Broadcaster face of praise program
Adele Nash
Personal assistant, communications, marketing and public relations
Seventh-day Adventist Church in northern New South Wales
Wallsend, New South Wales, Australia
Journalist and broadcaster Geraldine Doogue will compere a music program co-produced by an Avondale lecturer to preserve the Christian tradition of hymn singing.
Dr Lyell Heise conducts the Institute of Worship Orchestra and the Salvation Army’s Sydney Staff Songsters at Hymns and Songs of Praise in 2008.
Hymns and Songs of Praise will not only celebrate the great hymns of the Christian faith, but also the “emerging contemporary hymns and songs that characterise much of the worship of Christian denominations in Australia,” says Dr Lyell Heise, a senior lecturer in the School of Ministry and Theology and the director of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the South Pacific’s Institute of Worship.
The concert will feature vocal ensembles Avondale Singers, the Contemporary Choir and The Promise, tenor Albert Mataafa, who sings with New Zealand Voices and Auckland’s premier a cappella ensemble, V8, the 50-piece Institute of Worship Orchestra and congregational singing.
The institute models the style of the concert on the BBC’s Songs of Praise television program, which ABC1 broadcasts on Sunday mornings. So, having Geraldine, who hosts the religious program Compass on ABC TV and the political program Saturday Extra on ABC Radio National, compere seems a good fit. “We’re excited to have her,” says the institute’s assistant to the director, Valmai Hill.
Compere Geraldine Doogue.
Hymns and Songs of Praise has an eight-year history at Avondale College of Higher Education, although Lyell and Valmai are producing the concert in collaboration with the Adventist Church in northern New South Wales this year and using Panthers Newcastle as the venue. “I’ve watched Hymns and Songs morph over the years from a hobby for musos to something that connects with church members and with those in the wider community,” says Lyell.
He speaks of the ecumenical nature of the concert—the institute has collaborated previously with the Salvation Army’s Sydney Staff Songsters and with the Lake Macquarie Ladies Choir and the Sydney Male Choir. “It enables the community to identify the Adventist Church with excellence.”
Hymns and Songs of Praise, Panthers Newcastle, Saturday, November 3, 2012, 4.00 PM. $10 (adults); $5 (concession/students). Adventist Book Centre. www.nnswabc.com. 1800 231 061.