Côte d’Ivoire

Global Praise Training Event in Côte d’Ivoire

A report to friends and supporters
John D. Thornburg
August, 2008

THE PURPOSE AND NATURE OF THE TRIP

Almost a year ago, I was invited by Jorge Lockward, the head of United Methodism’s Global Praise program, to be one of the teachers in a training program for young musicians to be held in Abidjan, the largest city in Côte d’Ivoire. The training program was the dream of Abraham Arpellet, the national director of choral music for the United Methodist Church in Côte d’Ivoire.

He dreamed that a team of Americans could join a group of Ivorian church musicians in a joint effort to teach skills (keyboard playing, choral conducting, music theory and worship leading) and to provide inspiration and encouragement to a group of teenagers and young adults. Abraham enunciated the goal very succinctly; to inspire a whole new generation of church musicians for Côte d’Ivoire. By God’s grace, we hope that seeds have been planted for the future of church music leadership in the UMC in Côte d’Ivoire.

THE TEAM

What a joy it was to work with:

• Jorge Lockward, the head of Global Praise for the UMC, a wonderful church musician who was born and raised in the Dominican Republic
• Debi Tyree, the business manager of Global Praise and former music editor at Abingdon Press
• Michael Hawn, ethno-musicologist and professor of sacred music at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas
• Eileen Guenther, professor of church music at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D. C.
• Bettsey Curtis, minister of music at Wesley Memorial UMC in Wilmington, N.C., and a teacher of African drumming

We were joined after the first week by three members of the Global Praise Advisory Group:

• Simei Monteiro, a Brazilian Methodist who is worship and music staffer for the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland
• Godfrey Taylor, a Jamaican Methodist who is a church musician in Kingston, Jamaica
• Martin Heiler, a German Lutheran pastor/musician/songwriter

THE WORK

The trip divided in three parts:

• six full days of training with the 37 teenagers and young adults selected by the Ivorian church
• two days of worship and celebration with Ivorian United Methodists
• three days of travel to Ghana to experience Elmina Castle, one of the places from which enslaved Africans were sent to destinations in Brazil, the Carribean and British North America
• two days of consultation with a group of Methodist musicians from Sierre Leone, Ghana, Togo and Côte d’Ivoire
• four days of travel just to get to and from Côte d’Ivoire (including a neat layover in Casablanca)

DISCOVERIES/SERENDIPITIES

• Some of the older Ivorian church musicians were among the ‘rebels’ who persuaded the church to cease its ban on the use of drums and dancing (both of which had been condemned by early missionaries as being Satanic).
• West African musicians are urging their conferences to advocate for additional worship services in a more ‘contemporary’ format so as not to lose the younger generation of worshipers (it appears that some things are the same world wide!).
• The ability of the teenagers to harmonize on the spot was breathtaking. In more than one instance, when being taught a song in unison, the students had already begun to freely harmonize the song before they had even heard it all the way through. Their harmonization for the Mexican chorus, “Dios esta aqui” was breathtaking.
• When I asked one of the musicians from Sierre Leone “Why don’t west Africans sing their sorrows or woes?” (because in two weeks of intense singing, we never heard anything in a minor key, and never heard anything that approached a lament), he responded, “Because our suffering is so close to the surface. We live in it, and don’t need to sing about it.”
• We heard the Hallelujah Chorus from Handels’ Messiah twice during our trip, and discovered that both choirs learned the parts using tonic solfa (a system of words and symbols) rather than by reading notes on a page. In one instance, the choir was accompanied by the praise band.
• Many Ivorian churches have brass bands, an inheritance from their British colonial roots. Upon our return from Ghana, we arrived at our host church for our evening meal four hours late, and were still greeted by the entire congregation, the brass band, the choir (fully decked out in robes and mortar boards) and by a group of school children who presented us with flowers. It’s hard to imagine how we would have been treated had we arrived on time!
• The visit to Elmina Castle in Ghana was among the most sobering moments of my life. The cruelty visited upon enslaved Africans is too vast for words, and walking through the castle in the company of several Africans was life changing.
• The turbulence of west Africa showed its face in the fact that there was a coup d’etat in neighboring Mauritania while we were in Côte d’Ivoire.
• I received the blessing of Bishop Benjamin Boni, the bishop of Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Senegal, to proceed with the printing of the Cameroon Hymnal, and while I was confident that the bishop would bless the project, it was a wonderful affirmation nonetheless.

Please keep the work of the United Methodist Church in west Africa in your prayers, and pray for the wonderful group of 37 with whom we worked that God may prosper the work of their hands in the coming years.