Last updated 4th March 2025

Choir Church

What is Choir Church?

Choir Church is a model for new worshipping communities, built around children’s choirs in schools, led in partnership with local churches. It offers worship, musical excellence, and spiritual formation designed to build and grow congregations, working for social justice. While it is principally school-based, its worship is open to the wider community of parents, teachers, neighbours and friends.

Bishop Philip, Bishop of Blackburn and Choir Church sponsor said, “This is a passion project for me as it’s no secret that I came to faith through the choral tradition myself. Music can lift the soul and inspire people in so many ways and we now have the opportunity to test how the choral tradition, with its grounding in sacramental worship, can be adapted to a ‘planting context’; connecting home, church and school in fresh new ways.”

What happens at Choir Church?

Local school Choir Church builds a new congregation around a children’s choir based in a school, which may or may not be a church school 

Eucharist A children’s choir sings in a Eucharist which is open to all – parents, teachers, and neighbours, including a ‘planting team’ of existing worshippers 

Choral excellence Children learn a wide range of liturgical music, with the English Choral Tradition at its heart, equipping them musically for worship and life 

Social justice The congregation is built and developed using the practices of community organising, so it can work with its neighbours to act on Jesus’ command to challenge injustice

Who is Involved?

Choir Church Co-ordinator and Blackburn Cathedral
Choir Church Foundation trustees
Local schools and parishes
Choral Directors

Vacancies:

As we plant new choir churches, we are continuing to recruit Choral Directors. If you are interested, please contact our Choir Church Coordinator, Mrs Sian Howell-Jones at choirchurch@blackburncathedral.co.uk

Research

Choir Church is an innovative project that has the following focus:

The Christian choral tradition is a powerful tool for evangelism among children and their families. We want to test how the English Choral Tradition and its grounding in sacramental worship can be adapted to a planting context in the faith, home, school triangle as part of a mixed-ecology church.

Questions we are asking include:

Will planting congregations in schools built around communities of children and their families increase discipleship?
Does the Anglican Choral tradition retain the capacity to prepare children to participate in worship, help them to choose for Christ and lead them on a journey of discipleship?
Does Choir Church provide a model to draw Central and Catholic tradition parishes into church-planting?
How can the Eucharist and social action be most imaginatively employed to make new disciples for Jesus Christ?
Can a sense of transcendence in worship, lifting hearts to heaven, draw the unbeliever into seeking God and believers into the fullness of the mystery of God in Christ?

During the course of the project, we will be posting our findings.