Every Friday night, Po’ Shines Café De La Soul has been hosting a spoken-word open mic night. The youth-focused event, “Cornbred,” has been gaining momentum.
“I’m a youth advocate,” said Po’ Shines manager and Celebration Tabernacle Youth Minister Antjuan Tolbert.”Cornbred really takes on community youth.”

Even by Portland’s quirky standards, Cornbred is a unique event, and it’s only fitting that Po’Shines hosts it. Po’ Shines is a nonprofit café that gives most of its revenue to the neighboring Celebration Tabernacle to fund its church and cultural programming. Many of its employees are youth volunteers who are seeking job experience.

Cornbred runs from 8-10 p.m. every Friday. The first hour focuses on elementary- and middle-school-aged kids, and the second hour is for teens and older youth. Tolbert said eight to 10 poets perform on an average night.

Cornbred encourages anyone willing to get behind the mic to express themselves. Some participants read work that they have written, some read work of other poets, and others sing songs.

“Kids and parents come together. Parents dig it,” said Tolbert.

For many of the participants, performing at Cornbred is their first time ever speaking in front of a crowd.

“I like it the best when people who haven’t done anything before … get up there,” said regular Cornbred performer Sarah Vandervelde, 21. “It helps kids get out of their shells, and it builds confidence.”

Several of the youth who have performed at Cornbred have gone on to perform at bigger events.

“Two girls read at Vegan Soul Food at Interstate Firehouse Culture Center, and others have read at women’s night at Celebration Tabernacle,” said Tolbert.

Though Cornbread takes place in downtown Kenton, according to promoters the event attracts youth from all over the city, including Southeast Portland and the west side.

Cornbred host Deborah Samson has a background in music and drama and has been involved with Po’ Shines in one way or another for years.

“The freedom of the open mic is like the soul of Po’ Shines,” said Samson. “It creates community.”

Cornbred, Po’ Shines Café at 8139 N Denver Ave. Fridays from 8-10 p.m. Free.

I’m sitting in the sunny window of a corner storefront, watching the action on the intersection of North Denver Avenue and North Kilpatrick Street — the heart of the north Portland Kenton neighborhood. The Temptations and Al Green are playing on the stereo. Just on the other side of the glass, a young man is painting green flower petals onto the window. In front of me is a huge amount of food.

The barbecue platter at Po’ Shines Cafe de la Soul provides enough lunch for about three people. There’s a pile of pork ribs in rich, sticky sauce. Beside them are hush puppies, some grilled onion and garlic, and three fried chicken wings. There’s a separate bowl full of savory collard greens with bits of pork, and another bowl heaped with creamy, steaming mac and cheese.

The food is good, although the chicken requires some heavy splashes of Trappey’s Louisiana Hot Sauce to really taste right. The greens are great, the barbecue sauce is just right, and the mac and cheese is OK — but the hush puppies rule.

Hush puppies are simply fried corn batter, but they carry a lot of cultural weight. A northerner best think twice before making pronouncements about what they should or shouldn’t be, but I’m going to come right out and say it: The hush puppies at Po’ Shines are the best I’ve ever had. Crunchy but not dry, they’re flecked inside with bits of red pepper, and glazed on top with honey.

“We sell those by the bucket,” says manager Antjuan Tolbert. “They’re the talk of the town.”

Soul food has an added meaning at Po’ Shines. It was originally founded as Friday’s Espresso, 14 years ago, by Elbert Mondaine Jr., the pastor of the neighboring Celebration Tabernacle church. The idea behind the espresso shop was to use it to help out single mothers. The cafe has since expanded its menu and expanded its mission.

The cafe has a partner in Teach Me to Fish, a youth empowerment program. Some of the people who work here are volunteers learning the basics of having a job: managing time and managing customers.

Does that mean you’re going to be waited on by some surly hoodlum? Not at all. In my visits here, everyone’s been very friendly, and although food is ordered at a counter, they checked back with my table multiple times.

The cafe also sponsors neighborhood cleanups and hosts a Friday night spoken word series for youth. It’s open for dinner only on Friday and Saturday nights, and the rest of the time serves breakfast (breakfast burritos, biscuits and gravy, corn meal waffles) and lunch, including a fine blackened catfish po’ boy sandwich on a soft, fresh roll.

The recipes came from a variety of sources, including the group of neighborhood women who meet here every afternoon for coffee. Po’ Shines tries to use healthy ingredients, Tolbert says, and include a little fruit on every plate. The place doesn’t stock soda pop, just fruit juice.

