Pop icon Shapiro performs with band at Norfolk church
Stalham Baptist Church provided a relaxed environment for some 180 music fans to enjoy music by Hebron, a top rate Messianic trio, including international star Helen Shapiro. Kevin Gotts reports.
Helen is an English pop singer, jazz singer and actress, best known for her 1960s UK chart toppers, ”Don’t Treat Me Like A Child,” "You Don't Know" and "Walkin' Back to Happiness".
Hebron is: Simon Elman (vocals and bass guitar); Chrissy Rodgers (vocals, acoustic guitar and 6-string banjo) and Helen Shapiro (vocals, ukuleles and tenor guitar).
Not only did the trio play original folk, jazz, blues songs, with bluegrass influences, from their album “For Such A Time As This,” they spoke about their lives being changed by becoming born-again believers in Jesus and, for Simon and Helen who are Jewish, realising that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.
Chrissy spoke of her upbringing in Pittsburgh, USA. Chrissy, who is not Jewish, was raised as devout church-goer. Wanting to please God and earn His favour - Chrissy endeavoured to live a good, clean life. She thought that she could ‘earn’ her way to Heaven through doing enough good works to outweigh any bad deeds. Eventually, though, Chrissy read the Bible for the first time and learned that Jesus had died and paid the price for our sins and will grant eternal life to all who put their trust in Him – and that one can’t ‘earn their way to Heaven.’ Salvation is a free gift, if we accept what Jesus did, by faith. When she did this, and committed her life to Jesus, she says, ‘I never looked back.’
Simon grew up in North London, in a religious Jewish home. A professional musician, he was driving home one evening and listened to a well-known pirate radio station, when he heard the Gospel for the first time. This led to him accepting Yeshua (Jesus), as his Messiah. He, later, went to work amongst the Jewish people.
Helen was raised in a traditional Jewish home in the East End of London had a string of hits at the age of fourteen. Before she was sixteen years old, she was voted Britain's "Top Female Singer". She said, “For years I had a good life but felt much emptiness. A friend gave me a book of Messianic prophesies to read which I later found in the Hebrew Scriptures – known to Christians as the Old Testament. There are some 300 prophecies, in the Tenach (Hebrew Bible), which point to Jesus. Then I read the New Testament and, to me, the Jewish Messiah Jesus rose out of the pages!”
The performance, a blend of English and Hebrew songs, often with lively audience participation, reverberated around the majestic 19th century building.
The trio finished with a spiritual message of eternity and for listeners to heed Jesus words “and come and submit to him as we don’t know what tomorrow will bring?”
Hickling Broad Filling Station a local Christian outreach organised the evening in September.
Pictured above (from left to right) are singer-musicians Chrissy, Simon and Helen in the Hebron music trio.