Church in the Dust

We enter church with a cloud of dust. The 70-plus children from our Sabbath School program stampede into church following us, wiggly and giggly, despite our best efforts to remind them to be quiet and respectful. We pack in tight. Flies swarm. 

Older kids find sticks to keep the younger kids in line; babies cry and fall in the dust; children chew on unripe mangoes, rice bits, their clothes. I feel a breeze come through the open door and am thankful, knowing that in just a few short weeks hot season will begin, when the air doesn’t move, and it will feel hot and heavy in the church. 

I allow my mind to wander with the breeze, remembering how church used to be . . . wearing my best outfit, with clean feet in clean shoes, hair curled, smelling nice. Every song is beautifully sung, and the tune is always carried. I am blessed by the sermon, which I can fully understand. Church was restful, comfortable. A child kicking dust into my shoes brings me back to the present. 

My feet and shoes are shades darker than they were when I left the house this morning. I can’t sing the opening song because I am learning French, the language used only by those who have been educated, and in this congregation few have had that privilege. The song faintly resembles “In the Sweet By and By,” though the tune varies and modulates as the song continues. 

Church is about ministering to the body of Christ in a very real and sometimes raw way.

The kids, who make up more than 90 percent of the congregation, are antsy. Pigs run around outside; a dog wanders in and lies down in the aisle. It feels like another world. There are Sabbath mornings when I wake up and crave going to a church where I can fully understand everything going on and being said, where I know my feet will stay clean for the entire experience, where I can just sit in the pew and be fed and I won’t have to struggle to tell Bible stories in a foreign language or decipher the sermon. But these days I am learning what church truly is. 

Church is more than going somewhere where I “feel” comfortable or “feel” blessed. Sometimes church means that I am the blessing, whether I feel it or not. Church isn’t always restful; here, it is action-packed. Church is getting to tell children Bible stories they’ve never heard before; it’s singing praises to Him in languages other than my mother tongue. Church is hand gesturing with the thin elderly woman who is asking me for food and making a plan to get food to her. Church is recognizing the infected abscess on a child’s head, or the impaled foot, or the infected knee, and giving the needed treatment “gratuit,” or free of charge, because these people cannot afford basic medical care. Church is bandaging the bloody wound of a member who had a seizure during Sabbath School. Church is about ministering to the body of Christ in a very real and sometimes raw way. Here, church feels almost apostolic; it’s stripped of everything extraneous and reveals what truly matters. It’s not pretend or pretentious. It’s not a show, but a showering of love that can come only from the One who looks beyond the outward appearance and loves us for what we can be in Him.