Festival overview
The festival started in march 2009. The event was organized by volunteers of Saint-Petersburg Church of Christ. Despite the fact that organizing the festival was a new experience it turned out to be very interesting and, as we hope, will have a great future.
The purpose of the
festival is to spread the Gospel through musical serving as well as
an opportunity for gifted members of International Churches of Christ
in the CIS to show their talents. We were especially glad that the festival brought
together performers not only from Saint-Petersburg but also from
other cities of Russia and CIS — Moscow, Volgograd, Rostov-
The festival had two stages. Saturday was the main day of the festival where all the participants performed . It almost took the whole day with lunch and coffee breaks and discussion. The ending part took place on Sunday. It comprised gala performance of selected participants.
In the context of the festival a CD including performers' songs was released.
The a cappella quartette «Sinai» were special guests of the festival. The talented Kharkov singers perform their own and make covers of spiritual Christian songs. «Sinai» had already become well known among Church of Christ congregations in CIS and it was especially pleasant for the Saint-Petersburg church to hear the group at the festival.
We hope that «The Calling» is the beginning of a good musical and spiritual tradition in our city, as our God is worthy of good quality worship!
At the festival as well as after it we were able to take several interviews.
Yaroslav Volkov
«Sinai», Kharkov
Do «Sinai» count themselves a secular or a christian group? How do you position yourselves when you perform or, for instance, negotiate with producers?
We are a group that was formed and grew inside the
church, we cannot or want to count ourselves a secular group. We've
been learning and recording only spiritual music for the past 3
years. In fact, when we had only started we didn't
exactly know what a cappella was. We listened to many different
groups, learned from them and learned around 10 secular songs at the
time but that was only for our development. We only perform at
churches hardly ever do we get invited to copropate events but they
don't give an opportunity to talk or introduce ourselves. As for
producers, we just do what we can, we don't have a producer or
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Kirill Sikorski
«Order 161», Rostov-
In my opinion, your performance at the festival brightened it up and gave it an informal taste. Kirill, from your point of view, how well a mixture of rap and Christian music can be understood and appreciated by the listener? Very often people take Christian music as something more academic?
Sergey Kanonenko spoke very well about that at the
«Contemporary Church» conference. Jesus was very contemporary!
Apostle Paul wrote about being «all things to all people». I think
that the Church of God should be
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Kirill Kosolapov
«Lisbon», Saint-Petersurg
Do you think that modern Christian music is relevant for our time? Can you say that it influences the listener? Can you share about such influence on your group?
Of course! It is versatile, it is listened it’s
rather drawing attention than influencing. I pray almost every day
for my musicians and I dream of glorifying God through their
baptisms. I pray that God would work through the texts of songs and
our creative work in «Lisbon» helps me preach to the musicians and
build relationships.
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