Finding a Church…

When Jon and I first arrived in Botswana we visited many different churches in Gaborone, knowing that eventually we wanted to find a church located in the community wherever we would be living. Now that we have settled in Mmopane we started keeping an eye out for churches to visit. It is a little more difficult to find one here as there are no church buildings with steeples and signs out front advertising the church name and start time, there are no websites listing the churches in town, and no yellow pages to look through or phone numbers to call. Many of the African churches simply meet somewhere in the bush and others meet in daycare centers, schools, or in unmarked buildings. Trying to find a way around these barriers, we decided just to walk around town on a Sunday morning listening for church sounds like singing or someone speaking loudly. We felt a little ridiculous wandering around all dressed up with no where to go. The most promising site was less than 100 yards from our front gate, we saw maybe 10 or 15 people leaving a small cement building looking more dressed up than usual. As we approached one of the people I quickly racked my brain for the best way to figure out if it was a church and what time it started using my meager Setswana. After our greetings I asked, “Are you going to church?” (‘to come from’ hadn’t been in my vocabulary list yet). The old man rattled back in a long Setswana speech of which I understood ‘church’, ‘pray to God’, ‘go’, ‘read’, and a few other words that I couldn’t assemble into something that made sense to me. I tried to think of a way to ask what time it started but that was beyond me. Pointing to my wrist, I shrugged my shoulders and said ‘Time?’ but he just looked at my wrist giggled and said goodbye. One step at a time.

That encounter was several weeks ago and we have now been there two Sundays. It is a charming little one room church with about 40-50 people on a Sunday. We all sit on colorful plastic deck chairs facing a white wall with two black crosses painted on it and a table holding a crucifix and two candles. They ring a bell around nine o’clock and people slowly trickle in for the next twenty minutes. While the people assemble we sing acappela Setswana songs all the while thumping our Bibles to keep time with the worship leader blowing a whistle (it sounds kind of like the whistle Mr. Rogers blew to go to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe). As I don’t know any of these songs I generally sing the two words that the leader sings of the call and response and then concentrate on picking out individual words so I can put them in my notebook and ask later what they mean. Today when we were singing I was trying to pick out words and after two or three times through a particular song I realized that one of the phrases was ‘alpha le omega’ – alpha and omega. It’s funny how hard it is to pick words out in songs when they are pronounced differently than regular speech, most of the words I ask about later no one can figure out. After singing for thirty or forty minutes we read the Scripture lessons. As it is an Anglican church we follow the lectionary and read almost a whole chapter from each the Old Testament, a Psalm, the New Testament, and a chapter from the Gospels. In between each of the readings we’ll sing some short song before starting the next reading. At the end someone will stand up and preach on the OT, NT, and gospel passage somehow trying to tie them into one message. I’m always amazed that it seems to work out somehow (that is a lot to bring together) and I usually get something out of it. Scattered throughout the service we also read things out of a Prayer Book, sometimes in unison and sometimes in call and response. Jon and I don’t have a Prayer Book yet, sometimes someone will hand us one with it opened to the correct page but it seems to skip around a little and it doesn’t take long before we are lost and can’t figure out which page we are on. Other times we just listen to everyone speaking in unison, affirming things that I don’t understand. In between each of these things the person leading or someone in the congregation will interrupt and just start singing (my thought is that they do this to make sure no one falls asleep – if the speaker doesn’t think people are listening they start singing to reengage their audience). The sermon part is translated into English especially for Jon and I but everything else is done in Setswana. There isn’t a regular translator and this morning they went through three different people before they got to someone who could translate in a somewhat efficient manner. Every time they asked a new translator to come up we would go back and re-sing the song that leads into the sermon and then they would start the sermon over again. I know the first 10-15 sentences very well. “Greetings to you, my brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ…” (seriously, that part is verbatim).

One of the things I find most interesting about our church is that out of the 50 or so people in attendance there are only 5 males; out of the 45 women, over half are very old. I’m sure it will take me quite a while to figure out what these numbers mean and how they came to be, but it is surprising. I asked one of the young women today about it and she said that most of the men who go to church are here from Zimbabwe or Nigeria, that most Motswana men would rather drink. That was just her perspective, but it was interesting. Additionally, with such a large portion of the church very old (and therefore more likely to be illiterate), it made me wonder how a church goes about teaching its members to handle Scripture. I come from a denomination that is based on the question, “Where is it written?”; that becomes a hard question to ask when many in the congregation can’t read (the number of voices interpreting the answer to that question become fewer and less varied). It is interesting to live in a culture that is more similar to the culture of the early church, the way that I know how to do church certainly isn’t appropriate in all settings. I am trusting that God will open my eyes to the way He is speaking to His people here and that I will learn how to become part of that.

Our new church in Mmopane