Our friends and readers of our blog already know how much we have been uplifted and nourished on Sunday mornings in a variety of churches. And also, once in a while, very disturbed. Let me offer a montage in this posting, drawn from our recent experiences in Nairobi and from our travels in Ethiopia and Uganda.
Scene One. Let’s begin with yesterday’s service. Picture a very large stone nave patterned after an English Gothic cathedral, a choir dressed in crimson robes who open the Holy Communion service with an English Tudor introit setting, then move out of the choirstalls to sing an arrangement of an American African-American spiritual, the soprano soloist singing and dancing energetically while the choir sways and claps behind her. In the back row two figures stand out: a tall and slender black man of 60 or so who is the most enthusiastic handclapper in the choir and a stocky white-haired man of 70 or so, the only white member of the choir, who looks a little skeptical about the whole affair but is gamely giving it a go. All this accompanied by two choir members playing drums and – you would expect a piano but instead you hear an organ, a magnificent instrument that played a Bach prelude earlier, now lining out the melody and filling in a rhythmic backdrop for the singing.
Other elements of the service include a Gloria sung in Swahili, several fine hymns from Hymns Ancient and Modern (“Alleluia! Sing to Jesus” and “Come Down, O Love Divine” among them), and Scripture readings and sermon on the theme of the gift of the spirit at Pentecost. And there is a subtle balance between contemporary idiom and traditional content in the liturgy of the prayerbook of the Anglican Church of Kenya. All in all, an uplifting and inspiring service to end our five months in Kenya. We will miss All Saints’ Cathedral, even though we have attended only four or five times, choosing to visit lots of other churches as well.
I spoke with the white-haired man after the service: he greeted me and wondered whether we are living permanently in Nairobi, having noticed us in the congregation. “I have been singing in this choir for 43 years,” he said, watching its slow transformation from a white choir with a few black faces to an almost entirely African group. He served in the colonial and then the new Kenyan administration, he said, until he retired several years ago.
Scene Two: One week earlier on the church calendar was Ascension Sunday. We were traveling in northern Uganda with our friend David Burrell, a Holy Cross priest, retired from his work in the Theology and Philosophy departments at University of Notre Dame. We had booked a “chimpanzee tracking walk” for 9 am on Sunday, so we shifted our worship to Saturday evening. With David on the one chair in his small room at a German-run guest house in the town of Masindi, Susan and me sitting on the bed, we read the Psalms and Scripture lessons appointed for the day from his prayerbook, and David offered a homily, raising his voice when necessary to be heard over the cacophony of arriving guests in the hallway. He spoke about the ways in which Christ defies all our expectations and calls us to serve him in ways and in places that we might never have imagined. Then we joined him in the liturgy of the Mass, receiving the host from a saucer and drinking the wine from a small tumbler.
No choir, no vestments, no organ, no pews or altar—only three of us gathered together, sharing the meal of remembrance that binds all Christians together.
Scene Three: So many of my students are Pentecostals—one time at our Tuesday tea it was eight out of ten—that we decided to visit Nairobi Pentecostal Church on Valley Road, 15 minutes’ walk from our flat. We found ourselves in a huge sanctuary seating perhaps 2500, joining an opening medley of praise songs led by a well-rehearsed team of singers, guitarists, keyboard players, and drummers. The sermon was given by one of the pastors, lively and engaging in delivery but very strange in content. The message of the day (based on a reading from Ephesians, I think, but it isn’t listed in the bulletin) was that postmodernism is the great enemy of Christian faith, because it is essentially the same as atheism. There was much talk of the dangers of philosophy and the temptations of relativism. Among the phrases that I wrote down in my notes: “New Age philosophers bear no trace of the glory heat of heaven,” but “the Spirit can change even the hearts of stone of philosophers.”
We were surprised by the conventional structure and by its comparative brevity, just under 90 minutes. Not once was the congregation invited to engage in ecstatic prayer or testimony, something that is very common in a wide range of evangelical churches here and in Ghana. Nor was there any sign of the “prosperity gospel” message that Paul Gifford (in his recent book on the church in Kenya, which I am reviewing for Calvin Theological Journal) found to be pervasive in Pentecostal churches here. There really were no distinctively Pentecostal elements in the service, which was very much like services at Nairobi Baptist and Nairobi Chapel. But what caught us completely by surprise was the church’s campaign to defeat the proposed new Kenyan Constitution.
