After creating an interfaith choir to mark the 500th anniversary of the Reformation at the Vatican in 2018, the founders of the Together in Hope Project are preparing for the choir’s U.S. premiere of “The Stranger,” which explores major faiths’ traditions of welcoming the refugee, immigrant and outcast.

Drawing on Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu texts, “The Stranger” will be performed 7:30 p.m. Oct. 15 and 3:30 p.m. Oct. 16 at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts in St. Paul.

The musical project’s text was created by Together in Hope Project’s 2017 co-founders and Twin Cities residents Gary Aamodt and Celia Ellingson. The husband-and-wife team drew from first-person immigrant poetry and religious texts, including the work of Mary Patricia Mulhall, a Brigidine Sister from Windsor, England, whose outreach has focused on human trafficking victims.

In “The Stranger,” the choir sings her words:

Fears on the faces of those women,

men and children

frightened of the past

fearful of the future

Will no one understand their pain?

Will anyone open a door to receive

them?

“It’s a very basic human message that we all belong, we’re all here, we all have something to contribute and we all share many of the same desires,” Aamodt said.

Following the Together in Hope Project’s Vatican concert, which was attended by Archbishop Bernard Hebda and the Rev. Ann Svennungsen, bishop of the Minneapolis Area Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Aamodt and Ellingson reached out to the two faith leaders for ideas on their next project. Independently, Aamodt and Ellingson said, both Archbishop Hebda and Rev. Svennungsen suggested the plight of refugees and immigrants.

Aamodt, 84, and Ellingson, 72, who are Lutheran, see a connection between the Vatican project, which celebrated recent efforts toward mutual understanding by the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, and the challenges presented worldwide by widespread immigration and refugee crises, most recently among people fleeing the war in Ukraine.

“We describe ourselves as doing music with a purpose. And the purpose is raising awareness, promoting healing and reconciliation, whatever it looks like in the context of that issue, and frankly, activating people to do the right thing,” Ellingson said. “The common thread is using the platform of music to try to do that in a different way, because we believe music touches people in a way that words alone can’t.”

“The Stranger” was composed by Kim André Arnesen, and the piece premiered July 28 in his hometown, Trondheim, Norway, during the opening concert of the Trondheim International Olavsfest. It was well received, Aamodt said.

“The powerful thing is that all the major religions in the world, all of them, have a very, very strong ethic of welcoming the stranger,” he said. “I think that’s news to people, and it’s enlightening to people, and … a very powerful and unified message when you really dig into that.”

The Together in Hope choir has more than 50 members, many of whom participated in the 2018 Vatican performance. Among them are several Catholics.

Choir member Amanda Laugerman, 44, was raised Lutheran but now worships at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, which is how she encountered the Together in Hope Project and joined it before its 2018 Vatican concert.

“Music just speaks to the heart of everyone,” she said. “It’s a universal language.”

Laugerman said that as someone who has experienced both Lutheran and Catholic worship, the focus of the first project, Christian reconciliation, was “near and dear to my heart,” and that “The Stranger” feels related to the first theme.

“Christians have more in common than we have in difference, and people from other cultures, refugees, we have more in common than we have different,” she said. “It was a natural outgrowth of that first project and really spoke to personally how I feel about living out my Christian faith.”

“The Stranger” project was created in partnership with USA for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency that provides material and medical assistance to refugees around the world. According to UNHCR, as of the end of 2021, there were 89.2 million forcibly displaced people worldwide.

Aamodt and Ellingson have invited representatives from newer immigrant or refugee communities in the Twin Cities to attend the U.S. premiere.

“These audiences will be hopefully a strong mix of folks who have lived that refugee-immigrant experience and those whose families lived it long ago, before they got to this state, since we all came from somewhere else,” Ellingson said. “We think that that will be a very positive aspect of the concert, that they will, in and of themselves, be a place on an occasion for bringing people together from various backgrounds.”

Tickets for “The Stranger” are $42. For more information, visit ordway.org/events.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story stated incorrect dates for the performances.