Send Chapel Choir Students to South Africa

This project is now complete. You can still support the Chapel Choir's upcoming trip to South Africa by giving online here.

The Hope College Chapel Choir will be traveling abroad in 2018 for the first time in a decade. We’re encouraged by the college’s mission to share our music in contexts that will leave our student participants with profound, potentially life-changing impressions. The thirty-five students of the Chapel Choir are looking forward to performances in AIDS clinics, township schools, churches and communities.

Student musicians reap lasting benefits – educational, emotional, spiritual – from international touring. There are very few human endeavors that compare with what takes place between a music ensemble and its audience. This is especially true in cultural contexts that differ from our own, where the connective language of music is uniquely equipped to cross barriers.

Visiting South African churches will give us the opportunity to explore Christian contexts that are far removed from anything we might encounter domestically. Experiences like these open the eyes and ears of participants in ways that cannot be achieved in the classroom. As we learned during our 2008 trip, singers have the special advantage of being able to share music with the people they encounter, forging much deeper connections than can be achieved through simple observation.

There will be 35 students participating in this experience and they are each contributing a portion of their costs.  We also are using some Chapel Choir funds on hand. However, we need an additional $50,000 to make this transformational opportunity available to Chapel Choir students this year. Please join us by making a gift and sharing this project with your friends and family.