One Voice

When I moved back to Columbia from Texas in 1979, I re-joined First Baptist Church. It had become the center of creativity for me. The catalyst was the fledgling Singles Ministry that I helped start. It gave me a lot of avenues to do things in, such as building my Bible character monologues. I had already done the personification of the cross, when I was in seminary, but now I got to write and present other monologues with the support of my Sunday School class taught by Nezza Howard. She saw that I had a talent for this, and that is where Hosea was born, which is the monologue I have done the most. We had a Singles trip to Ridgecrest NC, which is where I met Wanda. She and I hit it off almost immediately, as we were both creative souls. Our group learned how to make an impact in our community, and it was the start of our mission work, which we carried to Philadelphia, and later to Tennessee and Puerto Rico. But, one thing that we really excelled in was music. The church wanted to form a choir made up of College and Singles singers. We came together with a group of musicians that took our mission seriously. We got green polo shirts and navy pants as a uniform. In thinking for a name, there were many ideas, but we settled on "One Voice". The name came from a Barry Manilow song, and it said it all for our choir. We sang with one voice. In addition to my singing responsibilities, I also wrote a weekly newsletter for the group that combined news with stories. Each one was different and was called "The One Voice". They were classics. We became the concert choir for First Baptist and went to several churches in the area to sing. At Kathwood Baptist, one of our group fainted in the middle of a song, but we kept going. At Fort Jackson, we were served wine during a communion. Baptists don't drink wine. We drink grape juice. The choir was at the front of the church at the altar, with our backs to the congregation. The girls were passing the shot glasses of wine down the row to the boys, who were drinking them. The minister got tickled. We had a fun performance that night. Our choir director was Jon Blouin. We did a performance of "Joy Comes in the Morning" at Township Auditorium which combined music and drama. Our most ambitious project was doing a musical called "Celebrate Life" in Spanish and performing it in Puerto Rico on July 4th in a park in Old San Juan. It meant that we had to do the musical phonetically, as most of us did not know Spanish that well. We had to take three months of Spanish as a crash course, because we were also going to do Vacation Bible Schools at three locations around Puerto Rico. We did a dry run of the musical at a Spanish church in Columbia to see if they would understand it. It went well, so we knew we were ready. Just before we were to leave, Jon Blouin left First Baptist. The choir was put into a bit of a uproar, because Jon was our leader, but we realized that the choir was bigger than one person. R. D. Roberts became our interim director, and we went to Puerto Rico. We did the VBS events. I was in Fajardo. The Puerto Rico missions folks were supposed to advertise our concert on the 4th of July, but they didn't. So, we only had a few tourists there. That was a little disappointing, with all of the work we put into it, but we did it anyway. After we got back from Puerto Rico, One Voice did a few more concerts, and then we slowly disbanded. I still wear the green shirt with my memories.