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Bluegrass Gospel Ministry History
The Lord began to speak to us at a festival in Moodus, CT (1999). A planned
Sunday morning Gospel Sing-a-long began without a leader present. The folks who came out took matters into their own hands
and gathered around one notebook full of songs and sang. Michael asked for everyone’s attention and prayed for God’s
blessing on the gathering. As we walked away from it, the Lord put on our heart the idea of having a gospel sing ministry
that would include a free songbook. We prayed over this and asked the Lord to lead us, if this was His will. A few weeks later
at another festival, an older lady came over and put her arm around Michael’s shoulder and said, “If there had
been a little book with the words in it, we could have all sang along at Moodus.” We took this as a sign from above
that God was speaking to us.
From this point, we spoke with our Pastor and told him the idea we had for a ministry
to Bluegrass Festivals. He was supportive and with his help, we put together the gospel sing book. The following spring (2000),
we began the ministry by contacting promoters with the idea. The first couple of years, we promoted the gospel sing with flyers
and hand-outs to the MC’s at the festivals. Since then, it has grown to a point that at every festival that we did in
New England in 2003, the gospel sing was included in the festival program. This has brought out great crowds, even in the
rain.
Our first year in Florida (2004) was encouraging and astounding as well. We had an average of 125 attendees at each event
with plenty of willing participants to help us play the music. For our second year full time (2005) we added
even more festivals, for a total of 25 events. (2006) was also a very successful season, we did a
total of over 40 events including festivals, church services, and other outreach events. Then in 2007 we did more than
50 events including 26 festivals. We look forward to another successful year in 2008.
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