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Singing With the Christmas Choir at the Osaka International Church

Posted on 26. Dec, 2009 by James in Church Ministry, Events | 427 views

The Christmas 2009 is over but the memory of the Christmas will be lasting. And one of the most beautiful moment of the Christmas for this year is when we sang with the Christmas Choir at the OIC Christmas Eve Celebration. I never thought we could sing in a choir like this again after we moved from Indonesia. But God heard our pray and gave us a chance to serve Him again through a choir.

I remember what we had done last year with our church in Bogor. As the coordinator of the Music and Choir ministry in our church, i was responsible to make a permanent choir as part of the church ministry. By the grace of God, we finally managed to form a choir with a very limited resources at that time. As the name of the church we named it “Rahmani Choir” with me as the coach and my wife as the coordinator of the choir, what a family.

Time went by and we had a regular rehearsal every Sunday after the church service and one week break at the end of the month. Again by the grace of God, we managed to sing couple of songs and performed not only during the church services but also in another occasions like marriage ceremony. We sang various kind of songs from Hymn to Classics, from an easy one to the most complex songs. And the peak of our performance was on the Christmas Eve Celebration in our church just exactly one year ago where we sang the “Hallelujah” Handel as one of the songs. We also sang another songs on the farewell of my wife and that’s became our final performance and also the end of the choir.

Arrived in Japan on May 2009 i never thought we could sing in a choir again like we did before. The first church we went to was totally Japanese. We then managed to find a bilingual church but the main language was Japanese. And after couple of months we decided to find another church and finally we went to the Osaka International Church (OIC). I was really happy to know that there’s a choir at the church although it’s not a regular choir. We finally decided to join the choir for the Christmas occasion.

My first impression of the choir, not much different with what we had in our church before. There were only few people join the choir at the first rehearsal. But the good news is i was not the only men there. After couple of weeks, still not so many people came and we had only three men on the choir. The coach decided not to sing the Tenor part. After couple of weeks rehearsal we finally made it. We sang 7 songs in total, two of them in the Sunday Christmas service and the whole songs in the Christmas Eve Celebration. I would say we’ve done a great job but the most important thing is God had given us a chance to serve Him again.