Professor Roberta King and Visiting Gospel Choir Focus on Forgiveness
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11/19/09
The Afrizo Gospel Choir, visiting Fuller from Daystar University in Nairobi, Kenya, enriched the all-seminary chapel service on Wednesday, November 18, with a sonorous vocal performance. Opening with a step dance routine, appropriate for the service’s theme “Step into Forgiveness,” the eight-member choir proceeded to impress the crowd with several songs delivered with deep expression and moving passion. Forgiveness and God’s sovereignty were themes that ran through the performance.
“Makes me want to go home—my other home,” commented Roberta King, associate professor of communication and ethnomusicology, after the singing. King lived and served in Nairobi for 22 years and established the Department of Christian Music Communication at Daystar University. Appointed to preach for the service, King pulled the choir performance’s thread of forgiveness into her talk by beginning with Scripture readings from Isaiah 43:1-3a, 25 and the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-15), while playing a kalimba, or African thumb piano. The audience was directed to respond in cadence, “Father, forgive us, as we also have been forgiven.”
“Celebration” and “strife” are the two words King focused on to illustrate the complicated situation in Africa, identifying the contrast between the two as “the conundrum in Kenya and other African countries.” Asking rhetorically, “Is there any hope to stop these cycles of violence?” King responded, “Father, forgive us, as we also have been forgiven.” In Nairobi, King taught a course on setting Scripture to music, and her students expressed that the greatest need for their communities were songs about forgiveness.
King observed the close connection between one’s relationships with God and with others and referenced South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s ubuntu theology, in which the oppressed are encouraged to restore the oppressor’s humanity in order to forgive. Jesus modeled this on the Cross when he asked forgiveness for those who crucified him.
“There is no future without forgiveness,” King proposed. “We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour, unceasingly.” She admitted that through the trials in her years of ministry, the “key ingredient” was learning to forgive. “We come to celebrate the Lord who restores our relationships,” King reminded her listeners. “When we step into forgiveness, we step into freedom.”