The Choir: Boys Don't Sing - Finale

In the middle of a trip up to Darlington to see old (and not so old) friends, we managed to catch the last episode of this excellent series. The BBC site has been upgraded with various clips from episodes and can be found here. The links on the side of that page might explain why I came back from a few days away and discovered 700 people had visited in 2 days. 'Part time TV critic' can now go on my CV........

Anyway, back to the programme. It was a fittingly triumphant ending - teacher Gareth Malone managed to coach the choir to it's performance at the Royal Albert Hall, integrate the beatbox crew with the regular choir, and get the school governors agreement 'in principle' to funding a post to support singing at the school in the future after he leaves.


Again, all sorts of things jumped out:


1. Mentoring: there's been lots of this in the series. This time round there was the amazing sight of the Lancaster school choir (est 6 months ago) singing next to the Kings College Choir (est some time before Bruce Forsyth was born), effectively in pairs, each Lancaster boy being mentored by a Kings chorister. They came out suitably inspired and encouraged. Gareth himself taught the music teacher the basics of conducting, though I'm not sure I'd want to make my conducting debut at the Albert Hall!! There was lots of 1-to-1 teaching going on, which is something that is gradually being rediscovered in business and youth work, but which the church is still a bit shy of.


The bit in the Kings chapel put me in mind of the title Jesus gives to the Holy Spirit: the 'Advocate' - which literally means 'one who stands alongside'. As we sing our faltering song to God, the Spirit stands beside us, holding the same music, holding the tune and the note and the rhythm to help us to get in tune.


2. Inspiration and Perspiration: alongside the occasional high of the visit to Kings was the relentless slog of practicing the 2 pieces for the Albert Hall. I guess we all need the mixture - discipleship, life, learning to sing, any project needs something which gives us a vision, but without falling into the trap of thinking that vision, inspiration and a 'high' will deliver quality.


There's a myth in Christian circles that all you need is enough of the Holy Spirit and you will magically be capable of stuff you've never done before, like sharing your faith, resisting temptation etc. In a way that's true, but it's also extremely lazy. The path to holiness is the path of the spiritual disciplines - prayer, chewing on the Bible, dealing with sin, loving people - and there aren't short cuts to being like Jesus. Yes we need the vision of God and the fire of the Spirit burning in our guts to keep us going on this path, but it's not easy.


3. Leaving a Legacy. Gareth did various things to make sure singing didn't finish the moment he left. This is a key challenge for all leaders, to make sure that those after you don't live in your shadow, but are equipped to go forward. I liked the way he involved the music staff all the way along, and got the head involved in as much as possible - get key leaders and stakeholders involved, and on your side, and it makes things so much easier. Through getting the boys themselves to speak to the governors about the effect of the choir on their own lives, he won the governing body over to fund a singing tutor for the future.


I find investing in other leaders, and in legacy stuff, very hard to do. It needs time - one thing that came out of the trip to Darlington was that, with the church now more stretched for resources (my post was discontinued), those in leadership have less time available to develop other leaders. Unless you really carve it out, it's very hard to make this a priority, and to work out the best way to do it.


4. Return of the Prodigal. One of the delights was seeing Imran, one of the most gifted singers in the school, take the mic at the Albert Hall for a solo. Having been a promising student who'd gone off the rails and quit singing, this was redemption time. Gareth Malone had left an open door, worked on Imran through his peer group rather than going at him direct, and won him round, and now we saw Imran freely admitting that he handled it badly and was the cause of his own problems.


It was an interesting bit of tribal evangelism: in our individualistic culture, we often forget how key the 'tribe' is to peoples identity, and Gareth worked out that to win Imran round, he had to win his 'beatbox crew' friends round. Shades there of Christianity Rediscovered (good article here), a book on mission to the Masai tribe by missionary Vincent Donovan, who discovered that individualistic Western models of mission failed completely when applied to a tribal culture.


And now?

