Carnegie Hall Experience

As those who follow me on Twitter or Facebook may know, I recently spent five days in New York City as part of the American Festival Choir's trip to perform in Carnegie Hall. The trip was organized by Phil Barfoot's Celebration Concert Tours (CCT). I would highly recommend them for any concert tours as they did an incredible job organizing every aspect and they desired to make a positive and lasting Christian impact on New York.

The concert included performances by Christian recording artist David Phelps and syndicated radio host and singer Marcia Ware. With 360 singers in the American Festival Choir we were the largest choral group to ever sing in Carnegie Hall. The choir consisted of 145 sopranos, 115 altos, 60 tenors and 40 basses, from thirteen churches from ten states including California, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Maryland, Oklahoma, and New York. The concert was a fund raiser to provide support for after school care program held at a Brooklyn church and for a another Brooklyn church's effort to build a home in India for former child prostitutes. The hall holds 2800 and more than 2000 tickets were purchased for the concert.

My wife has already joked that I had my eight measures of fame because I was able to conduct eight measures of a carol sing-a-long during our program at Carnegie Hall. Each music minister was allowed to conduct some of the concert, based on the number of choir members that they brought with them. Oak Grove Baptist had the smallest group with only four of us total. So that comes to two measures per person. However, there was a nice little write-up about me in the playbill from Carnegie Hall.

We stayed in the Crowne Plaza on Times Square, ate at Planet Hollywood every day for breakfast, attended a worship service at Brooklyn Tabernacle where we got to hear the Brooklyn Tabernacle choir perform and an excellent sermon by Jim Cymbala, toured New York via an all pass hop-on hop-off ticket, visited the 9-11 Memorial, took photos of Rockefeller Center decorated for Christmas, and enjoyed an elegant dining experience onboard the Spirit of New York harbor cruise ship.

I also made some new friends from LifeWay Music Services and from among the other music ministers who went on the trip.

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