BY MYRNA TETZ
niversally, the language of music defies compelling urgencies for a translation
process. Somehow voices, strings, piano and organ, reeds, horns, and percussion
instruments send messages that other communication methods cannot so readily
convey. Never would this be better demonstrated within the Seventh-day
Adventist Church community than during this General Conference session in Toronto,
Canada.
From the theme song to the musical features to the offertories
to the miniconcerts throughout the convention centre and city, members and visitors
will leave Toronto with melodies and harmonies resounding in their ears. Musicians
pray and practice and memorize until each piece becomes, they hope, a living
symbol of eternal ecstasies. These ministries are designed to lighten despair
and encourage joyful worship throughout the session.
The theme song for this year's session was chosen by a committee
chaired by Richard Stenbakken, director of Adventist Chaplaincy Ministries.
Four musicians were commissioned to write original pieces, and others submitted
pieces that were not solicited.
"We received some very good music," said Stenbakken.
"There were excellent possibilities, but as the committee members and I
reviewed each one, the song `We Have This Hope,' composed by Wayne Hooper for
the 1962 General Conference session, kept surfacing in our discussions. There
was the feeling that we could not pick a General Conference session theme between
now and the Second Coming that this song would not support. We bowed often in
prayer, and after the evaluation of each possibility, we decided to use the
Hooper melody again."
For four sessions (1962, 1966, 1975, and 1995) Wayne Hooper's "We
Have This Hope" was chosen as the theme song. "The music committee
felt that this song has a memorable impact," said Stenbakken. "Individuals
will come to the first meeting on Thursday evening, June 29, and they can sing
this song because it is, worldwide, so well known. There's an emotional impact
that becomes audibly powerful when it is sung by thousands of voices."
In the hymnal prepared specifically for the session, "We Have
This Hope" will be translated into five languages: French, German, Spanish,
Portuguese, and Swahili. As multiple languages are blended into one, the delegates
and visitors will participate in a� musical worship experience that will not
be forgotten soon.
The song has a strong message, said Stenbakken, and is "simple
without being simplistic. It has the energy of an anthem. Those who join in
singing will carry with them an emotional investment they cannot set aside once
the meetings are over. This song was not borrowed from another denomination,
and as a result it fits perfectly with who we are as a church. Generationally
and genetically, hope in the Second Coming is truly Adventist."
The composer, Wayne Hooper, is well known, especially in more mature
Adventist circles, as a member of the Voice of Prophecy quartet from 1944 to
1980. In 1962 Hooper was invited as a member of a special committee to prepare
music for the quadrennial session of the General Conference to be held in San
Francisco in 1962. The chairman, singing evangelist Charles Keymer, encouraged
Hooper to compose a theme song.
"I didn't see how I could do that since I was a member of
the committee," remembers Hooper. But Keymer said, "Go home and write
one." As Hooper was driving one day and thinking about the motto that had
been chosen, "We Have This Hope," the four notes following the pickup
note in the final theme of Brahms' Fourth Symphony No. 1 in C Minor came to
his mind as fitting those four words exactly.
Hooper had been praying that "if it were the Lord's will,
I should write something useful; that the Holy Spirit would impress my mind
with the right combination of words and music that would be a blessing to the
people at the GC session. In just a matter of a half hour I had all the words
and most of the music--the transition section did not come until about a week
later."*
Before the General Conference session in 1995, with the theme "United
in Christ," Hooper was asked to write a second stanza. After praying about
it and wondering just what would unite us in Christ, Hooper says that the answer
came from 1 Corinthians 13_and he centered the whole second stanza on love as
the uniting force in Christ.
Asked how he felt about the song being used again, Hooper replied,
"I'm delighted, of course, that it can be used in such a marvelous way.
I believe the Lord gave me that song for the church."