My main concern would be that having got to the Albert Hall, what is there left to achieve? How to get the boys excited about a lesser challenge when they've performed at the top venue, in the top show (The Proms) in the country? I guess that's a pertinent challenge too. Christian life will always have high points and low points. I know lots of people for whom Spring Harvest, or Soul Survivor, is the high point of their year, and the challenge for the rest of the year is to take the encouragement, teaching and energy of those festivals into day to day working and church life.


I guess that's the post-Transfiguration moment: Jesus bringing the disciples back down the mountain into a situation of mess and failure. We all have to come back down the mountain at some stage, there can be no building of shelters and prolonging the moment. It's there, it passes, and life goes on.

The Choir: Boys Don't Sing 3

I've started blogging episode by episode, so may as well see it through! The Choir: Boys Don't Sing traces the efforts of singing teacher Gareth Malone to get an all-boys school in Leicester singing. They seem to prefer rugby and fighting, but he gradually wins them over.

The first 2 episodes saw Gareth calling the choir together (1) and developing them into a singing unit (2). Week 3 had a different challenge. Gareth wanted the choir to sing at the Royal Albert Hall - nothing like aiming high - within 6 months of first coming together. That not only demonstrated incredible confidence in them, but also in himself as a leader and trainer. One of the things I love is his refusal to give up. Ok it's a bit easier when you're only in a school for a year, but despite repeated setbacks, Gareth refused to be deflected from his vision. Key thing for a leader.

Various aspects of part 3 which struck me:

- Setting the bar high. A challenge brings the best out of people, it makes them stretch themselves. In our discipleship training, do we do this? If a schoolteacher can expect kids with no singing training to progress to national standard within a year, are we too low in our expectations of how people can grow as Chrisitans? Gareth refused to leave development to chance - choir practice, individual singing lessons, bringing in inspirational people, pushing them out of their comfort zones. How many of our churches are schools of spiritual growth, and how many are just an easy chair? How many of our members would be shocked if growth in grace were expected as the norm, rather than tolerated as a random side effect?

- Mixed economy. In this episode, Gareth finally got the 'MCs' singing - a group of playground rappers with a good sense of rhythm and tune, but who'd decided the choir wasn't cool enough for them. Part of this was about helping a key member of this group to let go of his fear and start singing, part of it was to find a mode of singing they could relate to. By the end of the episode, there were effectively 2 choirs - the main group training for the Albert Hall, and the MC's developing a beatbox/acapella style. How (if?) he brings them together will be interesting. Made me think of the concept of a 'mixed economy' church - that there is no monolithic model of how the church should be, and if we allow the church to express people's culture, rather than swamp it, that we might end up with more life and variety rather than less.

- Team and individual. As well as developing the main choir, Gareth spent a lot of time with individuals, helping them to push pass pain barriers and conquer fears. Again, a great model. If you neglect the individual, the team won't work, and vice versa. Jesus spends lots of time with individuals, as well as with his 'team' of disciples.

- Demanding commitment. Gareth wasn't afraid to ask for commitment. He rang all the absentee choir members, one by one, to ask them to sign up or drop out. A good response followed, numbers at rehearsals virtually trebled. This made me think about a recent Premier TV interview with Carl Beech, of Christian Viewpoint for Men, who says that men need to rise to a challenge, and often the church doesn't ask enough of men to keep them interested.

The Choir: Boys Don't Sing

If last weeks episode of this fascinating series was about calling, this week was about how you train and develop a team to multiply your own ministry and influence. The boys choir at the Lancaster school, Leicester (confused already?) had a healthy number of recruits, but getting them to sing was a further challenge.

I liked the way that Gareth, the singing teacher, not only kept looking for individual talent, but he also kept putting a vision in front of them, a challenge to rise to - of singing at the end of term show, with solo parts for those who came forward. Again, through setting the bar high, he actually got more out of the lads than if he'd been woolly and accepted less.

