♫ PRAISE & WORSHIP — FIFTY-FOUR YEARS OF FRANCIS KUMAR

How one man kept a congregation singing across half a century

By Sunil Rajshekhar • Member, RTMC since 1984 with intervening membership at Taylor Memorial Church, Bombay and Centenary Methodist Church, Delhi

Sunday Morning — 29 June 2026

It is another Sunday morning service — the 29th of June, 2026 — at Richmond Town Methodist Church. Like in most churches, the service begins with thirty minutes of chorus singing. This week, as on so many other Sundays, it is Francis Kumar setting the pace.

WINSLOW — PHOTO NO. 44 OF FRANCIS KUMAR IN SHORTLISTED FOLDER

Popularly known as Frankie, he opens with a familiar call: ‘Good Morning, Church.’ The response is feeble. He tries again, louder. ‘Good Morning, Church.’ This time it lands, and the congregation wakes up. The team begins.

♫ O Glory to God, He Has Lifted Me Up
♫ My Glory and the Lifter of My Head

Watching Frankie lead, I find myself carried back fifty years. The memory is vivid: a young man, a visitor to Bangalore, walking into an evening service at RTMC in 1976 and encountering, for the first time, Frankie — loud, flourishing, hopping, rousing, stirring. Something about it lodged in the mind and stayed there.

The 1970s — The Beginning

Frankie began his long association with RTMC’s congregation in 1972, and from the very first his instinct was the same: take the congregation where it needs to go, even if it has to be dragged there one reluctant voice at a time. The choruses of the seventies were exuberant, unabashed, and built for exactly that purpose.

♫ I’ve Got Joy, Joy Down in My Heart
♫ All Over the World the Spirit Is Moving
♫ Every Day with Jesus Is Sweeter Than the Day Before
♫ It’s Bubbling, It’s Bubbling

The 1980s — Taking Root

It was not until 1984 that I moved to Bangalore and became a formal member of RTMC. What I discovered quickly was that the encounter with Frankie’s praise and worship eight years earlier had left more of a mark than I had realised. He was still there — every bit as present, every bit as warm — providing the kind of familiarity that every new member quietly seeks when they first walk through a church door.

Frankie’s gift has always been this: he makes worship feel like a homecoming, even for those who are arriving for the first time. The choruses of the eighties had a different register from the decade before — a little more devotional, a little more considered — but in his hands they carried the same essential energy.

♫ It Only Takes a Spark to Get a Fire Going
♫ Love Is the Flag on the Castle of My Heart

Frankie’s involvement in the life of RTMC has never been confined to the Sunday morning platform. He has been at the forefront of church activity across five decades — the Christmas dinners, the harvest Sunday auctions, the youth camps, the church picnics, and the tireless business of making sure that the congregation, on any given occasion, feels like a community.

The 1990s — A Newer Sound

The nineties brought a new wave of worship music to churches across India, and Frankie brought it to RTMC with characteristic enthusiasm. The congregation that had grown up on the choruses of the seventies and eighties found itself learning a newer vocabulary, and Frankie — as always — was also part of the teaching.

♫ I Will Sing of the Mercies of the Lord
♫ I Just Keep Trusting My Lord

2000 — The Return and the Millennium

There were years in the mid-nineties when I was away from Bangalore, and away from RTMC. Returning in 2000, I sensed a feeling of comfort in finding Frankie still leading. Some things, it turns out, you do not know you depend on until you find them still there.

He had not stood still. A whole new set of songs had arrived with the millennium, and he had made them his own, as he had made every previous generation of worship music his own.

♫ I Want to Love You, Lord, Much More Than I Do
♫ Thy Loving Kindness

2010 Onwards — The Constant

There was another absence between 2004 and 2010. Returning again, the congregation had changed — new faces everywhere, new energies, new dynamics. The pastors had changed, as they always do. But Frankie had not. He was still there, still leading a troupe of singers — a troupe that constantly reconstitutes itself — with the same warmth and the same inexhaustible vigour. Frankie has always been a constant.

♫ Great Is the Lord and Greatly to Be Praised
♫ He Is My Everything, He Is My All

The Shepherds Who Walked Alongside

Frankie is the first to say that none of what he has done over fifty-four years was done alone. The encouragement of pastors — the succession of those who stood at the pulpit of Richmond Town Methodist Church across this half-century — was, in his own words, indispensable. To name them is to sketch, in outline, the pastoral history of RTMC across the last five decades.

PASTORS OF RTMC • 1972–2026

Rev. Dr. Theodore Williams • Rev. Vinay Kumar Moses • Rev. Dr. Ravi Joseph • Rev. Michael Peppin • Rev. R.G. Soans • Rev. Arun Andrews • Rev. Dr. Vasudevan • Rev. C.A. Benjamin • Rev. Paneer Williams • Rev. Dr. Prabhakar S. • Rev. David Vijayakumar • Rev. N. Jaywanth • Bishop Anil Servand • Rev. Dr. Jonathan Bangera • Rev. Paul Royappa • Rev. Moses Mamadapur • Rev. H. Isaac • Rev. Hosea Mathew • Rev. Ravi Sebastian • Rev. Dr. Vivek Gundimi • Rev. Andrew Samuel

And the current pastoral team:
Rev. Rajesh Anand • Rev. Vilbert Vallance • Rev. Samarpan Suryavanshi

Sunday, 29 June 2026

Which brings us back to where we began. That last Sunday of June. Frankie with his team continues the work of more than half a century — carrying a congregation across thirty minutes of worship that felt, as it always does in his hands, both familiar and alive.

♫ He Is Lord, He Is Lord
♫ O What a Wonderful, Wonderful Day
♫ How I Praise Thee Precious Saviour
♫ Father, We Love Thee

At seventy-one, Francis Kumar retains something that most people, in most fields, quietly set down somewhere in their sixties: genuine enthusiasm. Not performance. Not duty. Enthusiasm. The kind that is contagious precisely because it does not appear to be trying to be.

Fifty-four years is a long time to bring the same energy to the same room. It requires something beyond talent or discipline. It requires love for the work, love for the congregation, and — perhaps most importantly — the grace to keep showing up.