MUSIC IN THE FELLOWS HIP GROUPS

Perhaps the place where differences can best be observed between generations is in those places where they are free to do as they please. At The New Harvest Christian Fellowship, that would be in the fellowship groups.¹⁹⁶ These groups are generally attended by people of similar ages, and each group chooses the Bible study material they will work through (there are many books available from Christian bookshops) and the manner in which they will worship. A description of the different kinds of worship that take place in these groups follows.

Youth¹⁹⁷

The youth fellowship group consists of about fifteen members and is held on a Wednesday evening from 19:00-21:00 at the home of M15 and M17. The youth do not worship every week because they find that their time is too limited to fit in socializing, the lesson and worship before their parents arrive to take them home. However, once a term they devote the whole evening to worship (roughly 19:30-21:00). Their leader, M19, compiles a CD for the evening, recorded from various recent worship albums. Chairs are moved out of the way, the lights are turned off and the music is turned up. The teenagers are encouraged to focus on themselves and on God, seeking forgiveness (cleansing and healing) and to draw near to the Lord. In the darkness the teens seem to find that they are able to kneel, lie on the floor, sit, stand, sing, listen, cry, or smile without worrying too much what their friends may think. Every couple of songs the music is turned down (but not off) and M19 invites anyone who would like to pray aloud to do so. It is always a tearful, emotional time (pain and joy). M19 and his co-pastor, M22 (who leads the Young Adults fellowship group but is also a youth pastor) move around counseling and praying for individuals as the evening progresses. Throughout the evening the teenagers also pray with one another from time to time.

I questioned M19 about how the youth managed to focus for so long and he concluded that it is because they don’t have to sing the whole time to keep worship going. With the

196 See chapter 3 for a description of these and their function within the church.

197 Information for this section was provided by M19 and members of the fellowship group.

CD playing the worship environment is maintained whether individuals choose to sing along or just sit or lie and listen. They are also free to pray alone or with a friend.

Allowing for, and facilitating, varied activities thus permits the worship to continue for a longer period.¹⁹⁸

Young Adults¹⁹⁹

In 2004 a young adults group was started to cater for post matriculants, although school-goers are not prohibited from attending and the youngest member is in grade eleven.

Those who attend are mostly between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three and number between nine and fifteen people. This is the most racially mixed group in NHCF, with an even ratio of black and white members. They meet at Rev. Smith’s home on Tuesday evenings from 19:00 to about 22:00. Worship takes place every week and is usually about half an hour to forty minutes in duration. Sometimes it will unexpectedly run for over an hour as the group starts to pray for each other and share what they feel the Lord is placing in their hearts and minds to say to one another.²⁰⁰ Messages from the Lord come in various forms, from a Bible reading, to a picture or a phrase, to a whole message that speaks into the life of another individual.²⁰¹ M21 plays the guitar and M22 leads the singing and prayers. The latter often plays a tambourine, and occasionally someone will play a djembe or I will pla y the piano. However, most often just the guitar accompanies the singing and various people harmonise vocally. M21 and M22 sometimes choose the songs before the meeting, and have introduced some Christian African songs and songs from other churches they visit. However, on some occasions M21 chooses songs on the spur of the moment during the course of the actual worship time - ones that are well-known to the group. M22 recognizes it by the chord structure and rhythm of M21’s introduction, and then takes over leading the group in song. Roughly four to six songs are used, and sometimes only the chorus of a song is sung over many times. People are free

198 Information from telephone conversation with M19 on 2 November 2004.

199 I personally attended this group for the whole of 2004.

200 ‘Sharing’ is the term applied to speaking out what an individual believes God has given them to impart to the group. It can also be applied to telling others about events in one’s life. In sharing what one is going through, lessons learned can be imparted to others. Help can also be elicited from members of the group, who thus share in overcoming the problem.

201 This is understood as the gift of knowledge. The person sharing the message might have no idea of what is troubling another individual but God does, and the person sharing the message becomes His vessel to speak into someone else’s life. The words seem to just flow into the mind and out of the mouth of the person sharing. Sometimes no more than a single word is offered, other times, several sentences.

to pray throughout the worship during the instrumental interludes between songs (although usually only about three people take up the opportunity). The lights are left on but most of the people worship with their eyes closed, thus shutting out the physical visual world and creating their own personal space in which they can hear the people around them and feel the ir presence, but not see them.

Young Couples²⁰²

There are currently two groups that cater for young couples. The young married couples’

group that M27 leads does not employ sung worship since some of the members are new to the church.

The othe r group consists of couples (aged mostly between thirty and forty) with young children. This group meets on Tuesday evenings at 18:30 and is led by M71 and F70.

Each week they meet at a different home and have supper together. Worship and a lesson prepared and presented by M71 follow and they aim to finish by 20:00 so that the children can get home to bed. They have a keyboard player (M40) who is able to utilize the large variety of rhythms and sounds on his Yamaha. (He upgrades the keyboard roughly once a year, thereby keeping up with the latest developments in this technology.) In the context of the congregation he usually plays for the Sunday School or provides backing keyboard sounds (like strings, voices, and various instruments) when he plays with the band in the main service. In the context of the fellowship group, each week he works out arrangements for several songs he has chosen, and these are sung one after another. The group may pray at the beginning and the end of the worship time, and sometimes between songs as he prepares the instrument and his music for the next song.

