congratulating the children as they left the church after the service. I said to the priest you won’t see many of those children again. It was normal that after 1st communion day many of the children didn’t attend any services again. The priest said l know, not sure what can be done about that. I said, well you could start with the music. What’s wrong with the music he said. Well, I said, the one note psalms and old-fashioned hymns that were regularly sung in this church don’t really resonate with young people today. They psalms were good enough for Jesus, he said. Exactly I said, but that was back then. I think even Jesus would be bored if he was to walk in this world today, hearing the same old music from over 2000 years ago. You know I said Cliff Richard had a hit song called “Why should the devil have all the good music”, so even though there may still be a place for the old music, church music needs to speak to the young as well. Well, he says why don’t you do something about it. That was the challenge right there for me.

Initially l tried to recruit some adults in the church that l knew played some musical instruments to play for a youth choir. Unfortunately, they could not commit to practicing and playing regularly. Karaoke was very popular back then. l thought maybe l could find some good gospel music backing tracks, which eventually I did. My next step was to find kids who liked to sing and wanted to join a lively gospel choir. I started by talking to every child/young person l knew. It didn’t matter to me if they were Catholic or not or if they were from other faiths or no faith. I never liked division of any kind. I started the choir with about 12 children/young people in ages arranging from 8yrs to 16yrs. We would meet in a room at the back of the church every week. It was a few weeks later before we started to sing in church and by that time there was about 20 young people coming to the weekly choir practices. Now I must admit in the beginning the choir were not particularly good they just needed time to develop. We would practice once a week but only sang in the church once a month. This guy in the church didn’t think the choir was much good and would refer to the choir kids as the cats. He would say to me are the cats singing this week. I would say to him, you won’t be saying that soon, they are getting much better.

When the choir had been singing together for about 3/4months they were really sounding good. They had learnt to sing well together with harmonies and descants. The numbers had grown to 30 young people from the various faiths and no faith communities. However, we were singing in a catholic church and some catholic parishioners found the lively gospel music to different to what the were used to and didn’t really like it. I got comments like “It’s a bit to rock’n’roll for us” “Not sure if this music fits in with our church” One person said when we sang a very modern version of Lord of the dance. “You shouldn’t be singing that in church. She said the Lord of the dance is in fact the devil in the song. I always replied to these comments by saying you can’t complain the young people are not coming to church and sit back and do nothing about it. This is a youth choir who sing the gospel songs they like and in the way that they like to sing them. I would also point out to them that the young people sang their music in the church once a month while the other 3wks of the month traditional hymns and psalms were sung for those complainers.

Just over 8months from starting, the choir became very popular in the church. They sang the 1st week of every month and when the choir sang there was a very noticeable big increase in numbers attending church that week. The complains had stopped, even the guy who use to call the choir the cats in the beginning, finally admitted the kids were great and let his teenage daughter who had been pestering him join the choir join us. The choir became so popular they were been booked to sing at people’s weddings. I negotiated with the wedding couple a fee for each young person who sang at their wedding. The wedding couple were able to choose any song they wanted for their wedding day (gospel songs or not)

Over the 12yrs I ran the choir 106 young people sang in the choir. In that time the choir had grown into a sort of youth club. We would play games etc at the end of each choir session. We would do residential weekend away in youth hostels doing team building outdoor activities like rock climbing, assailing, assault courses and orienteering.

I stopped running the choir after 12yrs because at the time l was also running an open youth club for 11 to 18year olds. l had also just started another youth charity in the Performing Arts and Sports. To be quite honest l was running myself ragged because l did all this voluntary while working in my day job, so something had to give. Sadly, l couldn’t get anyone to commit to taking over the choir so unfortunately, I had to close it. I still see many of the young people who sang in the choir (All grown up now with kids of their own.) it is so lovely to hear them talking so fondly about their time in the choir.

So, there you have it, my story as to why l started a youth gospel choir.