news article

How can I keep from singing?

February 14, 2017 / By Stephen Cady

A little over a year ago, Asbury First had a conversation about caroling as a congregation. We thought it would be fun to get together and walk through the neighborhoods surrounding our church to spread a little Christmas cheer. Then, we thought that it would be more fun with more people, so we considered inviting other churches to carol with us. Next, we thought about all of the brokenness and violence in our community and decided it might be even better if we could invite everyone in Rochester to participate. What resulted was the first annual “City Sing for Peace and Unity,” an ecumenical and interfaith event in which over 350 people from all over Rochester gathered to sing throughout a local neighborhood. While we shifted from Christmas carols to songs of peace from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and humanist traditions, there was no doubt about the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Methodists have long known the power of a song. As we lift up our voices together, the Spirit becomes apparent in a new way. Sometimes those “sighs too deep for words” find expression in voices raised in harmony. Even when the voices themselves fail to land on the right pitch, somehow the gathered community makes the tune apparent. The key to harmony, however, is to have different people singing different parts of the same tune. In the case of City Sing, the tune was peace on earth—something every tradition can get behind.

We recently held our second annual City Sing event. We were joined by a different group of people and walked through a different neighborhood, but the Spirit was the same. We sang songs from far-ranging traditions with far-ranging meanings to the various generations gathered. The evening ended with a candlelight vigil in which we all sang, We Shall Overcome. And in that moment, we believed it. Here was a church leading a group of people from all different faiths in the same song of hope. In the end, it didn’t matter if you could sing or not because the gathering itself was a kind of song.

We often think about how to make our churches more diverse—or at least better reflective of the community in which we exist. Asbury First has worked hard on that. From passing a reconciling statement which makes it clear that our congregation is open to all persons regardless of any distinguishing characteristic—age, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation—to ensuring that our committee structures and leadership are reflective of those commitments. In the end, however, the lesson of City Sing is that if we want to make our churches more reflective of our communities, we have to be in the community. We have to invest in those community partnerships with people who, though they may not look like us or believe like us or think like us, have the same commitment to those timeless issues of the human spirit that drive us all. The good news is that if we can somehow get those different voices singing the same tune together, the harmony becomes apparent—and so does the Spirit.

As the old hymn puts it, “Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”