Chicago group to celebrate 25 years with performance at Immanuel Lutheran
By Vicky Wedig
Staff Writer
When Mark McAuliffe’s girlfriend threw him a 50th birthday party at their church with his grade-school friends on the guest list, he knew he wanted her to be his wife.
“That day, I decided I was going to get married,” McAuliffe said about the April 10 celebration his girlfriend of six years, Rebecca, organized at the new Immanuel Lutheran Church in Lake Geneva.
About a week after his birthday, Rebecca’s daughter, Kimberly Duckworth, asked the couple if they wanted to go to a gospel revival at the House of Blues in Chicago.
They jumped at the chance, and McAuliffe decided he was going to propose that weekend. He bought a ring, and kept it in the backpack he carried around while the couple toured Chicago the day before the Sunday concert. McAuliffe said he was nervous about finding the opportune moment to pop the question, and his fiancé-to-be became suspicious.
“She knew I was acting weird,” he said. “She was trying to get in my backpack.”
The couple had a moment sitting on a park bench on Rush Street when McAuliffe gazed at Rebecca with a certain look in his eyes, and she thought the time had arrived.
“He had been acting weird for days, and I was looking at him going, ‘What’s up with you?’” Rebecca said.
When that moment passed without “the question,” Rebecca said, she thought it wasn’t going to happen.
“At that point, I had resigned myself to the fact that he wasn’t ready,” she said.
So, the next day, when the couple was running late for the performance of William Smith Jr. and The Renewed Voices For Christ, Rebecca was no longer suspicious.
McAuliffe said the couple entered Chicago’s famed House of Blues, and the place was packed. Amid the bustle, he handed the tickets to the guy at the counter and wondered how he would pull it off.
“I was nervous,” he said.
Rebecca went to get some food, and he wondered if he should ask the sound guy about helping him set up a proposal while she was gone. Rebecca came back, and spilled her coffee, and before he knew it, the curtain was coming up.
“I said, ‘I blew it,’” McAuliffe said. “’I don’t know how I’m going to do it now.’”
William Smith Jr. and The Renewed Voices For Christ sang but then began calling out names of people having birthdays and inviting them to the stage.
The announcer called a woman’s name first and then asked for “Eric” to come forward.
“I said, ‘There’s my in,’” McAuliffe said.
He rushed to the stage, beating “Eric” there and leaving Rebecca asking, “Where is he going?”
Rebecca said she didn’t think much of McAuliffe’s rush to the stage since he’d just had a birthday, but, at that point, the announcer was calling people by name.
“Mark made a beeline up there when they were calling specific people,” she said.
When McAuliffe got to the stage, he encountered the group’s host Cedric Nunley, who asked, “Are you Eric?”
When McAuliffe pulled Nunley aside and said he wasn’t Eric but wanted to propose to his girlfriend, Nunley got wide-eyed and said, “Ooooh.”
He told McAuliffe to stand to the side of the stage next to a speaker, but then McAuliffe realized he forgot the ring and ran back to his seat to retrieve it.
When he knelt down to get the ring out of his backpack, Duckworth, who suspected the pending proposal, made eye contact with McAuliffe and began to cry.
Rebecca said she’d seen McAuliffe talking to Nunley on stage, then standing to the side, and, when he returned to the table, she thought he was done with whatever he was doing on stage.
The backpacks were behind her, so she didn’t see him rifling around in his.
“But then he makes a beeline back to the stage, and I looked at my daughter, and said, ‘Do you know what’s going on?’” Rebecca said.
She said Duckworth slowly nodded with tears in her eyes then darted away to videotape what was about to happen.
“So they left me sitting at that table by myself, and I am literally panicking,” she said. “Is he going to tell them to make me sing … all kinds of things going through my head.”
McAuliffe realized when he returned to the stage that word had spread about his plan among the gospel singers. He noticed the women of The Renewed Voices for Christ smiling at him as he removed the oversized boxes from the ring and slipped it on his pinky finger.
Then Nunley called McAuliffe over.
“I’m in the middle of the stage,” McAuliffe said. “There’s like 500 people.”
Nunley summoned Becky down, and she danced her way to the stage. McAuliffe popped the question, and Rebecca turned her face and pointed to her cheek for a kiss. She said yes. And the crowd went wild.
The first verse
After the gospel concert, The Renewed Voices of Christ member Richard Douglas approached McAuliffe and said his was the first proposal the group, which has been together for 25 years, had had during a performance. He invited McAuliffe, Rebecca and Duckworth to tour the House of Blues, gave them a bottle of champagne and asked them to have their picture taken with the group. They obliged, and asked if the group would sing at Immanuel Lutheran in Lake Geneva. When the group agreed, McAuliffe asked, “How about a wedding?”
On Oct. 4, William Smith Jr. and The Renewed Voices of Christ – a group from community churches in Chicago who began singing together as teenagers – performed at the nuptials of Mark and Rebecca McAuliffe.
Group member Christopher Hall said the Chicago-area group had not sung in Wisconsin before but did not hesitate to accept the invitation.
“Whoever beckons us, we always come,” he said.
Mark McAuliffe kept the visiting performers a secret from his wedding guests. Duckworth’s video of McAuliffe’s House of Blues proposal played on the church’s big screen as guests became suspicious of the rustling of people they heard in the sanctuary. When the Rev. MaryAnn Moller-Gunderson proclaimed, “Let the celebration begin,” the booming a capella sound of the gospel singers let loose.
“They were just so cool,” McAuliffe said. “I can’t say enough how cool they were.”
And, Immanuel Lutheran Church welcomed them with open arms, he said.
“Everybody really loved them,” said Rebecca McAuliffe. “Immanuel really came through for us. It’s not a very diverse area, and we weren’t sure how well they’d be received.”
The group stayed to play at the McAuliffe’s reception in the hall attached to the new church at 700 N. Bloomfield Road, and then stayed overnight to sing at Immanuel Lutheran’s services Sunday morning.
“They got a five-minute standing ovation,” McAuliffe said. “They just blew it away.”
“We came for the wedding, and we had such a great time,” Hall said. “Everybody enjoyed us so much, they asked us to stay over for the service.”
The next song
The McAuliffes have stayed in touch with members of the group and attended a service at one of their neighborhood churches in Chicago around Christmas.
“You want to talk about killing it,” Mark McAuliffe said. “I mean, I had chills just listening to it.”
On Saturday – the day after Mark McAuliffe’s 10-year anniversary of sobriety – The Renewed Voices For Christ will present a gospel revival from 7 to 9 p.m. at Immanuel Lutheran Church.
McAuliffe has sold 300 tickets for the performance at the church, which holds 425 people. The cost is $10 per ticket. Tickets are available in the church office or by calling McAuliffe at (262) 215-3900. If the event is not sold out, tickets will be available at the door.
Rebecca McAuliffe said the group’s performance – a celebration of 25 years together – is very personal for her and her husband and a testament to the warmth of Immanuel Lutheran’s congregation.
“It’s amazing,” she said.
Hall said the group is excited to return to Lake Geneva as a featured act at Immanuel Lutheran.
“I have been to a million churches in my lifetime, and I can by far say this is one of the most loving, most welcoming,” he said. “It was phenomenal.”
