A small, yet diverse gathering of people walk into a worn down church building on Atlantic Avenue in 1971, near where the rippling architecture of the Barclays Center now stands. The early morning sky is already lit up on this sunny Sunday morning. On the similarly lit stage inside the building stand the nine nicely arranged members of the worship choir, a young woman leading them from the bench of a piano. There is no sheet music. There are no vocally or musically trained members. As the service begins, both congregation and choir lift their voices in melodic unison for a kingdom far grander than the view on the stage.
A cultural melting pot of ten thousand people group together in lines that stretch around the corner of Smith Street. These eager people are waiting to be let into one of the three services in the church building renovated from a former theater. Four thousand are seated inside, while others towards the back are directed to an annex building around the corner where a big screen has been set up in an overflow room. Inside the church the ceilings are high, the red carpets spotless, and the stage bright. 280 choir members stand to their feet, a middle-aged woman enthusiastically drops her lifted hands, and the room erupts into a harmony that can be heard from outside the wooden doors. A spectator would never guess that there is no sheet music and no professional musical training involved.
Believe it or not, these two vastly different choirs are one and the same. The Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir is a true “rags to riches” tale. The wife of the Brooklyn Tabernacle’s senior pastor, Carol Cymbala, was always naturally inclined to and gifted in music. She had envisioned herself as the leader of a large choir from a young age. After marrying Jim Cymbala, senior pastor of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, it seemed that her moment to begin this dream had finally come. The church was very small, yet she was able to find nine people who were passionate about music. She invited them to her home and began to teach them parts of songs to memorize for Sunday mornings. Carol was extremely shy to the point where she would get a nervous stomach right before the simple rehearsals held in her own home.
Nevertheless, over time, the choir grew to a few dozen members. Nancy Morales, one of these members who helped Carol lead the choir, and now a Deaconess in Brooklyn Tabernacle, honestly related that “the soprano section, of which I was a part, was very weak. Someone joked that we sounded like three blind mice!” Within forty years, these “mice” went from one extreme to another, winning six Grammy awards and having the honor to perform at President Barack Obama’s 2012 inauguration. However, this type of transformation does not simply happen overnight. There were defining moments in between the extremes that led to the transition and emergence from one to the other.
New York City is congested with people, and Carol Cymbala wanted to use her choir to connect with them– the daunting question was how. After months of a steady new stream of members – mostly college students – and collaborations with other Christian groups, Carol decided that she could not fulfill her goal if the choir limited itself to the church building, aware that most people were not going to go out of their way to attend. There were three subsequent events from this thought that propelled Brooklyn Tabernacle onto the path to its future: discography and bigger venues all facilitated by a new building.
Carol had longed to make a CD for the choir for years, but the funding was never available. However, in 1981 it was decided that the CD could be made as long as each chorus member pre-sold at least ten albums. After this hard work, the choir didn’t stop, recording the entire album in one night since they only had the money to rent out the studio for one day. The rest, as Nancy Morales put it, was “providential.” A young producer named Neal Joseph with Word Records, a Christian recording and distribution company, was given a copy of the album. He was instantly sold on it, and asked Carol to sign a contract.
Carol’s next plan was to rent out a hall for a concert performance, ambitiously deciding on Carnegie Hall. Though expectations were not at their peak, the turnout was massive. The crowd in front of the venue was so large that police had to be called in, and some hopefuls had to be turned away. As the choir became well known, after nearly annual album releases, they also performed at venues such as Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall! On convenient weekends such as Labor Day, the choir would travel to many different locations in the country. As a result of all this activity, a Best Gospel Album by a Choir or Chorus Grammy Award was presented to the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir consecutively from 1991-1997.
The choir’s tremendous growth was paralleled with that of the church itself over a time span of about twenty years. The Atlantic Avenue building was long outgrown, to the desperate point where a local YMCA had to be rented out for Sunday meetings. A former theater in Park Slope was finally purchased in the eighties, with a seat capacity of twelve thousand. This building was the facilitation and backrop for the tremendous growth and major events within the choir during that time. By the time “the Tab” made their final move to the former Loew’s Metropolitan Theatre in 2002, the choir was unrecognizable from their humble beginnings, congregants being dropped off at the doors by the busloads.
These key events provide plenty of reason to boast, yet Carol Cymbala takes no credit or pride, even after twenty-three produced albums released in multiple languages. She points out that many of the choir members are untrained, some former drug addicts and homeless.
“If God’s power had depended on the quality of their voices, I am quite sure nothing would have happened in those meetings. But great things did happen. As a result, I know that unless our hearts are pure, unless we depend entirely on God, our labors will be in vain, even if we are invited to sing on the stages of the world’s most famous concert halls,” she expressed.
As Nancy Morales and Carol Cymbala can both confirm, the most important part of the ministry is prayer. Each meeting begins with prayer, and during one such meeting this time of praying did not end until almost midnight! Tears sprung to Nancy Morales’ eyes as she looked back on God’s faithfulness to those who came to Him humbly and sincerely. The choir’s only goal has been to serve as a platform that points to God, focused on praising Him rather than on performance and musical technicalities; and they are confident He has honored and blessed this commitment, quoting Him in one of their recent songs as “faithful to the end.” Though the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir has come a long way, the kingdom they sing for is still believed by them to be far grander.
