Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Report from ‘Global Consultation on Music and Missions’
From Bert Polman (filed last week):
I’m attending the Global Consultation on Music & Missions in St Paul, Minn., with some 200+ missionaries, ethnomusicologists, and other musical types interested in indigenous styles of Christian music. (This event is partially funded by a grant from CICW.) We began Tuesday evening with a wonderful procession of some 40 ethnic instruments from all over the world, and with worship songs from all over the world—some of them bi-lingual. Roberta King of Fuller Seminary gave the opening plenary address, and used in part texts from Isaiah 60-61 to speak about “Springs of Righteousness and Praise: A Doxology of the Nations.” She was followed by a Chinese conductor who spoke about the Chinese housechurch collection “Canaan Hymns”—over 900 texts by one Chinese village Christian woman—the Chinese equivalent of a Fanny Crosby!
This morning (Weds the 12th), a Brazilian spoke of a Christian samba troupe who was winning prizes in the (very secular) carnival celebrations associated with Mardi Gras. The first breakout session I attended focussed on the use of different kinds of music in multi-ethnic and multi-lingual urban churches in the USA (the speaker used Acts 2 & Gal 3:28 to make valid points, but his male language for people suggested some more contextualization with that Galatians text was needed!). Another of breakout session brought together all conferees interested and/or working in Asia, and their topic of conversation was how to create a listserve or a website to enable networking among themselves. Incidentally, their main concern was security—not computer viruses, but the realities of government persecution! The final workshop that I attended used semiotics as a basis for developing a model of doing music criticism, how to decide when/how a native-composed worship song was “good.”
This evening, I-to-Loh (famous hymnologist from Taiwan) spoke about some characteristics of Asian hymn texts and tunes, and then gave various examples of Asian hymns whose texts expressed both the agonies of poverty, injustice, disease, etc., and the Christian hope. A panel on composing Christian narrative Bible songs in various parts of the world finished tonight’s session; an optional “late evening theatre” featured a choice of 4 videos, all of which documented the use of native-composed worship music in different countries of the world. All in all a great day!
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