Thought for the Week: ​Listening to the music of salvation and eternity​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ - ​Rev Dr Houston McKelvey

​I have been privileged also to have spent periods in residence in cathedrals and colleges where Christian music is prioritised.

My faith and my understanding of Christianity has been informed and directed by such

music-shaped worship. In Holy Week leading to the principal feast of Easter, we affirm in the best known of hymns the centralities of our Christian faith. Most Christians whom I know have their own particular hymn or set of hymns which are key to their understanding of their faith.

When it comes to Holy Week, I can draw on such a rich seam. The experience which dominates, however, is not from my nurture in Ireland or Britain, nor from within an Anglican church building.

Rather, it is from Methodism, and black America. I had been invited to conduct a series of seminars at an Episcopal seminary at Evanston near Chicago. When I mentioned this to an Irish Methodist colleague he revealed he was undertaking a programme of study at a Methodist seminary across the road from the one I was going to and would I collect some books for him.

I met Linda, the professor of Christian Education at that Methodist seminary. We talked the same language. I joined my Irish Methodist colleague on this programme of professional development. It was a tough programme and fitting in the journeys for the residential periods was not for the faint-hearted. Linda’s husband Dwight was the Dean of Chapel and taught liturgy in the seminary.

Eventually graduation came round. The graduands were those like myself who had completed doctorate of ministry programmes and those who had completed Masters of Divinity degrees and were about to be ordained.

Before the graduation at a communion service in the chapel one of the Masters' students sang a solo. She was a young black woman and she sang informed by her faith, race and American experience. She sang “Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?

Naturally, I knew the words but this lady was singing from her faith and culture within the environs of a part of the United States which had known racial conflict. She was not giving a performance, she was singing her testimony to her faith and vocation. May we stand with her and all fellow believers at the foot of the Cross once again this coming week. May we hear the music of salvation and eternity.