Po’ Shines Cafe de la Soul, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, closed Sunday, 8139 N. Denver Ave., 503-978-9000, www.poshines.com, entrees $6-$15

“I came here to play a little chess and participate in the community,” said New Columbia resident Robert Ingram, 66, as he stood in the drizzle after guiding Akariey Arrell, 4, through his first game of chess.

Chessboards were set up at picnic tables to encourage neighbors and outsiders to connect to each other over friendly games.

The live music, clown, face painting and free food were all designed to entertain and connect, as well.

Deborah Sampson, a head volunteer for PROPER, or People Reaching Oppressed People Expecting Results, said the rain and date of the festival, which coincided with a holiday weekend, affected the attendance.

PROPER is a program of the Portland-based Celebration Tabernacle nondenominational church. It uses events such as festivals and holiday dinners to get neighbors, businesses and churches to come out and meet one another in hopes of starting dialogue about Portland communities.

The Portland Development Commission and Boys & Girls Clubs of Portland Metropolitan Area also sponsored the event.

“Here, you have different types of people with different types of situations,” Sampson said.

One of the Housing Authority of Portland’s newest projects, New Columbia is an 852-unit mixed-housing site, featuring public housing, affordable rental housing and homes for sale. It sits on land that used to be Columbia Villa, a housing project that was built in 1942 and deemed substandard by the housing authority.

“The whole atmosphere is great with all the activities,” said New Columbia resident Thad Logan, who came with his wife and six children to the festival.”

Like many summer events, the festival at McCoy Park was made for kids. Volunteers for New Columbia painted hearts and other doodles on faces, and PROPER volunteers handed out generous slices of watermelon for kids to sink their teeth into.

“It is fun just to hang out,” said Enrique Perdomo, who came with his brother and friend and said he had met a lot of new people while at the park.

For PROPER, meeting new people is the goal.

“It’s all about community,” Sampson said.

PRICE - Dark clouds surrounded Price’s Peace Garden Tuesday night, but the light of hundreds of candles shining brightly on a choir of children’s faces weren’t doused by any rain.

The “Voices of a Thousand Angels” benefit concert drew a crowd of more than 300 residents from Carbon and Emery counties - despite an earlier downpour that left puddles on the tops of chairs and loudspeakers set up for the event.

The family members of six trapped miners, local leaders and Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. attended the concert, organized by the Celebration Tabernacle congregation in Portland, Ore. Members of the congregation paid their way to come to the city to sing and help heal the community, said director Don Elliott.

“We’ve been watching this whole thing unfold … and we heard people saying, ‘Where’s God?’ and questioning their faith, which broke our hearts,” Elliott said. “We thought if we came down here, maybe this will say something to them about how the eyes of the nation are on them and supporting them.”

The congregation’s musical director, Robin Gordon, said he felt he was called by God to visit the area that has been reeling since six miners - Kerry Allred, Manuel Sanchez, Louis Hernandez, Carlos Payan, Don Erickson and Brandon Phillips - disappeared in the Crandall Canyon Mine Aug. 6 and three others died trying to rescue them Aug. 16. This week, 170 local miners were laid off.

“We can’t touch the pain that this whole community is going through, but we want to help with it,” Gordon said.

Elliott said the church’s pastor, the Rev. Apostle Elbert Mondaine, told his congregation to come to Utah and show support through music. Mondaine contacted Price Mayor Joe Piccolo about a week ago, and plans quickly moved forward with the help of the community, Elliott said.

“Our goal is just to come and share in music,” Elliott said. “Our hope is that people’s lives are changed for the better, whatever that means for them.”

Local pastor Lary Sweeten helped bring the event together by coordinating with the Carbon and Emery school districts to recruit students to sing during the evening. At a Monday night rehearsal, Elliott said more than 600 children came to practice, but the threat of rain limited the Tuesday night turnout to about 200 children.

The children sang a song called “O, ye, God alone” that was written specifically for the event by Mondaine. Even with only two rehearsals, Elliott said the children learned the song quickly.

Fifteen candles were placed to remind members of the audience of the six missing miners, three volunteer miners - Dale Black, Gary Jensen and Brandon Kimber - who were killed while trying to rescue the six trapped miners, three volunteers who were critically injured during rescue efforts and three men who were injured during the rescue but have since been released from the hospital.

Residents said the concert is evidence of the community’s growing support for each other.

“My whole family are coal miners,” said Doloris Quintana, who watched the show. “We’re glad it’s not one of our family, but the reality is, we’re all family down here because we’re all miners.”

