Sunday march 2nd started out as an ordinary Sunday, with us traveling by feet and public transit to the Iglesia Bautista Internacional, or the ibi. The ibi is a large Baptist church with about 2000 members, with two services each holding about 1000 people. They just finished and began worshipping in a new building a few weeks before this trip began. It is a humungous building with full on sound and visual system, translator head sets for visitors like us, and a capacity of about 1800 people at once, with over flow seating. The set up is a lot like my church at home, with a worship team including electric guitar, bass, keyboard, and singers. They sing all the new and classic Christian contemporary songs. But the building is at least twice as large and probably cost 4 times as much as my church.
I honestly did not come on this trip expecting to see people and situations noticeably wealthier than mine. But that is what happened when I walked into this air-conditioned building with clean, white-washed floors, a projector screen bigger than almost all of the houses I have seen here so far, and everyone (including us) dressed in their typical Sunday best.
The worship was well done and powerful with a strong mixture of instrumentation and voices. The congregation seemed to have a real heart for worship as well. The sermon was a lot longer and a lot less English than most of us are used to. Translators through headsets help a little, but you don’t get the same effect. Late Saturday nights combined with a cool building and comfy seats admittedly see my nodding off on occasion, I will own up to that. Before and after the service the projector showed ads for church programs which included a Wednesday night option of hanging out with some disabled children (called Joni and friends), and also an anti-homosexuality campaign run by the church. From a worship planner or church owners stand point the service was well run and ‘good’
Now let me dive in to what happened on Sunday night. After our typical day at the mall and public transit home, we found out we were going to another evening service at a different church. The pastor of this church is a man named Levy (pronounced Lay-vee). He is a man of Haitian decent, as is his entire congregation. He is the one who picks us up from the base and drives us to our rotations every weekday morning and drives us back in the afternoon. He is extremely friendly and is a silent and effective helper, no matter if you ask him or not. The last place he drives us in the morning is the preschool that our group has started and tried to develop over the first two weeks of this trip. He lives basement of the building, we teach on the top floor, and the ground floor is where we had church on Sunday night. Levy is our connection to this community, and he seems to be at least some what of a leader and figure head to everyone there.
So Sunday night we take a big bus as far as the paved road will take us, then walk the last 50 meters down to the pre school/church. We heard it before we saw it. Loud music and people clapping and singing greeted us as we walked into what looked like and already full floor space, which was about the size of the stage in the ibi church. So somehow we managed to fit 30 more people in this place, by squishing in and throwing some extra chairs out near the front. It was quite warm, with all the movement and body heat, and the fact that there was one fan blowing to accommodate everyone. But this didn’t seem to stop anyone from clapping and praising God. There were 3 drum players rotating every song, a couple electric guitars, a bass player, and a keyboardist. One congregation member, seemingly at random, would make their way to the front of the crowd and sing into the every crackling and feed-backing microphone. The musicians would do their best to pick up the beat and or key and jam along, usually successfully and in no particular order or pattern. The songs were meant to be call in response, or listen-and-sing-along-as-you-feel. At all times there were children running around to different benches, people having their own conversations, people clapping and dancing, people singing, and people walking to the front to get ready for their turn to sing. When the song would end was usually impromptu between the band members and the singer.
Rachael informed me before hand that there likely be an opportunity to join in on the music, so I brought the bongos that Guidos son let us borrow, and also my drumsticks which I brought from home. As soon as we were seated I pointed at my drums and gave Rachael a look, and she nodded to go ahead. So I jammed along on the bongos, joining in on the accents and rhythms of the current drummer. If I didn’t feel like drumming I would dance back in forth in my small amount of personal space and clap along. At one point Levy read a bit from the bible, then called up Max to the mic, who introduced us and translated some of Levy’s greetings. Then we were informed that it was apparently our turn to lead worship. Well then. So Erica grabbed her guitar and a chair, and our whole group shuffled up to the front of the church. I brought my sticks, hoping to rock out on the drum kit. At first sight of me the drummer got up and offered me his seat. I was ecstatic, at this point not having played my drums for a good 12 days. I was experiencing with drawl from my hobby of rock’n and roll’n. The bass and guitar players were offering their instruments to us as well, but we didn’t have any people who thought they qualified, so it was just me and Erica as instrumentation.
After 5 minutes of debate we picked a couple songs that we knew, were up-beat, and were ‘dance-able’. So I am just doing my thing at first, keeping time, nothing to special. I had done this many times in my own church. At point I did some double strokes on the high hat (sorry for all the drummer talk), which apparently was very interesting to the other drum players watching me. It was fun singing loud with all our class, and seeing the congregation (okay mostly just Keena) dancing in their seats and clapping along. Classic Keena.
One of our last songs was ‘Days of Elijah’ which we all loved and know the actions too. So we are all jamming our air-horns ‘as the trumpet sounds’ and holding our reigns ‘riding on the clouds’. Then at the very end of our final chorus, we did a dramatic slow down and ended with a crazy train-wreck ending. Which included me going ham on the drums. I could not hear myself think anymore as I got progressively louder and faster. A couple of my classmates turned to look at me and or laugh/cheer. The local drummers who were standing watching started to cheer like mad! I felt so much energy as they cheered me on and just went nuts, which in turn allowed me to go as nuts as I wanted.
At the apex of all that noise I somehow came to the thought, ‘this is worship for me’ I have always appreciated God’s gift of music to us and I especially felt thankful at that moment. Just using what He has given me to praise him and having my friends and chaperons singing along and Erica jamming away on her 6 string, it feels so right.
‘This is church,’ I thought to myself. A mixture of cultures and backgrounds and talents and preferences mixed together praising the Lord in whatever way works for them. I doesn’t matter if you sing the same song two weeks in a row, or if someone coughs during the prayer. Heck, pray whenever you feel the need to pray. There doesn’t have to be a set schedule or a black and white liturgy for us to follow for it to be worship. This Sunday night church visit really brought this thought to the front of my head. And I continued from there to think, ‘Do I even need to be in a church to praise God in this way?’ I would like to believe the answer is no. As long as I have praise in my heart and a song in my throat, I can shout out to Jesus with expressions of love, gratitude, and sometimes even anger or confusion. There are so many beautiful and broken things in this country, in this world , that we can use to see the presence and love of God.
To be honest, if your primary goal is making sure that everyone has a bible app on their phones and i-pads, when you do nothing about the poverty that is a 20 minute walk down the road, then I think you have missed the point of going to church, and you have missed the point of being a follower of Christ. If you are spending MILLIONS of dollars on an impressive worshiping area, and just showing up so you look like you have it all together, than you need to get your priorities straight. I saw worship of God in one of its rawest forms at that Haitian church, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I can not even begin to imagine how ‘awkward’ it would be if some Haitians tried to sit down and worship in a huge, fully Hispanic church. The reason that there are no translators for Creole is because none of those people show up. But honestly, I think they got a lot of parts about worship right. Or mostly, they don’t focus on the wrong things.
I think we can draw a lot of parallels between the church we go to on Sunday mornings, and the churches we occupy in North America. Very rarely are there mixes in race, changes in format, or allowances for things ‘out of the norm’. I don’t think having an organized worship time is wrong, nor do I think that having a large congregation is wrong. But I do believe that sometimes we as Christians can put emphasis on the wrong things, so I pray that we can continue to come back to the heart of worship, and to remember that we are all praising the same God, no matter how much or how little we have.
And that was my church experience in the D.R. thanks for reading.
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