Church in Africa is very different than church in
America. I feel like that’s a pretty
obvious statement, but I want to elaborate on some of the differences. Here in Africa we hop into the car around ten
o’clock and drive a few miles to the church.
There aren’t hundreds of people, and there isn’t even a building. There are maybe twenty people, and we sit
under a tarp in a courtyard of houses.
We sit on plastic chairs and wooden benches that could fall over at any
moment, and when it’s sunny the tarp barely provides shade, and when it rains
we’re barely covered. There is no paid
staff, and no specific preacher. The men
take turns preaching. We open little
bright pink song books and sing the same four or five songs every week, and we
sing EVERY verse, whether the song has two verses or six. The church service lasts two hours, with a
long sermon in Swahili. Instead of
sitting with my friends I sit with Kate, Sadie, Hailey and a little African
girl named Mary. Instead of paper to
draw on, toys or snacks, mothers give their kids scratched up CDs, wire, or
straw to entertain them. The older kids
sit and listen silently. At the end of
the service you shake hands with every person before leaving.
But the coolest thing about the Swahili church services, the
thing that I enjoy the most, is the singing.
In America we sing just loud enough that we can hear ourselves, but not
so others can hear us. We keep our hands
down, and rarely clap or trill our voices or yell “Amen” in the middle of a
song. But here in Tanzania, they
do. They don’t care who hears them sing,
and the belt out the songs. They sing
with passion and joy and heartfelt feeling that I’ve never seen in America. They clap loudly and thank Jesus in the
middle of a song by yelling above the singing, and it’s awesome. They love the Lord and they aren’t afraid to
show it.