We also had a great example of the boys themselves becoming the evangelists. Gareth had identified Mr Foreman, the head of year 9 & 10, as the gatekeeper in the school, the 'alpha male'. Maybe Jesus might have called him the 'man of peace' - the one who's welcome gives you a base for ministry and outreach. In a breathtakingly bold move, (and we're left unclear about whose idea this was), some of the boys go into Foremans class and sing a song about him being a hypocrite unless he joins the choir. After months of resistance, he gives in, goes to Gareth for singing lessons, and takes his place in the staff choir. The boys prove more effective at evangelism than Gareth is, and that's a great secret in leadership. Most of the stuff that needs doing will be done better by other people than by you. The trick is to motivate and mobilise them.

The end of the episode was a brilliant bit of symbolism. Sport is the spiritual heart of the school, so Gareth got together a staff choir, browbeat the (all male) PE staff into being part of it, and had them sing as part of the sports day. This reminded me of Christian missionaries building churches over the pagan sites in ancient Britain. Find where the energy is and go there with the message, rather than set up somewhere else and try to call people over to you. It made a great statement on 2 levels: 1 that the staff were prepared to sing and 2 that singing is as much at the heart of what it is to in this school as sport.

I would imagine that the boys in the school see Christianity on pretty much of a par with singing - limp, girly, not something they'd want to be seen doing. There is so much to learn from seeing how 1 teacher, bravely and successfully, changes the whole culture of a school. It was also interesting to see that at the end, after the boys had performed succesfully at the school show, that amongst Gareths congratulations was more exhortation - you can still get better, do better, raise the bar. Again, that's discipleship. It's not a few weeks practice for one performance, it's continual growth in grace, and rising to the challenges that Jesus sets. I just see so much in common between this series and the way Jesus calls, trains, equips and releases disciples.

The Choir, the Cops and the Coptics

Managed to catch 'The Choir: Boys Don't Sing' on BBC2 last night. Very interesting. Back in vicar school, they once showeds us an Eastenders omnibus (in the days when they were only 1 hour long) in the Ethics module, and asked us to list the moral issues the programme dealt with - we ended up with well over 20. If you happen to be a mission tutor, download last nights The Choir from IPlayer and show it to your students.

The episode showed a keen singer and singing teacher given 2 terms at an all-boys comprehensive school in Leicester. His task: to recruit and train a choir to perform at the Royal Albert Hall at the end of the 8 months. The school didn't sing: assemblies were notices, pep talks and tellings off, the boys were very much 'singing is for girls' 'singing is gay' etc., and I must admit I wasn't too sure about his methods, but by the end he'd recruited 170 of the boys to start a choir, which was pretty incredible.

I was reminded at several points of Jesus. The teacher identified kids with talent, and recruited them one by one for singing lessons. One especially talented kid let him down, after showing a lot of promise, so we saw how tough and frustrating that was, but for others it was a big opportunity. The teacher also sang a solo in front of the whole school at his first assembly, which could have been horrendous, but actually seemed to earn him a lot of respect. 3 lessons in with the music GCSE group, he got them performing a song (they'd not done any singing before he arrived) to 2 othe classes. Terrifying, but they were thrilled when it went well. Reminiscent of Jesus calling the disciples, showing them how its done, then pushing them out to do it themselves.

And he was (at this stage anyway - 3 more programmes to go) succesful. It made us wonder whether as a church we are far too limp and gentle about discpleship. Jesus wasn't afraid to put tough challenges in front of people, and it was facing those challenges that brought growth and confidence. They'd also seen him do it, so Jesus wasn't asking the disciples to do anything he'd not already done. I don't know if this guy modelled himself on Jesus at all, but it was an excellent contemporary example of calling and discipleship in a modern context.

Whilst on the subject of TV, those of you who've not touched your remotes since the end of Extreme Pilgrim can twitch that finger again. Not only is there a raft of excellent films coming up this week (Calender Girls, Million Dollar Baby, Matrix (again), Last of the Mohicans), Ashes to Ashes starts on Thursday 9pm, and Channel 4's Unreported World on Friday 7.35pm focuses on the Coptic Christian community found on Egypts rubbish dumps.