Choral music as peace work

ELM and the Peter and Paul parish invited people to "tune in" to peace.

"Live God's peace and carry it out! Peace fill you", says the song "Heavenly peace be with you" by Ruth Wilson. The theme of "peace" has always been taken up in music all over the world. In a choir workshop, Hannah Rose and Ingrid Lüdemann from the Ev.-luth. Mission in Lower Saxony (ELM) have now worked out some of these peace songs in German and English with participants and performed them as part of a devotional.

"Today we want to feel the power of music. It should remind us that peace is not just a goal, but also a process - something that we must constantly seek within ourselves and with each other," said Ingrid Lüdemann, ELM education officer for the Peace Place2GO, introducing the devotion. Just as musicians tune their instruments to the right frequencies again and again, people must also regularly tune in to peace. "We lose the right 'tone' in our everyday lives - through arguments, stress, fear or anger," said the education officer. "Once we have lost our balance, we can always return to the 'tuner' - to God, who guides us back to the right 'tone' with his love and peace," she explained.

And the participants in the parish hall and church of St Peter-Paul-Gemeinde Hermannsburg, which was a co-organiser and whose gospel choir director Janna Meyer led the musical part of the event together with Hannah Rose, obviously felt this too. "We were all great and created such a beautiful and touching devotional together in such a short time. I really enjoyed it," said participant Mida Chamberlain. "It was a peaceful, devotional few hours, which was also about my own inner peace. The world around me and in the media doesn't seem to have become any more peaceful, but thinking about peace gives me hope that more peace is possible," summarised another participant.

For Hannah Rose, ELM's international poverty and peace work officer, choral music is a contribution to peace per se. "You work towards a common goal in musical harmony. You have to listen to yourself and to the voices of others," she says, emphasising her point of view. It was no problem for newcomers to choral singing to fit in with the harmonies and rhythms among more experienced singers. The "project choir" was accompanied by Janna Meyer on the electric piano, a cajon player and a percussionist.

In the run-up to the Kirchentag, choir workshops are currently being organised at all eight peace locations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover. On the Kirchentag itself, the eight places of peace of the Hanover regional church invite you to the Gartenkirche Hannover on Friday, 2 May, from 15:30-17:00. A concert with the Osnabrück band ZweiVormBus will take place there under the title "Beherzt auf dem Weg des Friedens". Annie Heger (NDR columnist and singer) will host the event, which is being organised under the patronage of Anna Nicole Heinrich (President of the EKD). There, too, people are encouraged to seek out peace and pass it on.