Last year was the first year we were able to go to Spartanburg for Choral Festival - one of the biggest and BEST music conferences in the country. Mom has gone to this conference for 20 years and so when we moved here and were going to be so close (only 1.5 hours away), she highly recommended that we go. We were not disappointed at all! This year, I was REALLY bummed because the dates of the festival were the same weekend that David was scheduled to lead a missions trip to California. But a couple of months ago, he got a call from the church they are helping in CA asking if they could move the dates of their trip back a week. So that meant Choral Festival was back on!!
We had some sweet friends move into our house with their 4 boys for the weekend to take care of our kids so that we could go. We left at 7 am and headed right to registration and were ready to go for the first session. They have ALL the main music publishers there and you get to sing through all the new music that has come out - alot of it Christmas music! :) It's such a FUN way to get to listen thru the music - singing it with 1000 other music people! They also have fabulous devotional speakers and it is SUCH a time of encouragement and refreshment.
They have breakout workshops that you can choose your topic (I went to all children's choir workshops of course - they were AWESOME!) and then you see a musical premiered before dinner. After dinner is a concert, and then you are FINALLY done around 10 pm. Thursday night's concert was Phillips Craig and Dean!
It was SUCH a fun night - brought back SOOO many memories for us! David's group (Brother's Keeper) used to sing a TON of their songs, so that was fun to hear. These guys are totally hilarious and are SO genuine. That's one of my favorite parts of this conference - the people that they bring in (whether song writers, music publishers, arrangers, artists, etc) are all totally the real deal. They understand what our ministries are - and they encourage us to do what we were called to do!
They ended up acapella around the keyboard - such a tender moment. It was a great way to end the first day! :)
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