During Kyron’s first year at New City East Lake, Gustavo walked into his office with a liturgy for Latino Heritage month. Kyron was inspired by Gustavo’s words and wrote a song for our congregation to sing as part of confession that month. He wrote the song and then walked into the Engine office and asked Libby to help finish it. It was progressively created by 3 different staff members for our particular church. It has become a tradition in our church every year for September. Grace Parker (on NCEL Arts Leadership Team) did the art for it and brought another lens of contemplation to the meaning of the words. Her image personalizes it to our context and makes it feel like we (New City East Lake) specifically are confessing.
Perdnanos came directly out of the liturgy that Gustavo wrote and became a sung portion of our liturgy: a reflective refrain and response to our time of confession. Kyron stepped into a context where directors before him had also set liturgy to music for our particular context and this song came to life through several different people. (Sometimes songwriting is long and systematic. Perdonanos came to life quickly, with different components coming easily to multiple people.)
This year, we decided to record the song. Our group of musicians was from our community and we were able to record in our sanctuary. Bryan and Nancy Holland, Braden Hess, Rich Hess, Zech Sydnor, Bekah Griggs, Caroline Stimart, Libby O’Neil, and Kyron Walker gathered and played together. We hired a sound engineer and producer (Luke) and we really appreciated the way he used our room and our epic reverb as a positive component.
God has richly blessed our church with musicians and songwriters and we have been working towards utilizing these gifts more. This is the first of many songs by our people for our people. As part of our CICW grant we will be recording several original psalms next year. We hope that our recordings will bless you, our church and that maybe a few other like minded congregations will come across them.
