Sweet Fellowship

I realize that not everyone reading this blog comes from the same religious or cultural background as I do. However, since many of you were raised attending American church services, I thought that finding out how Indian Christians worship might be at least semi-interesting to you all. And since I have a few fun pictures to go along with this subject, I have decided to dedicate this post to telling you about how my worship experiences in India have been so far.

Since coming to Mumbai, I've actually attended two different congregations in the city. Both of them bear the name "Church of Christ" and are involved with each other, even if they are not officially a part of a specific denomination. The first congregation I attended is the one that I will primarily be involved with, and is about a 20 minute bus ride from my flat. The group meets in a classroom of a school and averages 10 to 15 on Sunday mornings. Services are in Hindi, with occasional translation to English, and a few smatterings of songs in Marathi (the dialect spoken specifically in this part of the country.)

The second congregation I attended is located nearly 2 hours from my residence, making worshipping there on a regular basis unrealistic. The reason I even went to this church in the first place is because before coming to India, I had been in contact with the minister of the congregation. He invited me to come and visit them one Sunday, and even made the 4 hour roundtrip journey to pick me up and take me to services! I attended at this congregation my second week in India, and it was here that I experienced my very first Indian potluck! (More on that later.)

Both of the congregations conducted worship in similar manners, so after my first experience at church, I knew mostly what to expect. While some things are the same across the globe, I have noticed several major differences between American worship services that I have attended and Indian ones. First of all, while it's not explicitly demanded, in India most everyone removed their shoes for worship services. This is apparently partly due to the cultural element of Hindu temple worship and associating shoe removal with respect and sanctity of an act. Another difference is that men and women sit relatively segregated in the congregation. I think this goes along with the part of the culture that makes public displays of affection between men and women still extremely taboo. Regardless of the reason, it definitely makes it pretty difficult to identify family units! At first I wondered why the church had so many single individuals! Ooops! Finally, so far most every woman in the church that I have seen covers her head for the duration of the service. While I know this act is practiced in several congregations in the United States, I have personally never been a part of one that did, so this was a rather new experience for me. The nice thing about this is that the traditional Indian clothing makes covering one's head really easy, as most women already have a scarf with them, even if they didn't deliberately come to church prepared to wear one.

I think my favorite part of both of the churches I attended has been the singing. Rather than simply translating Western hymns into Hindi, the churches have their own, decidedly "Indian", songs they sing. Anyone who knows me knows I love music, so I am sure you understand when I say that I am really looking forward to learning these melodies and having a whole new set of songs to sing!

As I mentioned before, at the 2nd congregation I attended, we also had a potluck, complete with all kinds of wonderful, authentic Indian foods. While I have no idea what the name of anything I ate was, I can assure you that it was all really spicy, and really good!

All in all, I think church is going to be one of my favorite parts of being here. Not only does it give me a chance to practice my Hindi and get accustomed to the public transportation system here, but it helps me to see how universal faith can be and what a unifying factor it can become, even when crossing cultures as vastly different as those of America and India