Congregation of the Ridgecrest (NC) Baptist Conference Center, “Marching to Zion”
This is the one we waited for through a month of Sundays. This song, despite a rich indigenous tradition of Swedish hymnody, was the one we looked forward to. Partly it was because it was one of those rare songs for which all the stops on the organ were pulled out. Partly it was that it always seemed to fall on a spring Sunday following a searching and memorable sermon. Mostly it was because by the second verse the pastor had climbed down from the pulpit and began to bang out quite un-Scandinavian octaves on the grand piano. It rocked. In this way some of the rousing gospel spirit of the revival meeting survived into the Me Decade. Swimming in that ocean of sound, we wondered: who wouldn’t want to march to Zion?
For Glen V. Wiberg, on his 90th birthday
