Wednesday, January 9, 2019 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, January 9, 2019 // The Statement
5B
Annie Klus /Daily
The Good News Accapella group performing.
I
t’s a Saturday night in mid-December,
and despite the freezing temperatures
and the impending tempest of finals,
Angell Hall Auditorium A at the University
of Michigan is packed. Students and families
have crowded into the rows of cramped seats,
and there’s a folding table along the back wall
piled high with veggie trays, cookie platters
and boxes of Entenmann’s Little Bites. The
biannual Good News Christian a cappella
concert is about to start.
The performance begins with a video, pro-
jected on the screen at the front of the room.
In the video, Good News members do a vari-
ety of skits about the ordinary stresses of col-
lege life: an awkward date at Bubble Island, a
looming exam, catching the flu at an inconve-
nient time. All this, they explain, is why they
feel a bit unprepared for the concert — but the
show must go on. The video ends with the
Good News crew opening the doors of Audi-
torium A. As their on-screen counterparts
enter, so do the flesh-and-blood members of
the group. The lights turn back on, and the
show begins. Whatever I expected from a
performance by the University’s only Chris-
tian a cappella group, this wasn’t it.
A
few weeks before the concert, I
spoke to two Good News members
at a tiny table in the South Univer-
sity Espresso Royale: LSA sophomore Maica
Mori and Information graduate student Luke
Thompson. Mori is in her second year with
Good News, and Thompson is in his fifth
(he’s been a member since his sophomore
year of undergrad). Both Mori and Thomp-
son arrived at the University unsure about
how they would integrate their faith into col-
lege life.
“I knew I wanted to be a part of a singing
group,” Mori explained. “A capella seemed
cool.”
When she stumbled upon Good News
online, she was intrigued. “I felt really strong-
ly about Good News,” she said. “Joining it has
been one of the best college decisions.”
“My sophomore year, I tried to get more
engaged with the University,” Thompson
said. “I thought I would try to embrace the
faith I’d been brought up in and just see if that
would help me get to know people and under-
stand my faith better.”
Singing has always been important to both
Mori and Thompson, as both a part of wor-
ship and outside it.
Thompson grew up Lutheran, and since
coming to college, he’s tried out a few dif-
ferent churches in southeast Michigan. He
recently settled on Zion Evangelical-Luther-
an Church of Detroit, a 600-seat neo-Gothic
stone building located down the street from
the historic Senate Theater.
Mori was raised Apostolic Pentecostal, a
Christian sect with wildly different tradi-
tions than Lutheranism.
“I grew up going to a church that has a lot
of bands, worship, music, open worship every
Sunday,” Mori said. “So I’m used to collective
singing Christian songs,”
“And I come from a bunch of stoic Ger-
mans,” Thompson joked.
Good News members were raised with
all kinds of Christian denominations, which
Mori and Thompson believe is part of the
group’s strength.
“I grew up in maybe a kind of an older style
of church,” Thompson said. “So seeing people
who worship in a different way — people who
have emotion as more prevalent in the way
they worship — it sort of teaches me about
how they understand things and I’m able to
impart stuff I’ve learned in a more traditional
setting.”
“You can come from a very specific
denominational background, but then when
you come to Good News, you can meet other
Christians and see different worship styles
and different ways that people live out their
faith,” Mori added. “It really causes you to
grow as a Christian.”
Mori explained the Apostolic Pentecostal
traditions are much more emotive than those
of the Lutheran services Thompson grew up
attending.
“It’s the complete opposite side of the
coin,” she explained. “It’s a newer (type of
Christianity), a whole mixed bag of people.
It’s very much big displays of worship. It’s
completely different. I visited Luke’s church
before and it’s the traditional cathedral thing
— the priests came up and they did the goblet
of wine.”
At her church, things are far less formal.
“It’s very much open,” Mori said. Sometimes,
she explained, people even dance during ser-
vices. “If some people show emotional dis-
plays, it’s completely acceptable. If people are
crying, things like that.”
Though she began college unsure of how
faith would fit into her new routines and
rhythms, Mori explained the strength of
other Good News members’ devotion has
helped her realize that a life with God is the
one she wants and needs.
I asked Mori if Good News has changed
the way she thinks about religion.
