As I learned several years ago, when I was living on Sugar Hill in Harlem, even the hottest summer mornings can’t stand up to the magical harmonic balm of a church choir. On Sundays the city rings with music missed by too many who sleep off their Saturday-night revelries, and it’s a safe bet the air is seldom less charmed than by the strains of any of the seven principal choirs of Convent Avenue Baptist Church, at 420 W. 145th Street (www.conventchurch.org).

“We know there are many ways to come together in song,” says Gregory Hopkins, Convent’s minister of music, and he and his more than 200 singers share an inexhaustible passion for realizing each and every one. The church, a handsome glory of a building in a neighborhood almost as packed with houses of worship as Brooklyn (the “city of churches”), offers four services each Sunday (at 7, 8 & 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.) in their main sanctuary. Which services offer choir singing?

“Well, all of them,” Mr. Hopkins replies, as if religious worship without music were a phenomenon he’s never considered. Not only does every Con vent service come with music, but its choirs navigate the entire religious musical canon – standard hymns and spirituals from the Western European tradition as well as gospel and spiritual numbers more in tune with contemporary music. The church’s junior members are so eager to sing that they fill two choirs. There is also a Men’s Choir, as well as a Scripture Choir (which recites biblical passages), and a choir composed entirely of Asian parishioners. These choirs appear not only at services but at special concerts.

How do he and his choristers meet such considerable demands? “We don’t worry about it,” he assures me, “we just do it.” And if the exigencies of singing ever threaten to become oppressive, there’s always the ability to reach out for a little help, isn’t there? “Oh, absolutely!” Mr. Hopkins responds, in a voice strong enough to project across both Convent Avenue’s sanctuaries simultaneously. “Prayer is always the most important thing.” As the Negro National Anthem puts it, “Lift every voice and sing / And let salvation ring.”