Many Kenyan church leaders oppose the constitution because of two provisions: the option of submitting family law matters to Moslem courts, carried over from the 1962 constitution, and the inclusion of an exception for maternal health in its anti-abortion clause, where current law (a British status from the 19th century) allows abortion only to save the mother’s life. (See my forthcoming piece in Christian Century for a more extended comment on the debate.) These are being described, inaccurately, as anti-Christian and pro-abortion clauses. Nairobi Pentecostal’s “Operation Ezra,” we learned, has trained a thousand pastors and a thousand lay leaders to campaign against the constitution, because “our stance is that the Church of Christ in Kenya is saying No.” Allowing Moslem courts to continue to resolve marriage and divorce disputes will advance “the Muslim agenda” for taking control of Kenya, said the pastor. While Muslims raise large families and encourage their relatives to immigrate, “we are being encouraged to abort our Christian children. Do we want to be colonized yet again? We can see through this document! The time of separation is now. Stand up for Jesus!” (These are verbatim quotations, but there was probably other material between these statements.) The congregation applauded enthusiastically through most of this demagoguery.
I left my Bible in the pew at Nairobi Pentecostal by mistake. Rather than attend another service and try to retrieve it, we bought a new one.
Scene four: Sunday morning at another of Nairobi’s leading Protestant megachurches, Nairobi Chapel. When we attended in 2001 it met in a large joined-together shed in town, but the several hundred who attended were spilling out on all sides. Now that site, Mamlaka Hill Chapel, is one of five spinoff congregations, while the “mother church” meets under a huge tent complex along Ngong Road south of town.
Worship proceeded very much as at other large churches we have attended, with lots of singing and a well-drilled praise band. But after the opening song session it was announced that the ushers would fan out among the congregation—around 2000 under the huge tent and in adjoining areas—both to collect our offerings and to distribute communion elements. The pastor hurried through a very short communion service, and cubes of bread and little cups of grape juice were distributed and consumed. In more liturgical churches the Eucharist is the very heart of worship, but here it seems to be something you need to include from time to time as a supplement to the real worship, the singing and preaching.
The sermon by the senior pastor began with a string of amusing stories and witty comments, made passing reference to the Scripture passage that had been read, and moved on to practical matters of family and professional life. And he invited his two daughter and his dog—a Rottweiler—to come out on stage, illustrating some point or other about faithful living.
Many of our friends from Daystar and elsewhere attend “Chapel.” (After the service Njonjo and Katindi Mue, a leading human rights lawyer and an economic and political analyst who we had been trying to track down since we arrived, recognized us and sought us out.) I’m told the preaching is usually a bit more focused on Scripture, but always in the context of helping aspiring Kenyans cope with the challenges of career advancement and increasing prosperity. But we found the service skewed more toward entertainment than spiritual nurture, however. If we had had time to visit a few more times, we might have revised this impression.
Scene five. From Nairobi Chapel, cross Ngong Road, enter the Ngondo slum by way of a deeply rutted and often muddy track that runs between concrete block and corrugated iron house walls, then turn left on the muddy lane where women sitting outside tiny shops offer candy, vegetables, shoe repair, and mobile phone cards. Turn right down what looks more like a goat track than a road, and in 100 meters find a sign for Riruta United Methodist Church and Children of Africa Hope Mission. Pick your way through mud puddles to the ramshackle building. You are no more than a kilometer from Nairobi Chapel, but it might as well be a thousand.
We went to Ngondo Monday to visit the school—the “Hope Mission”—established and supported by our friends Rev. John Makokha and his wife Anne Baraza. In four rooms, none larger than 5 x 8 meters, seven classes of children aged 3 to 9 (or 10 or 11 or 12, since many have been out of school) perch on benches, or two to a chair, while volunteer teachers give them lessons in English, mathematics, Bible, and social studies. One room has 25 6 year olds sitting on plastic chairs facing in one direction, 20 4 year olds on benches facing in the other direction, while two teachers lead different lessons. The children are orphans, mostly because of AIDS, or “vulnerable children” whose parents cannot care for them. Enrollment was once as high as 250 but it stands now at 105, the maximum that they can accommodate in the current cramped facilities. Each child receives tea in the morning and lunch in the afternoon. For many it is the only meal of the day.
In this very room a few weeks ago we joined John and Anne and their congregation, mostly women from the surrounding slum with their young children at their feet or on their hips, for Sunday worship. The “praise team” here is just Anne, leading song after song in Swahili, dancing and swaying and shaking a tambourine. Women from the congregation take turns leading songs, too. When we agreed to come to the service John insisted that I must “bring the Word,” so I found the lectionary text for the day, a post-Resurrection appearance in the Gospel of John, and prepared a sermon, which John’s colleague pastor Peter translated into Swahili.
There were about twenty in attendance, crowded into one room because most of the building was flooded from recent rainstorms. The landlord, insisting that “rain comes from the sky, not from me,” refuses to make roof repairs or grade the muddy yard to make a dry space for children’s play. By Monday the interior was dry again, but the yard was a muddy mess.
