Holy Trinity Anglican Selected to Participate in Yale ISM Congregations Project

ArtSpiritualityHoly Trinity Anglican Selected to Participate in Yale ISM Congregations Project

The Yale Institute of Sacred Music is pleased to announce that Holy Trinity Anglican Church is among seven congregations from all over North America selected to attend the ISM Congregations Project Summer Seminar in June, 2015. Each congregation is working on a project related to the theme From Generation to Generation.  Holy Trinity is the first church from the Anglican Church of Canada and the second Canadian church selected to participate in this program.

For the seminar, leadership teams from the congregations gather with ISM and guest faculty on the Yale campus for five days to form a diverse ecumenical community of ministers, musicians, scholars, and other church leaders. The curriculum is shaped by the theme and designed to support the congregations’ individual projects, which build on their particular strengths in worship, music, and the arts; to expand their capacity to serve the surrounding community; and to nurture ecumenical partnerships.

Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Edmonton, Alberta is an active multigenerational parish whose working mission statement is “Making Christ Visible through the Arts.”  Believing creativity and spirituality are closely related, the church has invited actors, painters, dancers, writers, filmmakers, and musicians to celebrate the arts in their annual arts festivals and participate in their community life.

At the Yale seminar, the church will work on their project, called Who Goes There? God’s Presence in Transitional Moments, which to allow a number of individuals from a variety of social backgrounds to tell their stories of birth, marriage, or death (and the rituals involved in same) in a format that is dramatically structured and accessible to the public. These individuals may be disenfranchised, affluent, confident, uncertain or apparently routine, but the goal is to gather enough different perspectives and experiences to find the common touchstones that unite us all. Through drama, visual arts, recorded interviews and movement the subtle differences of human perception will be explored with the goal of uncovering the fundamental and foundational connections of the human experience and the Creator at the heart of it. More information about all the congregations and their projects is at ismcongregations.yale.edu/congregations.

The Yale Institute of Sacred Music is an interdisciplinary graduate centre that educates leaders who foster, explore, and study engagement with the sacred through music, worship, and the arts in Christian communities, diverse religious traditions, and public life. The ISM Congregations Project website, with information about its faculty, the congregations, themes, and application procedures is at ismcongregations.yale.edu.

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