Wheatland County volunteers honoured at Passion Play event

Laureen F. Guenther
Times Contributor

 

Every year, the Canadian Badlands Passion Play hosts a Founders Banquet, honouring a different group of the volunteers who transformed the play from a dream into a goal, into the reality of the first performances in 1994.
This year’s banquet, on Nov. 7, honoured members of the Capital Costs Committee, who organized fundraisers to cover the play’s large start-up costs in the early 1990s. Alice Andersen and Carol Munchrath of Rosebud, and Harry Christiansen, formerly of Dalum, were among those honoured.
Joan Herman started the committee after she came home from a Passion Play Society meeting, she said, and told her husband, “They’re on a merry-go-round,” because they didn’t have enough money. He challenged her to either stop attending the meetings or do something about it, so she decided to do something. She invited friends to help her raise the money the Passion Play needed, and she and her team became the Capital Costs Committee.
Alice Andersen said she wanted to see the Passion Play plans go ahead, so when Joan Herman asked for help, she didn’t say no. Andersen and her husband ended up volunteering for almost 20 years. It was amazing to see what God was doing through the Passion Play, she said, with everybody working together. When Carol Munchrath organized the Passion Play’s first celebrity golf tournaments in Rosebud, Andersen made Danish wreath cakes for the silent auctions. For the tournament suppers, the committee also sold balloons, which guests tied to the backs of their chairs and later popped to discover the prizes they’d won inside.
The committee also fundraised through a strategy called Coffee with a Cause, said committee members Pat McDougald and Helen Leonhardt. One person would invite five others over for coffee. Each guest paid $5, then hosted a party for five more guests. The committee raised tens of thousands of dollars that way, Leonhardt said.
Lance Neudorf, Passion Play Executive Director, reported that 60,000 people saw the Passion Play between 2011 and 2015. The play has an “incredible impact” on people’s lives, he said. One of the banquet cooks, for example, said his life had hit “rock-bottom.”
Since he got connected with Passion Play volunteers, his life has been transformed. Neudorf also told of a woman who wrote to him after seeing the show, saying she’d struggled with alcoholism for years, and didn’t believe in God. But, since seeing the Passion Play, she said she knows who Jesus is and that he loves her.
Neudorf also reported that, in the past few years, many site improvements have been made, including installation of a sound system and building a 300-seat amphitheatre. In the next few years, he said, they want to replace the audience benches and build some shaded sections. They’re also preparing a new script based on the Gospel of Luke.
The Canadian Badlands Passion Play won two more ALTO awards from Alberta Tourism this fall, for Collaborative Tourism and Marketing Excellence.
Until Dec. 31, the Passion Play is hosting its 777 Campaign, offering donors seven ways to give, with the goal of raising $70,000 in seven weeks.
From July 8 to 24, 2016, the Passion Play will present nine performances of the new script. Go to canadianpassionplay.com or call 1-403-823-2001 to purchase tickets or learn more about the 777 Campaign. Tickets for 2016 can be purchased at a 25 per cent discount until Dec. 31.