“In more ways than I could talk about with
our time,” she said. “It was really cool because
coming into college I had this thing, like, I
didn’t really want to go to church as much as
I used to. My faith was really waning. I would
talk to God sometimes and be like ‘God, to be
honest, I might take a break from church, I’m
not really sure about this.’”
After joining Good News, her initial uncer-
tainty evaporated. Mori said it is the specific
blend of community, singing and faith that
makes Good News such a good fit for her.
When I asked about the primary goal of
the group, they explained the group doesn’t
really have a single, defined aim.
“It’s kind of a fun question,” Thompson
said. “I think if you ask different members
of Good News, you’d get slightly different
answers. I mean, ultimately we’re united
around the Good News. We want to tell peo-
ple that are Christian or people that are not
Christian that Jesus died so that they could
be forgiven.”
“It’s a prayer set to a tune,” Mori explained.
“It’s worship set to a tune.”
Music for prayer is nothing new.
“Gregorian chant is like the first a cap-
pella,” Thompson said, “There are reasons
they would sing instead of speak everything.
There’s a long history in Christianity of
using music to express prayer. It’s thousands
of years old — we’re just adapting it to the
times.”
To prepare for their performances, they
spend the first hour and a half of rehearsals
singing. The last 30 minutes are devoted to
fellowship.
This can take on a variety of different
forms. Sometimes members of Good News
meet in a stairwell in the Modern Languages
Building to sing and worship. Other times it’s
bible study, games, prayer or announcements.
“You meet people who are passionate
about music and who are passionate about
God,” Thompson said. “You get these situ-
ations where everybody is definitely differ-
ent people but we’re able to unite. We’re not
just uniting in the way that a lot of choirs do,
where you’re uniting because you’ve got to
make this music sound good. We’re united in
our faith, ultimately.”
A
s someone who doesn’t take part in
organized religion, my discussion
with Mori and Thompson gave rise
to questions I knew they probably couldn’t
answer. I wondered, in the way I think all
agnostics and atheists do: How are you so
certain? Do you ever have doubts? But these
didn’t feel like questions I could ask them. I
was there to learn about Good News, not to
interrogate the basis and tenacity of their
faith.
The closest we came to discussing the
experience of belief — the actual physical
feeling of piety — was when they talked about
singing. They told me about the overwhelm-
ing sense of peace and harmony they felt,
strong enough to break through stage fright.
About performing a solo, surrounded by their
friends, their brothers and sisters in Christ.
This, at least, felt as though it shared a
boundary with something I could under-
stand. It reminded me of something I learned
about two years ago in a class whose material
mostly escapes me now.
I took Sociology 100 my freshman year.
The class blurs together with the rest of first
semester: milk stained with dining hall cere-
al, the bridge to the Hill, long evenings lost in
the strange rush of explaining my whole life
to new friends. But one concrete lesson I have
not forgotten from Sociology is something
LSA lecturer Terence McGinn told us about
concerts. Bear with me. I promise this con-
nects to Christian a cappella.
A few years ago, McGinn had a student
who wrote an honors thesis about the sociol-
ogy of concerts. The student was interested
in the experience of euphoric connection that
many concert-goers report feeling. I found
the thesis online. It begins with the author,
Jeffrey May, LSA ‘10 and current Michigan
Law student, describing his own powerful
sense of ecstasy during a cover of the Talking
Heads song “This Must Be the Place” by The
String Cheese Incident.
I confess that I was already intrigued. I
love “This Must Be the Place.” A few months
ago, some Saturday night when it was still
warm out, my friends and I sang it together
as we walked home. We were on the corner
of Washtenaw Avenue and South Univer-
sity Avenue, waiting to cross the street, and
I remember how that moment made me feel
more deeply what I’ve always sort of known
to be true: that the chimerical promise of
whatever is next will always be eclipsed by
the hugeness of our anticipation. The mem-
ory of the stuff we were waiting for will fade,
and what remains is everything else: dancing
in someone’s living room while the sun sets,
the quiet walk home.
BY MIRIAM FRANCISCO, COPY CHIEF
ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTINE JEGARL
See THE PLACE, Page 6B
This must be
the place
“
”