For all the associations with crumbling church halls and cardigans – mentioned in almost every choir article ever – many choirs are political. There is a grand tradition of left-leaning choral groups, taking the premise that if we join our voices together, we’re more likely to be heard to a very literal level.

I founded my choir – performance group and all-round world’s-best girl gang Gaggle – because I wanted to see a change in the representation of women on stage. Nothing prepared me for the life-changing experience of being in your own lady chorus. Choirs are transformational.

Of course, they’re very challenging too. Try keeping 25 women happy on a tour bus through Europe with one DVD of Hot Tub Time Machine. Then there’s the business side: figuring out how to organise the group and finance it. And then there’s the classic battle for best solos. One choir in the UK, though, has far more fundamental challenges than most; its very existence should inspire us to raise our expectations of tolerance.

“I know it’s political,” says Beth Allen, artistic director of Sacred Sounds Women’s Choir. “But we can’t think about that or we’d all start disagreeing.” Sacred Sounds was formed at Manchester international festival in 2013 as part of its Mif Creative aspect, where featured artists work closely with local people. It is a pan-religious group of Manchester women, who sing devotional music from across the spectrum of their beliefs.

All faiths (and those of no faith) are represented, apart from Bahá’í and Rastafari, because they haven’t found any believers in those creeds who want to join, and new women are recruited by word of mouth to keep the numbers balanced. “We’re quite low on Sikh women,” Allen admits.

After Mif 2013, Sacred Sounds had a few months off, figuring out what to do next. Since then, they’ve been trained in how to be sustainable, scored development funding and worked on more projects, including a showcase in January that saw them join forces with artists from across the UK, including percussionist Renu Hossain and beatboxer Jason Singh. Allen has also gathered the strongest voices in the choir to form a committee. Although they started off led, top-down, by her, this seemed the best way to navigate the sensitivities involved and now Allen is “head teacher” to the committee’s “governors”.

Allen explains it’s taken two years to decide on what they won’t sing. “The words that aren’t sung are hugely important. What we don’t sing, ever, is about land. We don’t sing about Zion, we don’t mention Jerusalem.” Last July was a difficult time for the choir, with Palestinian women and Orthodox Jewish women having family affected by the troubles in Gaza. Allen doesn’t want, though, to emphasise one struggle – “a few years ago it could have been Serbia”.

Just as in Gaggle, no one was auditioned, which comes with its own challenges. Having a diverse range of abilities can be difficult enough to direct but, for Sacred Sounds, there’s a whole other layer. “We’ve got women who didn’t sing chorally. The Hindu, Sikh and Indian ladies don’t have any choral tradition at all, so for them that’s a whole new world. Also, our pitch is so clumsy in western culture: we don’t do microtones.” Microtones? “They are used for much more detail: we’ve got the groaners, the ones who struggle to be at pitch – but they come into their own when we’ve doing soundscaping.”

Their new show has a lot of soundscaping: Neck of the Woods has Turner Prize-winning artist Douglas Gordon, pianist Hélène Grimaud and actor Charlotte Rampling teaming up to create a portrait of the wolf, with musical backing from Sacred Sounds. “The pagans and shamans are at home with this kind of soundscaping,” says Allen. Those not au fait with frog noises or howling are challenged to push their boundaries. “It’s been one of those life-changing moments where the women start to say: ‘I decided to get up early this morning and actually had a conversation with the birds in my back garden.’ It changes the way you hear things. Working with the beatboxer in the last project was the beginning of that.”

But for all choirs in the UK, the bell tolls, and eventually Britain’s Got Talent will come calling. So, will Sacred Sounds ever have a go? “I love a pop song and I’ve had requests for Labi Siffre’s Something Inside So Strong. But it doesn’t feel right,” she says. Why not? “Maybe it will change, but at the moment I want to hear the Serbian lady’s music, the Sufi Turkish song. There’s so much to explore, it’s too easy just to sing something like that.”

But some of the women will be really angry with me,” she admits. “Some of them would just love to be on it.” I tell her how I went against opinion in Gaggle by even having the conversation with the producers when they got in touch. I considered going on wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the “Iraqi prisoner abuse” Daily Mirror cover which got Piers Morgan sacked, but when I got the contract for the show, a lawyer told me it was the worst he’d ever seen and not to do it. We laugh. “There’s too much to be done in Manchester,” Allen concludes, “without getting too big for our boots”.

• Neck of the Woods is at HOME, Manchester, 10-18 July. Box office: 0844 871 7654