Packed House Hundreds Attend Silver Valley Churches’ Easter Cantata
When Silver Valley churches decide they want to get together to celebrate God, the faithful come in droves.
About 450 people from churches all over the valley packed the pews of the United Church of Kellogg for the ninth Easter Cantata on Sunday afternoon.
Director Joy Persoon expected an equally hefty crowd for the evening show.
“A cantata is singing with the spoken word between it that tells a story,” she said. For this particular cantata, “it’s always the Easter story, the story of Christ.”
For the past nine years, she’s directed an average of 110 singers from all sorts of Silver Valley congregations. This year, about 70 people were in the choir, though the smaller number of participants hasn’t led to a smaller audience, she said.
“We open it up to everybody,” she said, noting the event attracts members who are freshmen in high school to members in their 80s.
And people in the audience said the music was magnificent. As one woman left the first performance, she said she planned to attend the evening’s show, too.
This year, the program opened with the Joyful Handbell Ringers from the United Church of Christ Congregational from Wallace. The choir filed in and Persoon said a prayer, urging people to ask themselves who they say Jesus is.
The songs of the cantata followed the story of Christ, his birth, his teachings and miracles, his crucifixion and his ascent into Heaven. Between songs, members of the choir spoke as Mary, Peter, John and the adulteress who was about to be stoned before Jesus confronted the crowd.
Phil Squire as Peter recalled leading a normal life when he found himself and other disciples following Jesus, and later in the program described the shame he felt after his betrayal of Jesus.
The singers begin working with the pianists, Karen Frank and Rose Mary Peak shortly after Christmas. Persoon starts to work with them in February.
She does it because “I love the Lord, first of all, and music is my life,” said Persoon, a music teacher for Kellogg schools. “I love to do it. It’s uplifting. It’s a challenge to do it.”
And directing all those singers plus the audience for one song at the end is, she said, “a spiritual experience.”