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Brooklyn tabernacle3/24/2023 “People who were drug addicts put their faith in Christ and found the power in him not to do drugs anymore,” Mr. Many of the congregants say they have been born again, the pastor said. Schumer had visited the church occasionally and addressed the congregation, so he was familiar with the choir and the life changes many of its members had gone through. Cymbala, who watched the events on Monday from his apartment in Brooklyn, said Mr. The invitation to the choir had come from Senator Schumer, who was making arrangements last summer for the inauguration even though it was far from clear then that Mr. “I know I can tell my children and grandchildren that I and the choir sang for the president,” he said, “and not only for him but to represent our country and our people.” “And when I saw the video and saw the look on the president’s face, that’s when it really hit me: ‘You actually affected people in a positive way.’ ”ĭurell Comedy, 26, a professional dancer with the Limón Dance Company and a choir member since 2009, also said it took some time for the singularity of his singing at a presidential inauguration to fully register - until he returned to his Downtown Brooklyn home and watched a video of it. “My Facebook page had hundreds of comments, and my mother’s phone actually crashed,” Ms. We’re just average people but we represent this country, and that we could be there, it was such an honor for us.” Cymbala said later, left the choir members deeply moved. and former President Bill Clinton similarly strained to watch. Obama was seen craning his neck to look up as they sang. Cymbala and her assistant, Jason Michael Webb. Looking over the president, his cabinet, the Supreme Court, members of Congress and a crowd in the hundreds of thousands, they sang a new arrangement of “Battle Hymn” by Mrs. On a chilly but brightly sunny day, the choir members stood on a high balcony outside the Capitol and were decked out in new coats - crimson and fur-lined for the women, navy blue with red scarves for the men - contributed by a Macy’s executive who is a member of the Brooklyn Tabernacle church. The choir has won six Grammy Awards for gospel singing and performed at Carnegie Hall and Radio City Music Hall, as well as during Billy Graham crusades.īut no previous event matched the grandeur and spectacle of the inauguration, which was seen on television by more than a billion people. She cannot read sheet music but has an innate musical sense for captivating harmonies, he said. The choir is directed by his wife, Carol, 65, Chicago-born but Brooklyn-raised. The choir, with only a few trained musicians, is drawn from the congregation, which includes a multiracial mix of lawyers, doctors and other professionals from brownstone Brooklyn, but also former crack addicts and homeless people from other neighborhoods. On an average Sunday, he said, 10,000 worshipers can pass through the doors for the three services. Today, according to its Brooklyn-bred pastor, Jim Cymbala, 69, the choir is almost 300 strong and sings at services each Sunday in the 4,000-seat former Loew’s Metropolitan theater in Downtown Brooklyn. The choir started 40 years ago with just nine members of a struggling nondenominational church housed in a rundown building on Atlantic Avenue near where the Barclays Center now sits. Whether his correction was an effort to draw attention to the choir’s urban roots in his own home borough, the appearance of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir was a stirring moment in a ceremony in which a major theme was remaking a country where “a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” With a prideful emphasis he called the group “the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir.” Schumer introduced the singers of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at President Obama’s second inauguration, he first called them the “award-winning tabernacle choir,” as if the huge crowd were expecting another, more famous group, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.īut the senator, the inauguration’s impresario and M.C., quickly, with a mischievous smile, corrected himself.
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