It could have been deemed a disappointment that only about 20 people showed up.

But a worship service in the sanctuary, provided free by Bright Side Baptist Church Saturday night, to pray for the victims of the Amish school shootings in Bart Township was anything but.

Instead, it was a 2 1/2-hour rousing celebration of prayer and song that included the goose-bump-raising voice of a man who is referred to as “the Luther Vandross of Gospel.”

“I don’t need the auditorium full tonight, it is full of God,” belted out the Rev. Apostle Elbert Mondaine, senior pastor of congregations in Portland, Ore., and St. Louis, Mo.

Hearing about the killings of five Amish girls and wounds to five others at their Nickel Mines school house, Mondaine said he felt the need to start a national church movement to stop school violence.

“I said, “Where does it stop?’ ” said the pastor, who recalled 1998 in his home state when a 15-year-old boy, Kip Kinkel, shot 20 high school students and killed his parents.

“I said to God, ‘Why is this happening?’ ”

About two weeks ago, he called upon the 700 members of his churches, Celebration Tabernacle in Portland, where he lives, and Grace Center in St. Louis, as well as members of other churches across the country to join in the Saturday night “The 1,000 Angels Gathering” at Bright Side.

Mondaine was accompanied by seven clergy and musicians as well as 8-year-old Nahshon Jones, who performed a song that Mondaine wrote called “Father God.”

“Father God, take my hand, teach me what it is to live again,” the little boy sang in a sweet soprano in his dedication to the Amish girls and their families.

Mondaine said churches across the country need to unite and “to stand and recognize our responsibility to once again take the education of our children under our wings and teach the principles of forgiveness, inclusion and social responsibility.”

In an interview after the service, Mondaine said society is filled with so much mania and anxiety that result in tragic and horrific incidents as what happened in Nickel Mines.

“We are building mega-churches, we need to be building mega-clinics,” he said.

Mondaine who has been in the county a few days, said he met with Amish spokesman Herman Bontrager. Bontrager told him that the wish of the Amish community was for him to use his time here, not to draw attention to them, but to “turn this around” and put attention toward the needs of mainstream society “to prevent it from happening again.”

The Rev. Kevin Brown of Ray’s Temple Church of God and Christ, Lancaster, who served as the local liaison for Mondaine, and the Rev. Gerald Simmons pastor of Faith Tabernacle Church, Lancaster, both helped lead the Saturday night service.

Before the service, Brown said the tragedy in Nickel Mines shows society is at a “crucible” or is being tested. One indication of that is that someone like Roberts, who was described as being kind and mannerly, can fall under the radar; that no one could tell he was very disturbed.

“We are detaching ourselves from one another at such a rapid rate, we can’t pick up on things,” Brown said.

“Nobody is open to what is going on with our sisters and brothers.”

Brown said he was touched that Saturday’s gathering included a mixture of white and African-American people “to say we certainly feel the pain of the Amish.”

One of his church members, Wanda Cannon, accompanied by friends Carmella Artis, Jannette Toney and Dominai Taylor - all African-American women from Lancaster city- said she believes that it was a lesson for all that the Amish were so quick to forgive.

“The enemy did it for evil, but God turned it around for our good,” Cannon said.

Fran Catanzaro, Mount Joy, who is white and a member of Brown’s church, also attended the Saturday service. She said she believes a lot of society’s ills are a result of God being removed from schools and public places.

“God became hush-hush; that is so wrong, because we need him,” she said.

Mondaine said he hopes to someday return to Lancaster County, when all the media glare is off the Amish, to speak to Amish leaders and to form a unity with them to further the cause in stopping school violence.

The movement is being organized by the Pastor Elbert Mondaine, the senior pastor of congregations in Portland, Ore., and St. Louis, Mo.

When Mondaine heard about the shootings, in which five girls were killed and five were wounded, he said, “I thought, ‘What is God trying to say to us through this tragedy?’ ”

Suddenly, an answer came to Mondaine, and he decided to start a national campaign to unite churches across denominational lines to take a stand against school violence.

From Thursday to Saturday, he plans to bring 50 to 100 members of his congregations to Lancaster, where they’ll be joined by representatives of religious organizations from around the country.

At noon Thursday, a group of church leaders will gather for a lunch at the Leola Restaurant. At 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday, rehearsals will be held for a 1,000 Angels Choir at the Lancaster Church of the Nazarene, 2150 New Holland Pike.

The 1,000 Angels Gathering will take place at 6 p.m. Saturday at Bright Side Baptist Church, 515 Hershey Ave.

