Kin day 5—a church service

It took us two hours to get to church. We were an hour late but it didn’t start without us because we were the special guests of the day and Nina was preaching.

After we had been stopped for a long time on the Airport Road, Pastor François jumped out of the back of the SUV. I thought he was going to check on the bottleneck ahead but he never came back. He walked the rest of the way to church and was waiting for us when we finally arrived. The situation on the Airport Road is getting to the place where you’re better off walking a couple of miles than driving through the construction zone.

I could write only about the traffic jam, how we finally took a detour through a muddy market area and how we once again had to leave the navigable streets and, like the day before, negotiate a maze of rutted, crowded alleyways in a close-packed, poor neighborhood to get to our destination, only this day, since it had rained hard the day before and was still raining off and on, the streets were muddy instead of dusty. That would be enough recordable experience for one day. Except I must add that I am coming to think of the maze as a labyrinth. We do not go in to look for the exit but for the sacred center.

The sacred center is hidden but those who need to find it will eventually arrive. We arrived at the half-built space carved out in the dingy quarter by the Bondeko parish of the Mennonite Church of Congo after the rain had stopped. It was a good thing because the only shelter from the rain was a slice of tin roofing raised high above the unfinished cement block walls. Fifty people were gathered and waiting.

The vision of the completed church was evident only in the finished platform, a smooth, two-step semicircle raised high above the dirt floor. Eventually there will be a cement floor raising the congregation up to equality with their leaders but meanwhile the narrow, high space, with the congregation unnaturally low, has the feel of a very rough, tiny cathedral, a holy place in the slums that looks no different from its surroundings, where children and chickens walk by the doorless doorways and look in. Tall Pastor François looked truly imposing standing up on the elevated platform. Pastor Nina did not stay up there. She came down to the dirt to speak to the people.

But before the preaching there was a lot of singing and praying, including by us four American visitors. We were introduced and introduced ourselves up front. Then we were welcomed in song. The whole church sang but a woman stood in front of each of us and sang, looking into our eyes. All the singing was invigorating, including ours. The congregation joined in when we sang Come Thou Fount but we sang three other songs to which they also clapped, drummed, whistled, and ululated. They would have eventually learned and joined in on all of them but we didn’t know how to prolong a song for more than three verses. Nina prayed for the children, who came up front. This is a regular part of the service.

The service was mostly in Lingala with some French and Tshiluba. Nina preached about what it means to be “people of God’s peace,” in the words of the Menno Simons hymn, which was the tamest of the songs we visitors had sung, and Azir translated into Lingala. The two of them got a good rhythm going and Azir followed Nina’s gestures, as she had told him to.

There was a recognition of recent graduates from university and graduate school. More singing. An offering and then a special competitive offering for the church building. The emcee-cheerleader urged everybody on, the singing and drumming got going, and people danced up to the front to put their offerings in plastic baskets, a pink one for the women and a blue one for the men. The money was counted--the women were ahead--and then they did it again, urged on by the emcee, a man named Patient. The women danced forward with their handbags on their heads. The men edged closer in the second tally but lost to the women, as they apparently always do. Later, Patient, who had really tried to get the men going, pointed out that some important men of the parish were absent that day.

This sounds like a lot of church and it was. It went on for three hours, after starting an hour late because of the embouteillage (my word of the day, traffic jam). But although I nearly dozed off during the last prayer, it did not seem long. Time left my awareness as soon as we stepped over that high, rough threshold at the center of the labyrinth.