GRAND FORKS – Several Lutheran churches in the area are joining together to present two events leading up to the celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday.
A concert, titled “Lift Every Voice: A Celebration of Sacred Choral Music,” is set for 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 24, at Calvary Lutheran Church, 1405 S. Ninth St.
A special combined worship service is planned for 6 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 26, at Sharon Lutheran Church, 1720 20th St. S. (See below for details.)
The public is welcome to attend.
Sunday’s concert, organized by Whitney Berry, choir director at Calvary Lutheran Church, will feature the choirs of Calvary, Sharon and United Lutheran churches in Grand Forks and Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in East Grand Forks – altogether, about 80 singers.
The concert was scheduled close to Thanksgiving Day to raise money for a hunger-related charity, Berry said. A free will offering will be collected to benefit St. Joseph’s Social Care food pantry and summer lunch program.
The performance will feature music that is sacred in nature and represents a variety of styles. Each church choir has selected two or three anthems from their repertoire, she said. After each choir performs, the audience will be asked to join in singing a hymn together.
At the close of the concert, all choirs will join together as a mass choir to sing an arrangement of “When In Our Music God is Glorified,” Berry said. Melanie Popejoy will conduct the mass choir, which will be accompanied by the UND Prairie Rose Brass Quintet, a group of student musicians. Popejoy and Berry are teaching associate professors of music at UND.
The idea for a joint concert sprang from earlier experience when Berry and fellow church choir directors held this type of concert at Messiah Lutheran in Fargo in 2018 and another one at Calvary Lutheran in Bemidji the following year. A third was planned for Grand Forks in 2020 but was tabled due to the pandemic and further efforts to host a concert were stymied for various reasons, Berry said.
“The idea for this concert came out of a desire to host a similar event but with choirs from Grand Forks to make the logistics easier,” she said.
With Sunday’s concert, “We are hoping to get a nice-sized audience for this event and hopefully raise some money for a great cause,” she said. “Church choirs are kind of isolated and don’t get opportunities to collaborate like this very often, so I am very excited to be able to do this.”
A collaborative choir concert used to be a regular event here, senior members of her choir have told her, but Berry is unsure when it was last held.
“If all goes well,” she said, “we may try to make it an annual tradition again.”
Tuesday’s worship service
Sharon, United and Calvary Lutheran churches have organized Tuesday’s worship service, which will take place at Sharon Lutheran, but other churches may also participate if they wish, said Deacon Jamie Travers of Sharon Lutheran.
A “pie potluck” will follow the service. Those who wish to may bring a pie to share, Travers said.
“The ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Churches in America) churches here in town are trying to do a little bit more things together,” he said, noting, as an example, the service and fellowship event in September at Town Square, which involved Sharon, United, Calvary, Augustana, St. Mark’s and University Lutheran, all ELCA churches.
“After that event, this is another idea that popped up … doing a Thanksgiving service together,” he said. “Because, usually, we have each done our own, either on Wednesday or Tuesday before Thanksgiving. And this year, someone just brought up the idea of doing it together.”
Other ELCA churches already had services planned, but Sharon, United and Calvary hadn’t scheduled any yet, so they decided to offer a service together, he said.
Tuesday’s worship service will feature a blend of traditional and contemporary music; the combined choir, representing the three churches, will be performing, Travers said. It will also include music by members of Sharon Lutheran Church’s handbell group.
Ministers from all three churches will each have a role in the service, he said. The service, which will include the distribution of Holy Communion, will revolve around the thanksgiving theme.
The churches’ pastors thought presenting a combined worship service “was something good to do,” Travers said. Collaboration of this kind is encouraged by the ELCA Eastern North Dakota Synod office.
“I think there are hopes that this will become a yearly thing, possibly,” he said.