BY MYRNA TETZ

niversally, the language of music defies compelling urgencies for a translation process. Somehow voices, strings, piano and organ, reeds, horns, and percussion instruments send messages that other communication methods cannot so readily convey. Never would this be better demonstrated within the Seventh-day Adventist Church community than during this General Conference session in Toronto, Canada.

From the theme song to the musical features to the offertories to the miniconcerts throughout the convention centre and city, members and visitors will leave Toronto with melodies and harmonies resounding in their ears. Musicians pray and practice and memorize until each piece becomes, they hope, a living symbol of eternal ecstasies. These ministries are designed to lighten despair and encourage joyful worship throughout the session.

The theme song for this year's session was chosen by a committee chaired by Richard Stenbakken, director of Adventist Chaplaincy Ministries. Four musicians were commissioned to write original pieces, and others submitted pieces that were not solicited.

"We received some very good music," said Stenbakken. "There were excellent possibilities, but as the committee members and I reviewed each one, the song `We Have This Hope,' composed by Wayne Hooper for the 1962 General Conference session, kept surfacing in our discussions. There was the feeling that we could not pick a General Conference session theme between now and the Second Coming that this song would not support. We bowed often in prayer, and after the evaluation of each possibility, we decided to use the Hooper melody again."

For four sessions (1962, 1966, 1975, and 1995) Wayne Hooper's "We Have This Hope" was chosen as the theme song. "The music committee felt that this song has a memorable impact," said Stenbakken. "Individuals will come to the first meeting on Thursday evening, June 29, and they can sing this song because it is, worldwide, so well known. There's an emotional impact that becomes audibly powerful when it is sung by thousands of voices."

In the hymnal prepared specifically for the session, "We Have This Hope" will be translated into five languages: French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Swahili. As multiple languages are blended into one, the delegates and visitors will participate in a� musical worship experience that will not be forgotten soon.

The song has a strong message, said Stenbakken, and is "simple without being simplistic. It has the energy of an anthem. Those who join in singing will carry with them an emotional investment they cannot set aside once the meetings are over. This song was not borrowed from another denomination, and as a result it fits perfectly with who we are as a church. Generationally and genetically, hope in the Second Coming is truly Adventist."

The composer, Wayne Hooper, is well known, especially in more mature Adventist circles, as a member of the Voice of Prophecy quartet from 1944 to 1980. In 1962 Hooper was invited as a member of a special committee to prepare music for the quadrennial session of the General Conference to be held in San Francisco in 1962. The chairman, singing evangelist Charles Keymer, encouraged Hooper to compose a theme song.

"I didn't see how I could do that since I was a member of the committee," remembers Hooper. But Keymer said, "Go home and write one." As Hooper was driving one day and thinking about the motto that had been chosen, "We Have This Hope," the four notes following the pickup note in the final theme of Brahms' Fourth Symphony No. 1 in C Minor came to his mind as fitting those four words exactly.

Hooper had been praying that "if it were the Lord's will, I should write something useful; that the Holy Spirit would impress my mind with the right combination of words and music that would be a blessing to the people at the GC session. In just a matter of a half hour I had all the words and most of the music--the transition section did not come until about a week later."*

Before the General Conference session in 1995, with the theme "United in Christ," Hooper was asked to write a second stanza. After praying about it and wondering just what would unite us in Christ, Hooper says that the answer came from 1 Corinthians 13_and he centered the whole second stanza on love as the uniting force in Christ.