Middle-aged Adults²⁰³

Eleven of the sixteen fellowship groups consist predominantly of middle-aged attendants, whose children are either in high school, at university, or have started work and are moving out to start homes of their own. At least two of these groups have decided not to

202 Information on worship in these groups has been provided by some of their members. I attended one meeting of the group where M40 leads the worship.

203 I attended one of these groups for two years (2002 and 2003). Information on the other groups has been gleaned from fellowship group leaders and musicians in the groups.

have sung worship at all in their meetings, but M46 and F45 (the leaders of one of them) comment that they often worship through the medium of prayer instead. A few other groups sing along with worship albums on CD players. Members of these groups pre-select songs and if the CD has to be changed, a person might pray during the silence or someone may pass a humorous comment to fill the brief, but awkward silence. Worship usually either starts or finishes with prayer, but not always both.

In some of the groups worship is led by an amateur guitarist with a limited chord repertoire. This means that keys consisting of chords that are easy to play on the guitar are utilized, so that most songs are sung in the keys of G, A, or D major. Very few are in minor keys but those that are, are generally in E minor. These guitarists tend to strum in a fairly static rhythmic pattern that is altered only in tempo and dynamic level. Songs therefore have to be simple harmonically and rhythmically, and these groups tend to stick to choruses from the 1970s and 1980s, with a few popular hymns that don’t need too many chord changes (like “Amazing Grace”, “What a Friend we have in Jesus”, and

“Blessed Assurance”). Two adult groups have more accomplished guitarists who can play in a wider range of keys and produce more complex chord changes. However, they too seem to have some favourite strumming and plucking patterns that they apply to most songs, setting a moderate beat that is very seldom slower than an andante or faster than an allegro moderato.

The guitar- led groups function in one of two ways. Either the guitarist chooses songs for the evening beforehand and calls out the number of each song in the group’s songbook just before it is sung, or members of the fellowship group will page through the songbook and call out their favourites.²⁰⁴ In the adult fellowship group that I attend, both methods are used. The guitarist (who is also a drummer for the Sunday service band) sometimes prepares worship; at other times the members choose their favourites. At the last meeting of each term, the evening is devoted to singing (everybody calling out their favourites), prayer and socialising. There are three songbooks from which to choose songs: Scripture in Song and two other booklets that have been compiled by members of the group that

204 Most groups use the Scripture in Song book, and a number of them have compiled songbooks with more recently written choruses and popular modern hymn s.

include choruses and a few popular hymns from a variety of sources, including a few songs from the 1990s.

The Elderly²⁰⁵

During the 1990s there were two afternoon fellowship groups that catered for retired people. Since the leaders are now in ill health and quite frail, Rev. Smith runs a Bible study at the local old age home on a Monday afternoon from 15:00 to 16:00. (This is an interdenominational meeting since this particular home for the elderly is affiliated to the Anglican church, situated next door to their property.) Mary Smith currently leads the only fellowship group that caters specifically for the elderly (those aged sixty- five and up) at NHCF, although there are a few of women in their mid-to-late fifties who also attend the group. The group currently consists of about ten members, Smith being the youngest and a ninety-two-year-old, the oldest. They meet on a Wednesday afternoon from 14:30 to 16:00. A songbook was compiled for the group by their first leaders (about ten years ago) drawing from choruses of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. At one stage F82 used to accompany the singing on the piano and later F48 used to visit the group to accompany their singing on her guitar. Now Mary Smith just pitches the songs vocally and the rest of the ladies (there is currently only one man in the group) join in. Anyone in the group can select songs and, once a song has been sung, the floor is open for the next suggestion. They stop singing at 15:00, by which time they have usually sung between ten and twelve songs. After this they pray for about fifteen minutes before reading the material from the book they are working through for twenty minutes. They then discuss the questions at the back of the book for the twenty minutes that remain. They leave promptly at 16:00 to avoid the afternoon traffic.

Conclusions

From the worship styles employed by the different fellowship groups, it can be seen that there are many different ideas at work in the congregation about how music should be used, many of which are age-specific and time-related. The young couples group has similar time constraints to the elderly group, so they are quite particular about how much time can be spent on worship. However, they are making use of the latest technologies to

205 Information for this section was provided by Mary Smith.

give their worship an ‘upbeat’ feel, whereas the elderly are singing old favourites unaccompanied. The youth and young adults both enjoy long, unstructured times of worship where they are free to express themselves as they please. The middle-aged groups vary according to availability of musicians, the skill level of the musicians, and the preferences of the members in a group.

In order to gain more specific insights into the personal views of various age groups a questionnaire was handed out to the congregation on Sunday 12 October 2003. The questions were designed to elicit the musical tastes of the respondents’, their religious histories, and their views on, and experiences of, musical worship at NHCF. Surveys of members’ favourite songs in May 2003, and again in November 2004, by which time new songs and music styles had been introduced. The 2004 survey also asked members to list their preferred radio stations (in order to compare general musical tastes), and to comment on whether or not they would like to continue with multi- generational worship in the future. An estimated 97% of the congregation responded to the final survey, allowing for a fairly accurate demographic report to be produced. Thus, while the questionnaire of 12 October 2003 forms the main body of qualitative data presented in this chapter, information from the other two surveys help to establish a more substantial quantitative basis for the analysis.²⁰⁶