Nkwen Baptist Church, Bamenda - Sunday, 23 August 2026
I have no connection to the Royal Priesthood Choir of Nkwen Baptist Church, Bamenda. Nobody invited me, I know none of the singers, and I had never heard them before. I went because I love choral music, and because for most of my life the ambitious choral music in this country has been made in Catholic and Presbyterian parishes. Baptists have sung, and sung loudly, but the patient work of building repertoire and technique has mostly happened somewhere else. NACOMEC has been spearheading choral music in the Baptistsetting. An afternoon programme with Handel on it, put together by a Baptist youth choir, was something I was glad to experience. It was themed "A New Encounter: an afternoon of heartfelt worship, inspiring ministration, and glorious praise unto God."
The poster said 1:30 pm prompt. The first choristers came onto the stage at 2:13. By the standards of a Cameroonian Sunday that is not a scandal, and I would not lead with it except that everything else about the afternoon showed that the choir had thought carefully about what they were doing, which makes the one mishap stand out.
Pastor Tanjang Rudolf opened in prayer and a good part of the hall talked through it. Not murmuring. Talking. I found that hard to sit with, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Whatever we think about applause and dancing in church, and I think a great deal in favour of both, a congregation that cannot keep quiet while a pastor prays is annoying. It set the tone for a recurring difficulty, so I may as well name it here and stop apologising for it later. People just can't seem to stop talking.
The MCs, Petra and Lifted, were lively without being tiresome, which is rarer than it should be. The instrumentalists played a brief prelude. Seven players: Three organs, a bass guitar, a drum kit and a conga set, with a saxophone joining later in the afternoon. They settled into a rumba groove that was the most assured music of the entire first half, and the saxophone, when it eventually arrived, was worth waiting for.
Before the interval
The first half ran like this: Hold On to Jesus, Father We Bow, Mary Did You Know by Mark Lowry 1984 and Buddy Greene 1991,(as Perfformed by Pentatonix) Zadok the Priest by Handel, El'agbelo by T. W. Kwami, Shout to the Lord (Mwimbieni Bwana) by Darlene Zschech arr. David Angerman, Psalm 150 by Louis Lewandowski arr. Lorrain Kingsley, Joy Is Coming, Great I Am.
Two contemporary worship ballads, a Christmas carol, a coronation anthem, an Ewe praise song best suited for Easter, a nineties Hillsong standard, a psalm setting and a gospel number. While many of songs performed inspired heartfelt worship and glorious praise unto God, some of them felt out of place.
Mary, Did You Know?, a Christmas song in August is certainly a choice. Maybe I'm overthinking it.
Father We Bow went on and on. There is a meme that circulates, a screenshot that just reads "This is a joke about contemporary Christian music" five times over, the last repetition is marked "(Key Change)". It came to mind while the piece kept not ending. I resonate more with Hymns.
Zadok the Priest was the bravest choice of the day and the one the audience least deserved. Handel wrote it in 1727 for the coronation of George II and it has been sung at every British coronation since, which gives you some idea of how much ceremony the piece is built to carry. The whole opening is a slow accumulation over rising strings, a prolonged period of nothing but tension, and it only works if the hall is silent. The hall was not silent. The score is in the catalogue if any choir reading this wants to try it in front of a better-behaved congregation.
El'agbe lo, was probably the best singing before the break and by some margin. Ten out of ten from me. It is an Ewe setting by T. W. Kwami, written around 1940, proclaiming "he is alive and victorious."
Psalm 150 was good too, eight or so. Joy Is Coming got people onto their feet. Great I Am, Jared Anderson's song, run into Holy, Holy, Holy, was where the sopranos finally showed what they have, and where I began to think this choir's ceiling sits well above what this programme was asking of it.
Minister Flavy Praise came on next and sang Cory Asbury's Reckless Love, Overnight, and a couple of his own compositions, among them Reh-Rah Rah. (Petra, ushering him in sang a brief chorus of his. She is an amazing vocalist and I always enjoy listening to her)
Then forty-five minutes of fundraising for the NBCYF Distinction Mini Supermarket Project. I expected it to kill the room and it did nothing of the sort. What it did instead was show how generous the audience is, and generous in a way that did not need coaxing. Money came forward steadily and cheerfully for the better part of an hour, from a hall that is not, by any reading, very wealthy.
After the fundraising
Everyone knew the second half was the part they had come for, and they were right.
He Called My Name was staged, lightly. Jesus calling a sinner out of the dark, acted out as the text describes. It stayed on the safe side of sentimental, mostly because nobody let it run long.
The three minutes that told me most about the afternoon came next. A soprano stepped forward for I Will Give Thanks Unto Thee, O Lord by Rossini and sang well. She has the range, she has the kind of voice that fills a hall without the microphone doing the work, and she got most of it. Her breath control let her down a bit in the running passage on "above," where she lost a few notes, which happens to every soprano alive and is easily fixable.
What is not fixable in a fortnight is what the room did to her. She arrived at the final high note, the one the whole piece has been climbing toward, and the hall erupted before she could sing it. Not out of malice. This congregation loves the choir, and they cheered at the top of every movement all afternoon, and there is something good in a church that answers back rather than sitting on its hands. But she had rehearsed that solo, and she will not get another go at it in front of those people.
After that the afternoon simply got better and stayed better. Kané has amazing chords, and when the rhythm turned over into bikutsi the drummers got to play what they had been waiting since two o'clock to play. What followed was the njang medley, built on O Give Thanks by Nji Victor, whose work I would put among the strongest coming out of Cameroon at the moment, and it drew the loudest response of the concert. If you do not know his catalogue, that is worth correcting.
My own favourite stretch was the highlife medley: Mida Akpe, Nyame Sumsu, Bra Onua Bra, Minim Nea, Nyame No Waka, Mamkoma. Then an amapiano set of He Turned It, Moses Bliss's Miracle No Dey Tire Jesus, and Jerusalema, which Master KG and Nomcebo Zikode released in 2019 and which has not stopped travelling since. When the whole hall sang Miracle No Dey Tire Jesus back at the choir, that was the afternoon the poster had promised. Glorious is not too strong a word.
They finished on a bikutsi setting: My soul magnify the Lord, and my spirit praise His name, for death could not hold Him captive; even in the grave, Jesus is Lord. The youth pastor closed in prayer.
Closing thoughts
Somewhere between Zadok the Priest and the bikutsi at the end, this choir stopped performing and started singing. The njang, the highlife, the amapiano set, El'agbe lo: this is music they own rather than music they have learned, and it showed in every bar. Thirty-five voices, seven players who can genuinely play, sopranos with real top, and a rhythmic instinct that made the whole hall get up. When a room of that size sings Miracle No Dey Tire Jesus back at a choir, nobody is thinking about technique. They are just in it.
And then the generosity. Forty-five minutes of giving, cheerful and unforced, from a congregation that has plenty else to do with its money. That tells you something about what this choir means to the people who sit in front of it.
The theme was A New Encounter. I arrived a stranger to the Royal Priesthood Choir and left glad I had come, glad that Baptist youth in this country are putting this much work into choral music, and looking forward to whatever they do next.
If you were in attendance, let me know what your experience was in the comment section.