Harmonies Workshop, an Anabaptist music ministry that sponsored hymn sings and concerts for 33 years, concluded at the end of 2025. Beyond its core area of Lancaster, Pa., thousands of people have listened online.

“Over the years, a community rose up to support this effort, so this ending is filled with much gratitude,” said Glenn Lehman, who directed the nonprofit corporation since its founding in 1992.

Board chair Rhoda Denlinger said: “Even though it’s ending, there are many echoes of our work that continue to bring peace to our hearts and to the world.”

Harmonies began when the late ­Hiram Hershey asked Lehman to write a manual for “song leaders who couldn’t use a pitch pipe.” The manual, You Can Lead Singing, was published in 1996. Hershey and Lehman both went to Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J., where Lehman got a master’s degree in church music.

Two choirs led by Lehman soon became signature projects. The Table Singers — a 40-voice auditioned amateur choir with singers from Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania — explored six Mennonite hymnals, from the first English-language hymnal, Church and Sunday School (1902), to Hymnal: A Worship Book (1992).

Two early 20th-century editors, J.D. Brunk and Walter Yoder, often inspired Lehman.

“We perfected the unaccompanied, live acoustics sound of that era,” Lehman said. “The secret ingredient was sounding like a practiced, confident congregation, poised but not polished.”

The name Table Singers harks back to the historic practice of lead singers around a table in front of the pulpit, when there was one.

The other group, the Foresingers, explored historic singing in Mennonite congregations long before singing schools and shaped notes had their impact and before Mennonite hymnals were printed with notes and in English.

A musical spark for that venture was lit when Lehman attended a neighbor’s wedding and heard the ­solemnity and beauty of plain, non-metrical unison singing. He researched, arranged and transcribed slow, chant-like Amish tunes, which became a reference for the similar but faster tunes shared by most other churches of that era in colonial America.

With a semiprofessional ensemble of 12 voices, harp and zither, the Foresingers took a musical, Menno Heirs, to colleges and historic sites such as the Detweiler Meetinghouse in Ontario, Behalt in Ohio and Germantown and Pendle Hill in Philadelphia.

In addition to acting, costumes and sets, the musical required Pennsylvania German scripts and a knowledge of worship practices in early settler congregations.

“I learned that, to enrich my spirit in mystery, I didn’t need a trip to a medieval monastery,” Lehman said. “I just went back 300 years and found that the sublimity was waiting for me.”

Access to the music continues at harmonies.org.