By Tofarati Ige
The Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries’ Guitar Choir recently made the church proud when it won the 2020 edition of the Lagos Choir Awards.
Expressing joy at clinching the award, the choir’s leader, Joseph Olubukola, told Sunday Scoop, “As a group, we feel happy that the efforts of the church’s General Overseer, Daniel Olukoya, and his wife, Folashade, upon the guitar choir were not in vain after training us for 14 years’. We see this victory as the beginning of achieving greater strides to the glory of God.”
Speaking on some of the preparations they put in place to win the award, Olubukola, who spoke on behalf of the choir, said, “Our 14 years experience in church ministrations, as well as artistic and creative performances, fostered our preparation towards the competition. It also enhanced our ability to diversify in order to adjust faster to the correction of the judges. While preparing for the competition, we keenly observed the criteria for adjudication which was used for assessment by the judges.
“More importantly, we embarked on fasting and prayer retreats to ask God for divine inspiration and creative ideas. This was even as we held rigorous rehearsals, while maintaining discipline and consistency in maintaining the standard set for our performance.”
Highlighting some of the challenges they face as a group, Olubukola stated, “The MFM Guitar Choir is a large group. Our experience in handling crowds has helped us to inculcate discipline, humility, loyalty, punctuality, consistency, patience and endurance in our members.”
Olubukola also noted that there were several factors that distinguished the choir from other groups. He said, “Several other choirs just sing but we train our members to play the guitar and sing while expressing happiness. This additional skill of playing instruments was actually commended by the judges in the competition.
“Also, secular choirs center their goals on business to ensure that they make money to sustain and promote their works. But, in our case, the purpose of establishing the group was for evangelism and edification of the body of Christ.
“We are one big family with members from three years old to 77 years old. Members of the choir within this age range have participated in some of our previous concerts where we had over 1,200 members on stage.
On why the choir focused only on playing the guitar, Olubukola said, “Specialising on guitar music is a concept that allows us explore conglomeration of guitars at various levels of acoustic bass and lead as a means of accompaniment to songs. The guitar provides a unique ambience when combined with songs. This is quite different from regular musical set up where keyboards and drums are used. In all the 10 countries where the guitar choir has been sponsored to by ‘Daddy Olukoya’ for ministrations, our concept was amazing, admired and widely accepted. We derive the percussive sound of drums from beating the box of the acoustic guitar and/or sounding the drums on the thick strings of the guitar. We also codify the use of other guitarlike instruments such as ukulele, banjo and mandolin to perform various genres of music.”
Originally published at Punch