“The campaign will unite church leaders who want to take responsibility for our children and take a stand against violence in schools,” said Mondaine’s associate, Don Elliot.

“This campaign was put together only two weeks ago, and already we’ve heard from almost 200 churches across the country,” Elliot said. “We’re hoping to come together and figure out a way to educate our people and look at the mental-health and violence issues in our communities.”

After church and community leaders meet, participants will convene by candlelight near the village of Nickel Mines, singing hymns and praising God.

But Elliot stresses that the group will not in any way disturb the residents of the Bart Township community. Mondaine said the group’s attire and conduct will be within the codes adhered to by the Amish people.

“We visited Lancaster last week to get a better view of the area,” he said. “We met with some churches in Lancaster and began speaking with an Amish spokesperson, Herman Bontrager.”

More information about “Voices of a Thousand Angels” can be found at www.friendsoftheamish.org.

The Nickel Mines community also has inspired an event called “Prayer at Binns Park,” to be led by Lancaster City pastors.

The prayer rally will take place Tuesday. Lancaster County church leaders and members plan to walk from North to South Queen Street, then to East and West King Street before ending at Binns Park.

People will gather at 9 p.m. at East King and Broad streets; Lancaster Regional Medical Center at College Avenue; the former Rebman’s store on South Queen Street; and at the YMCA or Clipper Stadium on North Queen Street.

There also will be a time of prayer at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Mennonite School auditorium on Lincoln Highway East.

When the Rev. Elbert Mondaine heard about the shootings at West Nickel Mines School, he began asking himself serious questions.

For starters, how could such violence take place on Amish soil?

“The Amish are such a plain, gentle people,” said the senior pastor of congregations in Portland, Ore., and St. Louis, Miss.

He was even more affected when he learned the Amish community in Bart Township had forgiven the shooter, Charles Carl Roberts IV, killed five girls and wounded five others.

“I thought, ‘What is God trying to say to us through this tragedy?’” he said.

Suddenly, an answer came to Mondaine, who decided to start a national campaign to unite churches across “denominational lines” to take a stand against school violence.

On Saturday, he plans to bring 50 to 100 members of his congregations to Lancaster, where they’ll be joined by churchgoers and religious organizations from around the country.

The gathering, to be called “The Voices of a Thousand Angels,” will take place at Bright Side Baptist Church in Lancaster city.

“The campaign will unite church leaders who want to take responsibility for our children and take a stand against violence in schools,” said Mondaine’s associate, Don Elliot.

“This campaign was put together only two weeks ago, and already we’ve heard from almost 200 churches across the country,” Elliot said. “We’re hoping to come together and figure out a way to educate our people and look at the mental-health and violence issues in our communities.”

After church and community leaders meet, participants will convene by candlelight near the village of Nickel Mines, singing hymns and praising God.

But Elliot stresses the group will not in any way disturb the residents of the Bart Township community.

“We visited Lancaster last week to get a better view of the area,” he said. “We met with some churches in Lancaster and began speaking with an Amish spokesperson - Herman Bontrager.”

Elliot said the meetings proved to be fruitful and affected how the “Voices of a Thousand Angels” was planned.

“At first, we thought we’d hold the gathering closer to the Nickel Mines community,” Elliot said. “But then we thought a less invasive approach was better. We understand the Amish community values privacy.”

And though the gathering will end up in Bart Township, Mondaine said, the group’s attire and conduct will be within the behavior codes adhered to by the Amish people.

More information about “Voices of a Thousand Angels” can be found at www.friendsoftheamish.org.

“It’s time for the church to once again take the lead in teaching our children social responsibility,” Mondaine said. “It’s not through legislation and governmental interference that this shift must occur, but through example and the raw proof given from a united faith community.”

The Nickel Mines community also has inspired an event called “Prayer at Binns Park,” to be led by Lancaster city pastors. The prayer rally will take place Tuesday. Lancaster County church leaders and members plan to walk from North to South Queen Street, then to East and West King Street before ending at Binns Park.

There also will be a time of prayer at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Mennonite School auditorium on Lincoln Highway East.

Elliot said the Nickel Mines tragedy obviously struck a chord with a lot of people, whether they are from Lancaster County or not.

“The way the Amish community dealt with this tragic situation has been amazing,” he said.

“And, overall, we found Lancaster to have a certain welcoming air, with genuine people.”

Mondaine reflected on the young lives lost.