John and Anne receive occasional contributions from donors in addition to support from the offerings on Sunday morning, which can’t amount to more than a few dollars a week. But God has called them to this ministry, and they carry on in a spirit of confidence and hope.
What is even more remarkable is that they have a third ministry besides the congregation and the school: John is Kenya coordinator for Other Sheep, an international organization working to overcome homophobia and make space in the church for GLBT Christians. Because of this affiliation, he has been effectively cut off by his diocese. His bishop even returned a $20,000 contribution designated for support of the school, fearing that conservative donors in the US would refuse to support other projects if he passed it along. The US office of Other Sheep provided support for their ministry for two years—all of $240 a month—but that has now stopped. Recently John and Anne, and their two daughters and one additional orphan whom they have taken in, had to sleep in the hallway for several nights until they raised enough money to pay overdue rent. (Renters’ rights don’t really exist here, unfortunately—there was no eviction order, just a new lock on the door.) We went right over and gave them the funds for the rent, and today we made another donation to support the school. We hope to mobilize some regular support among friends back home.
It’s hard to imagine living with so little, yet doing so much for people whom the rest of Kenyan society has essentially cast aside: AIDS orphans, mothers barely able to feel their children, gays and lesbians shunned by family and community. John told us once that God has helped him cast out many evil spirits in a village in Tanzania that invited him to lead several days’ revival services. (Far from supplementing his income, the trip cost him out of pocket because the village could pay only a portion of his travel expense.)
In that cockeyed shack, with a roof so low that I could stand up only on one side, singing along in Swahili as best we could, we felt a profound sense of coming together to give thanks and proclaim God’s goodness in our lives. It was one of the most memorable and most genuine worship experiences that we have had.
Scene six: Susan is working on an account of our Ethiopia trip, and I will include just a couple of sample scenes. It is just after sunset in the provincial town of Bahir Dar, at the southern end of Lake Tana where a dozen ancient monasteries occupy peninsulas and islands—our destination by boat on the following morning. Our guide, Kebede, a devout Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, has had dinner with us at our hotel and is heading to his accommodations across town. Ten minutes later he phones to say that the Feast of St. George is still being celebrated at the church just down the road, and perhaps we would like to walk over.
As we approach the church we hear a man’s voice singing over a loudspeaker in a style that we’ve learned to recognize. These “popular spiritual songs” borrow something from Western popular music, something from the sinuously intertwined melodies of the Middle East, something from the traditional liturgical chants that the Ethiopian church has used since the 7th century. In contempory Amharic, not in the liturgical language (Ge’ez), they recount miracle stories from the Ethiopian holy books.
Gathered around the church’s front steps—mostly young men on one side, young women on the other, but with no strict separation—was a crowd of several hundred, many holding candles. In an open space a group of women in richly embroidered gowns beat on drums and perform a sort of circle dance. The singer is a priest standing just outside the closed door of the church. All the women gathered around wear filmy white veils over their heads. Women and men alike bow in prayer from time to time, then resume listening and watching. We feel as if we are a hundred meters and a thousand years distant from our hotel.
After half an hour the priest ceases singing and enters the church, but the people do not follow. Evidently the evening ceremony was outdoors only. A young man dismounts from his bicycle to greet us and ask us whether we understood the singing, and then he is joined by Kebede, who spotted us as the crowd dispersed.
Scene seven: Just a few days later, another thousand kilometers down the road on our tour of northern historic sites, we are beginning to tour the southern group of churches at Lalibela. As we near the door of one of them, a solo man’s voice rings out. We step inside and hear a dozen other male voices respond, and the pattern continues: solo and response, solo and response. There is no harmony, only a unison male chorus. And because we are standing in a church that was hewn out of the solid rock, the melodies bounce off every surface to envelop us in a sea of sound.
The language this time is Ge’ez, and our guide tells us that the men are singing Psalms and responses from a liturgy for morning prayer. King Lalibela built this church and ten more nearby in the early 13th century. The men who worshipped there during his reign probably dressed very much like these men, in loose white robes, and sang like them as well. Indeed, their daily life may not have changed very much either. Ethiopia is much poorer, and agriculture much less mechanized, than anywhere else we have traveled in East Africa.
Everywhere else in Africa, Christianity arrived with the missionaries. Some of them accompanied the slave ships, while others came with fewer encumberments in the 19th century. But here in Ethiopia, the church was established in the time of the apostles, and Christianity has been the dominant religion since the 4th century. Eighty generations of Christian teaching and worship! It puts recent events like the East-West schism of 1054 and Luther’s 95 theses in 1517 into a new perspective.
