Ekstasis Magazine1 Comment

The Effervescent Expression

Ekstasis Magazine1 Comment
The Effervescent Expression

The Effervescent Expression

Jonathan Chan

Photography by Toby Mitchell

It was the October of 2017. I was at my university’s societies fair, parsing through the rows of stalls pressed against one another, inching slowly along in a compressed line of eager bodies. I’d just arrived in England from Singapore for my first year of school and the fair was an intuitive extension of my orientation to campus. As I turned a corner, my eyes fell upon two banners proudly displaying the name ‘Cambridge University Gospel Choir’. I was intrigued. The name of the society captured a felicitous contradiction, not least when the choirs of Cambridge I’d envisioned sang in a high Anglican setting and consisted mostly of white British kids.

Growing up in Singapore, I’d maintained a fleeting awareness of gospel music’s role as an ancestor to rock, soul, and R&B. I’d studied Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes for literature classes and had cultivated a healthy affinity for and interest in African American literature. Yet, the opportunity to sing in a gospel choir? It seemed at once novel and compelling, not least when it promised access to a worship tradition that had largely eluded the steady diet of Hillsong, Planetshakers, and Elevation Worship I’d been raised on. I signed up, took a flier, and showed up at Pembroke College Chapel for my first session. What I hadn’t realized at that point was that the Gospel Choir would stand not only as an enduring pillar of my undergraduate life, but would also broaden and sharpen my vision of what the Church can and will look like in the years to come.

The choir itself was open to people of all faiths but was united in the effervescence of an expression of Christian praise. Our director, a Nigerian American doctoral student in plant sciences, was unequivocal in underscoring the fact that the songs we sang would always proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ. We were an effortlessly multiethnic choir, even if predominantly African, Afro-Caribbean and white British. Against pews, stain-glass and a blue cross made from the wood of shattered refugee boats, we sang the songs of the Edwin Hawkins Singers, Micah Stampley and the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. Accustomed to worship songs that held closely to the melodic pop sensibilities of contemporary Christian music, the transition to songs that demanded deep breaths, long notes and a deep reservoir of spiritual feeling was transformative. I remember two songs in particular—“Send the Rain” by William McDowell and “Total Praise” by Richard Smallwood. They never failed to place me in a state of deep reverence, such powerful expressions of devotion, hunger and desire for the Lord. As we sang for a release of God’s glory to flood the chapel and declared that He was our peace and strength in the midst of storms, I felt the powerful resonance of being transformed into a conduit for worship. I would gaze at the painting that hung at the front of the chapel: an oil-painted depiction of the limp body of Christ carried down from the cross.

Fundamentally, Gospel music takes its shape from the African American worship tradition, to the extent that one can be said to exist. A genealogy is often traced to the spirituals that converted slaves would sing in the midst of profound mental and physical anguish, with the language of an exiled Israel granting the lexis of estrangement necessary to articulate a collective pain. Singing with the choir opened up modes of worshipful expression that were cognizant of lament and suffering, utter devotion and absolute surrender.

And yet, in equal measure, we were introduced to the jubilation of African praise. As a choir, we were invited to sing at one of Cambridge’s local churches that celebrated an ‘Africa Night’, complete with a sumptuous array of stews, jollof rice and plantains provided by the congregation’s African aunties. It was there that I was introduced to an array of songs that were unabashedly multilingual, such as the Zulu interpolations of Tom Inglis’ “Bayete Inkosi”. Just as songs emerging triumphantly from the African American church were a cornerstone of our setlists, so too were the expressions of praise that emerged out of Africa. From “Mighty God” by Joe Praize, which features a resolute bass portion in Zulu, to Nathaniel Bassey’s “Imela”, with a soaring bridge in Igbo, to the irrepressible rhythms of “Awesome God” by Proclaim Music, each performance we gave was vivacious and effervescent. The joyousness of the music was infectious and drew people to us as we sang on the streets and in the malls, in the chapels and in the churches, before bishops and television audiences. 

So much of the music we sang belied the histories of violence that formed the backdrop of their composition, whether in the horrors of slavery, lynching, mass incarceration, or the democratic exclusion of the African Americans in the US, the pillaging and razing of the African continent under European colonialism, or the persistence of institutional discrimination against Black Britons in the UK. As one of the few East Asian members of the choir, my presence during performances was conspicuous. Yet, I never felt a sense of unease. Worshipping in the tradition of Gospel music gave my Christian life a texture it never had before, an expressiveness that was unafraid of lament and yearning, groaning and waiting. It gave a potency to worship that I perhaps did not always experience in the Anglican church I attended while in Cambridge, or even in my home church in Singapore.  The desperation, the hunger and the desire for the Lord as experienced by the church of the African diaspora was shared generously through my time with the choir. It was a place I returned to each week to dwell intentionally with the Holy Spirit, a necessary valve by which I found I could express the anguishes and pressures levied by the intensity of my academic calendar. And in the midst of that praise, our choir members were unfailingly hospitable and warm, drawn from the Cambridge student body as well as the town’s broader community. We would begin each session with a time of free worship, often an acapella rendition of “Way Maker” by Sinach.