“They were sacrificed,” he said. “If we let their sacrifice go unseen and unheard, something’s wrong with us.”

BY ERIC BARTELS
The Portland Tribune, Oct 17, 2006

Pastor Elbert Mondainé, who pronounces his last name with continental flair and goes by the honorific Apostle, is a big talker.

Ask members of his congregation. Some of them jump-start their days with the sound of his megaphonic orations, which he cranks up at twice-weekly services that start at five o’clock. In the morning.

But the charismatic Mondainé also walks the walk. While maintaining a congregation in his native St. Louis, he has ministered to folks in North Portland for 18 years, inspiring the creation of a small empire of self-empowerment.

On Oct. 28 he’ll be in eastern Pennsylvania, leading a choir of voices from around the nation that represents different churches and different faiths.

Named the Voices of 1,000 Angels, the hastily arranged project is designed to show support for a small town devastated by tragedy and to issue a call to America’s religious community.

“We will be there, come rain, snow or shine,” Mondainé says. “If it’s 10 people or 1,000 people, we’re going to sing.”

On Oct. 2, a schoolhouse shooting in Nickel Mines, Pa., left five Amish girls dead and five others wounded. Mondainé says news of the tragedy affected him deeply, in part because of the image of the Amish as a plain, gentle people.

“I heard about the shooting, and it really, really gripped me,” he says. “Why did it end up on the Amish soil? I thought, ‘What is God trying to say to us?’”

The Amish, descendents of 17th-century Mennonite reformers, subscribe to an insular, agragrian lifestyle largely devoid of modern technologies like electricity and the automobile.

“If it’s happening in this community, can’t you imagine what’s happening on the street?” Mondainé asks. “Do we have to wait until there are dead bodies all over the place before we answer the call? In a crisis, we have to be ready to go.

“What a perfect use of resources. Why not go to where the call was made?”

Mondainé plans to lead between 50 and 100 members of his Portland and St. Louis congregations - most of them paying their own way - to the Lancaster County community, where they’ll be joined by churchgoers and religious organizations from around the country.

“It’s really taken off,” says Don Elliott, Mondainé’s executive assistant. “There’s a church in Denver; there are two churches in Florida that are joining us. We’ve got churches of all affiliations. All the denominations across the board are responding. Everything from Mennonites to Catholics and Lutherans. Also, the Mormons.

“We haven’t even done much of the outreach to Portland churches yet.”

Mondainé says the message he hopes to convey in Pennsylvania is not aimed solely at the Amish community.

“It’s about our gesture, to say, ‘We love you,’ ” he says. “We’re going to sing as the Amish sing. We’re going to sing their songs. It’s also a call to Christian people. It’s time to take our schools and our children seriously.”

The Nickel Mines incident closely followed fatal school shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin. Oregon was home to a 1998 tragedy in which a student at Thurston High School in Springfield killed his parents, two classmates and wounded 25 others.

“They were sacrificed,” Mondainé says of the five Amish girls. “If we let their sacrifice go unseen and unheard, something’s wrong with us. This is His way of telling us it’s time to educate our people, also to look at the mental health piece in our community.”

Faith flows before dawn
Mondainé, 47, admits to heading a different kind of organization, something he calls an “entrepreneurial ministry.” Within one block of its base in Kenton, nondenominational Celebration Tabernacle has spun off an accredited Christian K-8 school, a day-care center, a dance studio, a cafe and an improvisational comedy troupe for young people.

In all, his organization includes at least 20 such “ministries.”

Mondainé, whose first official role was as a music minister, is also a pianist and singer whose group, Belief, has recorded two energetic, gospel-inspired albums and performed at the Newmark Theatre downtown.

He is an outspoken, outsize personality who needs little time to warm up at the pre-sunrise services, which have become the basis for a planned series of books called “The 5 a.m. Chronicles.”

On a recent morning his amplified voice rebounded sharply off the walls inside Celebration Tabernacle as he hectored two dozen sleep-deprived souls, tagging the end of passages with provocative exhortations.

“Did you hear what I said?” he challenges, and the faithful respond with expressions of “Yeah” and “Amen.”

Then his voice is suddenly soft and almost apologetic. “Don’t you like being screamed at at five in the morning?”

“He’s very engaging and accessible, which I think is cool,” says Megan Turvey, 19, a University of Portland sophomore in sweat pants and a hooded sweatshirt. “A lot of people, when they go to big megachurches, the pastor doesn’t even know your name. He’s visible.”

The man who can startle associates with his assertiveness one moment can shock them with his candor the next, speaking frankly about growing up poor and suffering abuses as a child.

