SPIRITUAL BAPTISTS

MUSIC FROM THEIR HEARTS

By Phoolo Danny

Express

March 30, 2000

Page 33

University of the West Indies musicologist Morgan William has praised the music of the Spiritual Baptists.

"When you listen to the Baptists' music, you listen to music that is humanly organised sounds coming from their hearts and it must be judged that way," he stated.

Addressing the West Indian United Spiritual Baptist Sacred Order's 50^th anniversary service at Skinner park, San Fernando last week, William said: "Your music is not simply music. In analyzing the music of the Spiritual Baptists, I observed you have a liturgy where you know what music to use, when to use it and how to use it and even what you should get from it."

William pointed out that in days of yore, when the Baptists' services consisted of "loud shouting and speaking in tongues"; they were considered wrong in the 1970s. But those attributes have rubbed of now onto other churches, "and it's considered right in 2000".

He said: "Over the years, there were many criticisms about the Baptists, but now every corner I turn, there is some organisation, (not the Spiritual Baptists), speaking in tongues, and shouting and I am wondering why was it wrong in 1970 and right in 2000?"

Maybe, he said, it was recognised as a good path of prayer.'

William, who filled in for feature speaker Torrance Mohammed, deputy mayor of San Fernando, spoke of his research into the Baptists' religion and music, which he recorded in his thesis Songs from Valley to Mountain.

"The more I looked and heard the music of the Spiritual Baptists, the more fascinated I became," he said, adding that he was enchanted with their Rites of Passage (Baptism). "I found it so obsessing that I have not stopped doing research among the Spiritual Baptists."

He urged the faithful to be proud of the organisation. He said; "In my research, I see Baptism as building blocks from which the strength of the Baptist faith comes. I see it as death, resurrection and restoration."

He referred to the Baptists traditions and rites as having been transmitted from African and the early Christian Churches. He urged the younger Baptists to take the Rites of Passage more seriously.

"You do not have a simple religion, so try to understand it," he stressed. He also urged the Baptists to encourage proper documentation of the faith.

Another Baptist congregation, the Beth'aleel Fundamental Baptist Church, dedicated its million-dollar three-storey structure on Drayton Street, San Fernando last week.

Opposition leader Patrick Manning cut the ribbon to formally open the church.

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