 “Way Maker” was a mainstay from when I joined the choir in 2017 all the way until I graduated in 2020. There was a simplicity and profundity to its lyrics and melody of that made it powerfully proclamatory and suited to bringing newcomers into our rehearsals. The repetition of the lyrics and the harmonic possibilities the song accorded were a powerful combination. In Pembroke Chapel we would declare:

“Way maker,
Miracle worker,
Promise keeper
Light in the darkness
My God, that is who You are”[1]

It was like a chant, an unwavering affirmation of God’s omnipotence, beneficence, faithfulness and glory. I loved it tremendously and sought to introduce it to the other Christian communities I’d been involved with, singing it with the Chinese Christian Fellowship during our retreat. I didn’t think much of it at the time beyond an opportunity to introduce my Singaporean, Malaysian, Hong Konger and Chinese British Christian friends to the expression of worship that I loved with such temerity. I did not anticipate finding out that my parents, all the way in Singapore, had been singing it during service under the auspices of their African American music pastor in their international church. It was a delightful coincidence. What I did not foresee was its eventual crossover to the mainstream of Christian music in the form of a cover by Leeland in 2019.

I have no particular qualms with the Leeland version, which itself draws on Michael W. Smith’s cover. In fact, I believe that Smith’s introduction of a sung bridge made the song better poised for corporate worship across evangelical and other Protestant denominations in the Anglophone congregations of the United States, Britain and Australia. I remember registering a visceral fear that the song would be attributed primarily to Leeland rather than Sinach on account of the explosive popularity of the former’s cover. It even made its way to the Methodist church that I worshipped in in Singapore, one composed primarily of Chinese Singaporeans. Singing a markedly different and somewhat sanitized version of the song was bizarre to process, particularly in the enfolding of these forms of worship that I’d often conceived of as wildly disparate. And yet, the popularity of the song did not seem to wane. David Archuleta covered it. Bethel covered it. Steffany Gretzinger covered it. There were versions in Spanish. There was a version set against techno music with a German rap breakdown. The song continued to transform and adapt, itself opening to a multiplicity of reinventions and a seemingly irrepressible generativity. It was almost like witnessing the Gospel rocket across the world again, shifting and morphing along transcultural lines. I was absolutely astounded.

The version that felt like the synthesis of these tensions and amusements came in the form of a cover by Darlene Zschech and William McDowell, released in June, 2020. The former was the voice of many of the Hillsong pieces that were cornerstones of my Christian upbringing such as ‘Shout to the Lord’ and ‘The Potter’s Hand’. The latter, of course, was central to my experience with the Gospel Choir. Seeing them sing “Way Maker” with such fervor and such a commitment to unity, especially amid the grieving of the death of George Floyd, left me humbled yet again. The multiethnic context in which I first encountered the song in Cambridge found its mirror, an intertwining of the worship music influences that I’d drawn on in my journey of faith. And it was during McDowell’s interlude where he crystallised that which had made me respond to the song’s proliferation with such a sense of marvel and wonder:

“There come moments in every generation, whether you’re watching or whether you’re in this room right now, when the Lord reintroduces Himself to a generation and amplifies His message. Whether He says to Moses, ‘Tell the people that I am, that I am’ or whether He says, ‘Tell them that I am your Father, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’, there come moments where He says, ‘It’s important for you to know who I am’. And whenever there’s a generation that may forget who He is, He allows a message to stir around the world, when it’s in everybody’s mouth at the same time, to say, ‘Hello, I want to reintroduce who I am. I still do miracles, I still make ways, I keep my promises’. This is who our God is.” [2]

What astounded me was the fact that the Lord chose to reintroduce himself through a song composed and sung in worship to Him in Nigeria, tracing its way across Britain and the United States, Singapore and Australia and wherever the faithful continue to worship His Holy name.

The future of world Christianity is African. That was the assertion made by Philip Jenkins in a recent analysis of declining fertility rates in the Western world and Christianity’s steady hold in the African continent.  As he remarks:

Already by 2050, Africa will be home to more than a billion Christians, by far the largest concentration on the planet. That doesn’t take African migrants living around the world into account, that mighty Christian diaspora. The rate of numerical change is astonishing—and accelerating. By 2050 a list of the 10 countries worldwide with the largest Christian populations will include several African members, including Nigeria, Ethiopia, the DRC and Uganda. Between 1900 and 2050, the African share of the global Christian population will have grown from barely 2 percent to more than 33 percent. 

This is just one part of the shift in the strongholds of Christianity away from the United States and Europe to the Global South, particularly the various nations of Africa as mentioned earlier, Latin America, as well as China and South Korea. This reconfiguring of the face of the church will demand new conversations about race and racism, colonialism and imperialism, worship and persecution, of tattered history and resurgent belief. Above all, I believe that we will only continue to see expressions of faith that locate their origin in Africa continue to inflect the shape of our worship, especially as pastors and artists across the continent continue to faithfully minister God’s word and bear creative fruit for the edification of the global church.

In retrospect, the gift of my time in the Cambridge University Gospel Choir was a mere glimpse of what is to come. 

[1] Osinachi Joseph, Way Maker (Nigeria: Spirit Music, 2015).

[2] Sounds Of Unity, Darlene Zschech, and William McDowell, Way Maker (US: Capitol Christian Music, 2020)

Jonathan Chan
Writer & Poet

Jonathan Chan received a BA in English from the University of Cambridge. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore where he is presently based. He is a naturalised Singaporean citizen. He is interested in questions of faith, creative expression and human identity.