Choir Nerd

Today is Easter, a celebration of the most significant person and event in the history of the Christian church, and I gotta say, Mars Hill Church sure knows how to celebrate.

This weekend was also the culmination of two months of rehearsals with the Mars Hill choir. On Good Friday, we sang "Lacrimosa" from the Mozart Requiem. It's a great piece that isn't hard for a classically-trained choir (most of us have sung the piece at some point in the past). So our singing on Good Friday went by without a hitch. Well, with just one exception. That was when a fog machine started generating smoke a little earlier than any of us expected, blowing the stuff right into our singing faces. It's a good thing we were behind an opaque scrim, or else people would've seen me trying painfully not to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation. All this, while we sang about a day of weeping. But, anyway, Friday was Good.

Then there was our repertoire for Easter Sunday. We got asked to sing gospel-style backup for Mars Hill's resident funk band, The Brothers of the Empty Tomb. Now that was interesting. You must understand, there is not a single black person in our choir. In an earlier rehearsal, our director even did an impression of Kip Dynamite (brother of Napoleon) singing "I love technology"...as her impression of us. Sad. But, thank God for blessing The BET with an awesome lead singer and a world class guitarist (you can read about them on pages 6 and 19 here). With their energy and skill, it wasn't hard to get into the music today and actually move with it! It was awesome and fun.

So, yeah, Mars Hill is still working on diversity. In fact, look here:

Behold the diversity at Mars Hill.

Three of the basses got together for a picture today. Together we account for almost half the population of Asian-Americans at Mars.