Worship Musician July 2020 | Page 54

WORSHIP LEADERS “THE BLESSING” CONTINUES | Grant Norsworthy I don’t believe this has ever happened before. Not like this! All around the world, countless people of the Christian faith - singers, instrumentalists and technicians - have worked together - across geographical, denominational, theological, racial, age, stylistic, musical ability and other boundaries - to bring God’s words of blessing to their communities, their nations and to the rest of the world. And they have chosen to do this by singing a song - the same song - together. “The Blessing”. In last month’s issue of [WM], I wrote about how this movement of God’s Church began and started to grow. Utilizing the song “The Blessing” from Elevation Worship, a wave of “virtual choirs” have been formed - singing to the whole world from the YouTube “stage”. These videos have been gathering tens of thousands, hundreds of thousand, even millions of views. All of them combine uploaded video submissions from individuals and smaller groups into a collage of voices and faces to powerful effect. A beautiful picture of unity though diversity. A clear display of many different people with one common, powerful desire to be conduits for God’s Word of blessing. What may have started as a good project idea for Church singers to undertake during a time of no Church gatherings and no congregational singing during Covid-19 lockdown has become much more. Even though, for many (but by no means all!) of us the Covid-19 pandemic troubles seem to be subsiding, the desire and need to sing “The Blessing” continues. We have chosen to join a global choir to sing God’s blessing in a time such as this. For my previous [WM] article I included links of my favorite five “The Blessing - virtual choir” videos of the ones that had been released up to the time of writing. Now it’s my pleasure to highlight another five that have gone live since then. That’s five more of the many! How many, you ask? I don’t know. I’ve lost count. Check out the videos below. Who are the Tamil people, you may ask? They’re an ethnic group who live mainly in Sri Lanka and parts of southern India in regions where they are very much in the minority. These are only a handful of the many that can be found on YouTube. Search them out. The musical and technical quality varies wildly, but the common sincerity, purpose and passion are hard to deny. In my home country of New Zealand, it has just been announced that there are no known cases of the Covid-19 illness within our shores. We have not been in lockdown for a while now. It feels like we Kiwis have dodged the Covid-19 bullet! But only yesterday the World Health Organization announced that, globally, there have been more than 100,000 new cases in nine of the last ten days. Many are still suffering and that suffering is getting worse. And while things are rather tranquil for me in rural New Zealand right now (working away to co-ordinate and produce “The Blessing | Aotearoa/New Zealand” song video), the news - especially from the USA - while it’s not so dominated by Covid-19, clearly shows a greater need than ever for more of Almighty God’s blessing on us all. Grant Norsworthy founder of MoreThanMusicMentor.com providing training for worshipping musicians. MoreThanMusicMentor.com Name: “The Hawaii Blessing” Release date: May 14, 2020 Name: “The Blessing - Canada” Release Date: May 17, 2020 Name: “The Blessing Tamil | ஆசீர்வாதம் | Tamil Worship Leaders | Tamil Christian song | 2020” Release Date: May 22, 2020 Name: “The Blessing SWEDEN | Välsignelsen Sverige” Release Date: May 24, 2020 Name: “The Bay Area Blessing — Churches sing 'The Blessing' over the San Francisco Bay Area” Release Date: May 30, 2020 54 July 2020 Subscribe for Free...