On Sunday, October 22, at 4pm, Hope Church will be hosting a Spanish Language Hymn Sing-Along, with the Hope Church Choir being joined by the choirs from First United Methodist Church of Holland and Grace Episcopal Church. Below is a note from Hope Church Director of Music and Organist, Rhonda Edgington:
“Many of you know that I teach organ at Calvin University, and have become more involved with the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship in the last few years because of that. Last spring, CICW announced that they were awarding grants to congregations who would like to hold a hymn festival, celebrating and introducing a hymnal that CICW had put out in 2019, Santo, Santo, Santo. This is a fully bilingual hymnal, with both traditional hymns, as well as many songs from the Latinx church around the world, and every song in both languages.
I’d heard some of this music at an Worship Symposium (complete with authentic mariachi band), and found it really compelling, so with the blessing of the Worship Ministry, I applied for and received the grant.
This enabled us to buy at a huge discount, 25 copies of the hymnal, which are now in the choir room, if you’d ever like to borrow one and take a look. They have also helped us organize and plan a special event that is coming up this Sunday, Oct 22 at 4pm.
We will be joined by the choirs of First United Methodist and Grace Episcopal, plus some extra community singers, as well as instrumentalists, many from the Holland Symphony (trying to approximate our own little mariachi band!) The choirs will sing anthem arrangements of a number of hymns, that the congregation will then sing together.
Carlos Lemagne, from CICW, who is a native Spanish speaker, will do some solo singing, and will also coach us on pronunciation, so that we can all sing some easy refrains in Spanish together. Bob Batastini, who was on the hymnal committee, and is a huge proponent of multicultural song and ecumenical worship, will speak briefly about these topics. Many know Bob as the music director for the Holland group Christians United in Song and Prayer.
I’m excited about this event, which will give you a chance to both listen and sing, in English and Spanish, and perhaps introduce us to some new hymns that we’d like to sing again. I hope you can join us, maybe invite some friends, and learn more about the songs of other Christians around the world.”
