by Fiona Morgan
Music lovers from Asbury and the surrounding communities filled Hughes Auditorium for a night of worship and Irish dancing Saturday, Nov. 10. Asbury acted as a venue for the Christian band Rend Collective, which is currently on its Good News tour. The show sold out, and Hughes Auditorium was packed with excited fans.
The concert opened with Cody Carnes, a worship leader who is married to fellow Christian artist Kari Jobe. He sang popular worship choruses, and much like in Asbury’s chapel, the crowd sang along. Following Carnes was a presentation from World Vision, a Christian organization that provides humanitarian relief to refugees worldwide. The spokesperson told his story of visiting the child he sponsors in Guatemala, and he encouraged others to sponsor children. After a brief intermission, Rend Collective came on, and the crowd went wild. Smoke machines filled the air, and confetti cannons went off.
Rend Collective is a folk-rock worship band from Bangor, Northern Ireland. It released its new album “Good News” on Jan. 19 of this year. Drummer Gareth Gilkeson compared the band’s music to that of popular folk-rock band Mumford & Sons. During a break in Rend Collective’s set, he said, “Maybe some of you folks thought you were coming to see the real Mumford & Sons … except we actually are Irish.”
Asbury had purchased 300 tickets to give students for free, and all of them were claimed. The show required 52 volunteers, and organizers reached out to Asbury students to fulfill roles in selling merchandise, ushering, setting up and tearing down. The concert had been in the works since last spring but wasn’t finalized until September. Director of Student Engagement Heather Tyner and students in Asbury Student Congress (ASC) did most of the planning. They worked with Premier Productions, which is the largest producer of live Christian events in the country.
ASC co-chair of the Concert Committee Sydney Scheller explained the long preparation: “It was quite complicated. It was a process of meeting with Physical Plant like every five days; meeting with Premier Productions, Heather Tyner and pretty much everybody you could meet with on this campus to make sure we have safety down; and making sure we don’t start a fire in Hughes and that the ceiling doesn’t cave in like it did for Family Force 5.”
Asbury has hosted other Christian bands in recent years, one of them being crunk rock band Family Force 5. During that concert, people were jumping in the Hughes balcony, and debris from the ceiling started raining down on people. “It was getting to the point where they were going to crack the ceiling from noise and people jumping, which is why we’re doing more lowkey concerts like this now,” Scheller said.
Students have expressed their hopes for Asbury to host other bands in the near future. Vice President of the Student Activities Board Maggie Richwine said, “We have gotten offers already this semester to have productions of this size come to Asbury. Now that Rend Collective has come, a lot of students have come up to me with their ideas of who they would want to see here, and I’m definitely open to working toward that. Not only is it great for our students, but it’s also publicity.”
Richwine said the concert went smoothly on all sides and that people loved it. “Hughes needs a little bit of crazy,” she said. “I mean, we get crazy sometimes, but that was a different kind of crazy. There were so many people who were just so invested in it, and that’s what I like to see. I don’t do what I do for any other reason than to bring joy to this campus. So the fact that I can do that and just be a part of this big production was awesome.”