Church at home and abroad

Today was Sunday, the classic day of worship for Christians worldwide; except those Seventh-Day Adventists as I understand it.  Sadly, my friends have told me that if a church springs up here the first thing they do is buy incredibly expensive sound equipment.  Kind of reminds me of some churches back home that take on a tremendous amount of debt for a building.  When we sing here, it seems like I can’t quite clap on the right beat; perhaps it’s because they clap on the different beat as what I’m used to or more likely due to the fact that I have no rhythm.

Children are featured a little more prominently here in Yangon which I absolutely love.  Almost every Sunday some age group of students are singing in front of church.  Last Sunday there were the wee ones that could barely walk up there singing and dancing and having a great time.  It was pure joy to watch them worship; we adults should take notes and learn how to truly abandon ourselves to worship in singing and dancing.  Why don’t adults dance more in worship?  It’s clearly Biblical.  I think we have so many insecurities when in front of other people that we neglect to realize that we dance and sing for an audience of One as the song says.

They also do many  more hymns whereas I’m used to more contemporary music.  The hymns are rich in their lyrics but sometimes the pace is so incredibly slow that I can’t hardly get through it.  It is nice though that they have the Burmese language right on top of the English language at least for a few of the hymns.  Back home, I’m more used to what we would call ‘good’ music, meaning that the worship team knows how to make good sounding music.  Often times this can turn into attractional forms of church if you’re not careful.  Maybe that’s not such a bad thing though, right?  My friend was attracted to a church and came in through the doors due to the good worship music being played.  Sometimes it can be more of a distraction though, as such we need to tread carefully.

My favorite part of church here and back home though isn’t the actual service.  It’s what happens afterwards.  Here they have a lunch right at the church afterwards.  Back home we usually go out to lunch since we meet in a movie theater and aren’t allowed to stay too long after we finish tearing down.  That is by far my favorite part of every Sunday.  When I don’t get to have lunch with people something is just missing in my spiritual life it seems like.  It’s simply not feasible back home to do it every Sunday as people have things going on all the time with their kids’ sport teams and all the rest, but I certainly do enjoy when we all make the effort to go to lunch and fellowship together.

Here in Yangon, I have the additional benefit of working with the people I go to church with, at least some of them.  We have devotions every morning, and that is a truly beautiful thing in my book.  Last Friday we did devotions and it was just three of us, me and two Buddhists!  I loved it, they had questions to ask and if you know me at all you know I love to tackle questions head on in regards to the Bible, even if the answer is often times that I really don’t know the answer, I do certainly like to encourage questioning of the Scriptures.