The Everlasting Gospel Choir
Adelaide, South Australia
The Everlasting Gospel Choir
Ian's vision for this singing group brought Richard occasionally to The Branches in late 2004 to help establish it. Maureen and he are proceding slowly with the taking of "raw talent" - without formal musical training - and encouraging their latent abilities to harmonise by ear.
This is just a handful of people at the moment, and while Ian's vision was for wider community participation, the way it has developed into a potential public outreach is interesting. The surpising thing is that the group is predominately male, which is extremely unusual for a "church choir".
The group has been singing, standing together in the middle of the body of believers, on a number of occasions. This unusual way of doing things was developed to encourage the concept of unity within the body of believers.
At easter 2006, we presented a series of songs on the "Resurrection Sunday".
Most of the people involved had exposure to singing in public at two old-peoples' facilities around Christmas 2005, presenting real carols linked to the gospel story. The trio of Ann, Maureen, and I had developed these two carols venues over a number of years.
Here are four snaps taken just before Christmas 2005, at the Elderly Citizens' Homes at Walkerville, with two views of the gathered residents (taken by me), and two (of six) taken by a visitor; only these two of the latter came out :)
the last picture... from the left... Rose, Richard, Andrew, John, and Ian
Worship Information Repository site
Like the church's website (built, and still in development http://www.branches.org.au), a suggestion that has been offered is that it would be very useful to have an on-line repository of overhead song words slides - and other material - that all the worship leaders could access any time of the day or night, seven days a week. Most churches who are au-fait with on-line practice provide such a download facility, and frequently they are associated with a web server.
Currently there are two directories here, /OHT (for overheads)and /music (for sound files and/or sheet music), although this is a temporary concept which will in time become too cumbersome to use. In any case there are very few files in either. This arrangement will need to change, to place all files associated with each specific song into seperate sub-directories.
uptime and server statistics