Last night we had our second monthly bi-lingual worship service.
None of the planning or preparation that we had really put into it could have created the spirit of worship that we shared. We couldn’t have made it happen… but God could.
In our first worship service, we decided to pretty much stick with the standard order of worship in the book of discipline. We gather, pray, hear the word (in many ways), respond with prayers, offering and communion. Es muy bueno y facil. Oh, and we stick hymns in there where appropriate.
Also, our first worship brought in a few spanish speakers – but no native spanish speakers. No one who wasn’t also fluent in english. And no one of Hispanic/Latino/a descent.
This time, as we gathered for worship, it felt like there were only a few of us. The sanctuary felt so big – but we began, hesitantly to worship. We hadn’t even gotten to the call to worship with sirens began going off. There was severe weather moving into our area and we had to go to the basement – to be safe.
So we huddled down in this little room that the church has for children’s drama – so it had a cute little stage and benches and chairs for toddlers. And we worshipped God together. and it was beautiful.
Because we were all in this little room, we filled the space with our singing and words. Because we lost our powerpoint, all of the leaders shared our worship scripts and sat mixed in with everyone else. We sang to the guitar, we sang whether or not we knew the tune, we sang from our hearts. We clapped and made music together. We heard the word of God proclaimed in english and spanish. And we prayed. I’m not sure that we would have had all of the prayerful time that we did had we been upstairs. There was something about being in that smaller space together that created an intimacy we might not have achieved otherwise. We realized we had no offering plate, so we passed around a sombrero (which we found in the props) and gave from our blessings to this important ministry. And we shared el cuerpo y la sangre de Cristo,
para que seamos el cuerpo de Cristo para el mundo,redimidos por su sangre. And at the end, I felt like we were el cuerop de Cristo.
THIS time, we also had some new participants and felt like we really met our target audience! In fact, we had a quite a few bi-cultural couples – which I think is a big part of our audience. One of the husbands said to me – this was really important for my wife to be able to be here – Thank You!
Please continue to pray for this important imporant ministry – and especially pray for me – I’m giving the sermon at our next service (on Pentecost) and I will be attempting to proclaim God’s word in Spanish!!!