Rock Tour 4 - Bristol

After our morning meeting in Taunton, we travelled the short distance up the M5 to Bristol and the newly refurbished Colston Hall in Bristol. I say newly refurbished... Since we last visited for Jail Break they have built a beautiful enormous foyer area on to one side, which was fabulous for Keith and Laura with the bookstall. Not a great deal more than that has changed - the backstage areas are still... er... interesting. The cast had plenty of space in lots of little dressing rooms, but the poor choir found themselves in the basement again.

Despite this, the Colston Hall remains one of the most impressive venues on the tour. The auditorium seats well over a thousand, and there is loads of room for a fabulously big choir. Huge thanks go to the wonderful Brenda Munden, without whom none of this could have happened. She not only trained the Bristol section of the choir, but she handled all the administration too.

The other choir trained specially for the event came from Thornbury just north of Bristol. The choir there was wonderfully trained by Heather Staley. Then the two choirs were joined by singers from Weston, Gloucester, Exeter and Taunton - an amazing bunch.

What was so fabulous about Bristol was it was like a mini Symphony Hall finale, with loads of familiar faces and friends among the choir and audience. Richard Harvey had his usual supporters travel all the way down from Nottingham. Then there was Barbara Carpenter, Bill's wife, and many familiar faces from our music weeks. It was also great to see some other CMM people - Caroline Finney (the original Mary Magdalene) was there, and also Ruth Butler and Kaye Cooke (who also sang at Weston) who were part of our Wildfire touring party. It was also Alyson's home performance, so she was understandably very nervous, but you couldn't tell. She had many supporters, including work colleagues as well as family and friends.

In the afternoon in the team meeting we had a long time of prayer for any who were ill or in pain amongst the touring party. In the end we found that it was at least 1/3 of the group, one of which was Rachel, who was asleep in one of the dressing rooms suffering from a migraine. The prayer time was immensely powerful, and God did quite a lot of work amongst us. Rachel wasn't quite well enough to perform that evening, but she was considerably better.

Just before the performance when we prayed together with the choir, someone had brought along some oil to anoint people with. This is what Brenda said in an email afterwards: "One of my choir men actually said on the second rehearsal that he felt the Lord telling him He would really anoint this whole tour and our part specifically. Then we were all anointed before the performance!!! Now how about God telling us He was and is with us?"

The performance went very well, and was really blessed by God. Margaret, our prayer coordinator, noticed some of the hall staff who should have been standing on guard at the doors peeping in through the curtains so they could watch. We pray that God can break through there.

So once again, huge thanks to Brenda for all her hard work, and also the many choir trainers who have made the Bristol performance so wonderful.