Elliott says that while the pastor’s honesty has put off some church members, it also has helped generate intense loyalty and trust.

“My previous church had 1,000 members and tons of money,” he says. “I never saw the kind of life change I’ve seen here.”

Treading softly
The Voices project may call on every tool in Mondainé’s skill set. Residents of Nickel Mines reportedly struggled with the media attention attracted by the schoolhouse shootings, but Mondainé says he spoke to Amish leaders, who have approved of his planned visit.

“The message they asked me to pass was that the Amish community is fine,” he says. “They’re doing well. It is not for the Amish alone that we’re going. We’re going to give praise to God.”

Scott Fischer, executive director of the Lancaster County Council of Churches, says other events, including a community march, had already been scheduled to take place in the area.

“I know the Amish are very private people,” he says. “We want to be very sensitive about that. We try to be very responsible as we seek to stand with them.”

Given the sympathy he’s seen for the bereaved of Nickel Mines, Fischer says Mondainé may have trouble limiting the size of his choir. “Quite frankly, I could see it being more than 1,000,” he says. “The Lancaster community is very interested in doing whatever is possible to show our support.”

In an oft-repeated refrain, Mondainé maintains that the trouble for America’s youth began when churches, which were once centers of learning, ceded responsibility for educating children to the public sector.

Mondainé says Voices of 1,000 Angels is not about generating policy so much as ratcheting up awareness of the faith community’s responsibility to wider society.

“How can we help?” he wonders. “How can we make this better? We’re going to try to say we have to turn our empty churches into classrooms. We’re going to say to our churches, teach your people how to educate our children. We’re going to have to start understanding the manic behavior that is taking place in our societies.”

In a way, Mondainé says, Christians fail in part of their mission when they insist on prayer in schools while losing sight of the meaning behind it.

“What is the prayer intended to do?” he asks. “Let’s celebrate what that was. Let’s bring back unity, the sense of community that religion teaches. The ultimate responsibility is to each and every man to love his neighbor.”

From: Portland Tribune

Just listen to how it works on the new CD, “The Blessing Box,” by Apostle E.D. Mondaine of Portland’s Celebration Tabernacle.

His supple tenor rises above a choir of layered voices in a mounting call and response. “All you need is grace,” the leader sings, and nine voices affirm, “All you need is grace.” They carry the soloist, offering encouragement and reassurance. “All you need is grace,” they repeat, and the sound of a trumpet weaves through the choir like a thread of hope.

In the arrangement by producer Robin Gordon, the chords provide clear voice-leading so listeners can anticipate the inexorable path of Mondaine’s melody. The electric bass lends support from below, and a backbeat drives steadily toward musical resolution and the promise of the lyrics. The choir reaches a soaring crescendo.

This is classic, old-school gospel, made popular by Andrae Crouch and others in the 1970s and ’80s. Whether or not you subscribe to the belief system it expresses, its appeal is undeniable. It helped Ray Charles become a star and is the basis for the soul music of the ’60s that transformed American popular culture.

Mondaine, a classic singing preacher, learned these techniques, he says, “under the careful tutelage of people like James Cleveland,” the father of contemporary gospel music. He also learned from his mother and father, both gospel singers, while growing up in the family choir in St. Louis, Mo.

These sophisticated techniques, designed to grab and hold a listener, are “extraordinarily inclusive,” Mondaine says, because they are able to reach beyond the converted and those raised in the community that produced them.

“It has always been in my heart to transcend the limits of the black church,” he says. The concert scheduled Friday at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts’ Newmark Theatre to debut his CD is a step toward that goal.

Previous performances by Mondaine’s performing arts church, though they featured gospel greats such as Willa Dorsey, have been held in the Kenton neighborhood. Now, this higher-profile stage “allows us to move in circles that can lend more support for our program,” he says.

That program’s primary focus, Mondaine says, “is the African American male between the ages of 20 and 40. A disproportionate number are in jail, and their children are affected by their absence.”

The Celebration Tabernacle performing group –made up of the interracial choir Belief and its backing funk/jazz band, the 25th Hour (including trumpeter Farnell Newton and a string section led by Oregon Symphony’s principal violist, Jennifer Arnold) –has also scheduled a performance at the Schnitzer Concert Hall in August.

Taking another step, the choir recently added choreography, reminding us that gospel music’s power comes from its ability to generate movement, whether in body or in soul.

ILLUSTRATION: Apostle E.D. Mondaine At the Newmark Theatre