Bath Faith Community Choir Gets Started

Warm Springs, VA – In Bath County, The Faith Community Choir is taking form and welcoming participants from churches throughout the county. Betty Cauley is a member of Warm Springs Presbyterian Church and she’s helping to organize the Faith Community Choir.

“We have, I think, an amazing faith in this county,” says Cauley. “We have some amazing musicians in this county. And so often we express our faith and use our musical talents in our own Churches or our own community groups, but we don’t seem to have an opportunity to bring us all together in one big celebration.”

A committee has been working on the idea of a community choir performance for six to eight months now.

“The time was just right,” says Cauley. “It had been casually mentioned, for example by Glenn Coleman, who’s the Minister at Hot Springs Presbyterian Church. It had been casually mentioned in a group that I was sitting around with once, prior to that. But nobody really just got it going. Last winter after Christmas sometime, in listening to some music, some of the new praise songs that came out and we were just listening to music and to be honest that just provided the motivation to get the committee going and get the effort going.”

Rehearsals start in mid January and a performance is scheduled for February 25th at Bath County High School. Depending on how it goes, the Faith Community Choir performance might become an annual event. At this point the choir has about 60 members, with the potential for more to join.

“If there are other folks in the community who want to come sing with us, we’re not going to turn you down, we’d love to have you,” says Cauley. “But the sooner you let us know, the better just so we can order more music if we need it and we’d love to have that problem. And you don’t have to be a member of a Church choir, you don’t have to be a regular Churchgoer to participate in the community choir. If you are a person who wants to celebrate your faith with a bunch of musicians in the county through music, we’d love to have you.”

The Faith Community Choir will perform a cross section of songs, with some newer praise songs and some more traditional selections. The entire choir will perform songs together and several church choirs will do a few numbers too and the United 4 One Youth Choir is also going to perform.

“And we think it’s important because, particularly in this day and age, we want to celebrate the things that bind us, not the things that separate us,” says Cauley. “And our faith is certainly a thing that binds us. And we want to put that out there and give people an opportunity to come and participate in that.”

For more information about the Faith Community Choir contact Betty Cauley at 839-3444.