Sunday, July 25th - Church Services

(Note: read the previous posts, below, if you want to hear about the trip in chronological order.)

On Sunday morning, the group split up. Half went to a Good Shepherd Church in the city, and the other 4 of us were to go to the services at the church on campus. After spending some time alone journalling, in prayer and preparing to share my testimony during the youth service, I had a brief but nonetheless impactful encounter with someone who was being really negative at the moment, so I wasn't feeling much in the mood for any such thing. But I'd said I would share, and I did still want to, whatever other negativity may be interfering with my day.

The youth service was not very big, some children and young adults (by which I'm including people, like my age). We lead a couple of songs, falteringly (and not nearly as well as the worship leader, whom we that evening found out had been in 3 Bollywood bands). But it was fun, and I even managed to get through my brief testimony, via a translator for those who didn't understand English. The whole service (which had started at 9am) was over by 9:50 or so, giving us a few minutes before the main service began. During this time we met a man from Denver who'd recently moved with his family to a gated community near Bangalore (with a lot of other expats; he works for Sysco). It was interesting how he was saying that, with that community, he could live in India without ever really doing India, if he wanted to-- I was just thinking, why would you ever want to do such a thing?

The main worship service contained a lot more singing (including "God is So Good" in something like a dozen languages! Including Portuguese) and then a long... long... long message from Alfie Franks (who is going to be the first bishop of the GSCC's-- Good Shepherd Community Churches). Let's just say it was going on 1pm when we got out. (There were some really good points in his message, though. Unbeknownst to us, however, the other church service was not nearly as long, and the other group had to wait like an hour and a half for us to meet them for lunch.)

We then were picked up and went to meet the rest of the team, plus a few of the OM staff and the family of the pastor of the city church, for lunch at a Chinese restaurant (which was really quite good, actually).


The evening saw us return to the same church in the city for a youth service. (We later found out that this is a special service, they only have these a few times a year.) Initially the rest of the group had decided they didn't want to go, but I'd protested that doing stuff was what we were in India for, and it seemed like no one ever wanted to do anything. Eventually it was decided that we would go after all, and I'm really glad we did end up going.

I hadn't been to that service in the morning, obviously, so I didn't know what to expect-- we went down into a basement room in this building. It was really hot and stuffy, and there were people just packed in. Now, just like I mentioned for the morning service, when they say "youth" it's not just like kids-- the people there were probably teens through 20s. The same music leader who'd been at the on-campus church that morning was leading the singing here, as well, along with a couple other musicians (including a guy on the keyboards who provided utterly hilarious sound effects for our later skit).

And dancing! The guys had no inhibitions whatsoever about breaking into a dance party, yelling back an enthusiastic "no!" when the leader asked, "does God say you can't dance? does the Bible say you shouldn't dance?" Karrie and Megan found room to squeeze in next to the girls (we'd filed in along the back wall or seats in the front when we came in, since the service was already underway) to try and get them dancing as well, though none ever joined in with quite as much energy as the two of them.

After all that wild singing and dancing, Angela shared her testimony, as we'd been asked to have at least one person share, and we'd also been asked... to do a skit. I dare say we didn't do too bad, for having as little time as we did to come up with an idea that afternoon-- we even got some laughs (and I mean, at appropriate times, which may even indicate laughing with us rather than at us). We based it on James 2:14-26, which we'd read for our team devotions earlier in the weekend. Of course, then we were shown up by their skit, which clearly had much more time to put preparation into it-- Sodom and Gomorrah, always a good time.

Afterwards, we enjoyed samosas and soda together outside the entrance to the building, before heading back to campus for the night. (I guess I should add that the next morning was when we were leaving campus at 5am for our train to Dharmapuri-- I did a really great job of getting my backpack packed with the things I was taking for the few days, and ready to head to bed on time... till I pretty much cut off the tip of my finger. There was profuse bleeding. Days-- nay, weeks-- of pain. Still not all the way healed up. But really, as soon as it happened-- while my roommates were busy stopping me from putting my hand under the tap while they fetched bottled water-- I thought of the most important thing: that I really didn't want it to mess up my mehndi. :)