A Multicultural Student Affairs member began the upbeat Shippensburg University Black History Month gospel celebration by sharing how her iPad was recently stolen from her car. While some may get angry at the loss, graduate assistant Kapri Brown looked at it as a teaching lesson.
“God’s never gonna give you more than you can handle…although material things can be taken they can’t take your soul,” Brown said.
Despite various trials the attendees faced in life, they all came together for an evening of worship and praise Sunday, in the Tuscarora Room of Reisner Hall. The celebration consisted of poet Regina King and singers from both the Harmonic Voices of Truth (HVT) as well as Sound of Worship.
One of the singers from Sound of Worship, Brandon Mincey-Abel, is an alumnus of SU. When Mincey-Abel was a student at SU, he decided to bring HVT back from the ashes after its brief dissolve. During his freshmen year, in 2007, he started with seven members and by the time he graduated, in 2011, there were 35 students.
“He’s our everything, you can’t do anything without Him,” Mincey-Abel said, referring to why God is important.
HVT is a student-run multi-denomination choir whose goal is to PUSH or Praise, Uplift, Sing the songs of Zion and move spirits to Higher heights. Each month, the group has a “Gospel Hour of Power” in the Spiritual Center, with the next one on March 27.
Chico Robinson, leader of Sound of Worship, said she noticed how many times people get frustrated when their prayers are not answered.
“We want things fast…we need to learn how to stay in prayer,” Robinson said, adding that people need to take a moment out of their day to praise God.
The two musical groups led the attendees in a worship session. Each song started with a solo and built up to multiple voices in the chorus and echoes from the audience. As the drums and pianos grew louder, the singers’ passions built more and more until it felt like the room would explode. The crowd kept chanting the same phrases over and over, “Hallelujah. He has done great things.”
The Gospel Celebration was the last of a lengthy list of events for Black History Month on SU campus. members from HVT stressed that Black History Month is important because it is not just black history, but American History. They said how typically people only think about Martin Luther King Jr. when they hear Black History Month, but that African Americans achieved much more.
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