As youth ministers and music ministers are planning their calendars for the new year, Jeff Stith said he’d recommend that they consider something that they might not have thought about in a while — a youth choir tour.
Although for many churches they’ve become a thing of the past, for him they’ve consistently been a thing of great impact.
“When we would sit down over at my last church and talk about trips, the number one trips they would talk about was our youth choir tours before the trips to Six Flags or camps or Disney or whatever else they’d done that year,” said Stith, who currently serves as minister of music at First Baptist Church Birmingham. “Four kids in the past 10 years have been saved on our choir tours through our devotional times at night or our experiences with the churches. It’s a great bonding experience for the group as well.”
Not only that, he said it provides a place for students to get a passion for music, something he had a lot of opportunity to do growing up.
“Some of my greatest memories are from Shocco Springs, from youth music weeks that don’t exist anymore. That’s where we got called into ministry and fell in love with music ministry,” Stith said of himself and his peers. “I think the youth choir is the one place left that these kids can experience music in the church.”
Music and missions
A tour offers the opportunity to pair music with missions experience, he said, adding that churches with youth groups of any size can do it if they join forces.
In early 2023, Stith joined the staff at FBC Birmingham and learned about how Nathan Lyon, who was directing the student choir at the time, had done some joint projects with Grace Life Baptist Church and Tannehill Valley Baptist Church, both in McCalla. They wanted to plan a youth choir tour for the three churches, so he and Lyon started planning that with Mike Jones, minister of worship ministries and media at Grace Life, and Joe Marchetti, music minister at Tannehill Valley.
“Our church had all girls — nine girls,” Stith said. “Joe’s church had five guys and girls. And then Grace Life had about 15.”
The three combined their groups for a youth choir tour that was low cost — they stayed at Grace Life — and offered a lot of different experiences for the students.
“They did six concerts in five days,” Stith said.
They called the tour Missions Begins at Home because they were staying in the Birmingham area, and during the day they served and sang at several local ministries — Daniel Cason Ministries, Jimmie Hale Mission, The Changing Station and The Oaks on Parkwood retirement community.
“It was a great experience for the kids, and a lot of them didn’t know each other before the tour,” Stith said.
Stith said the ministers also divided the load — Jones and Marchetti directed the music, Lyon played piano for the group and Stith helped with logistics and meals.
Jones said the experience was great “because it brought three local churches together without fostering competition, but promoting family.”
He said he hopes the opportunity to be involved in local missions showed them that they can share the love of Jesus right in their own city anytime they want.
‘Compelling people’
He saw the musical part make an impact in those missions contexts too — on the people they were serving and on the students themselves.
“Singing has an incredible way of compelling people to stop what they are doing and listen to your message and bringing people together,” Jones said.
“Singing about freedom in Christ took on a whole new meaning for many of our students when we sang at the Jimmie Hale mission where we saw people who had overcome their addictions rejoicing in the freedom they have now.”
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