Going to Church in Chinese!

On Friday, Patty helped me hunt down a Chinese-English Bible, so I figured I was armed to go to a Chinese-speaking church this Sunday. The church I attended turned out to be a Baptist church, and a very large one, but I think I was the only foreigner there, nonetheless. The service started with worship, and I was relieved to find that it was all fairly easy for me to understand. The prayers and the songs were fairly repetitive by nature, so what I didn't catch the first time around, I felt pretty good about the third or fourth. I don't really know many church words in Chinese, but I do know the word for "create" (chuangzao), and it was allll over the place in the prayers, so I was pretty on top of that situation. The song lyrics were projected up on a big screen in the front, so that wasn't too bad either. The words usually go fairly slow when you're singing (esp. church music), so there is plenty of time to read the lyrics for those of us who aren't fast readers in Chinese. It was a little bit of an adventure in traditional characters. Interestingly, a lot of the worship music is of English-language origin, translated into Chinese. We even sang a song that I knew from PCC (the one that goes "from the mountains to the valleys/hear our praises rise to you"), translated into Chinese, which was a lot of fun for me.

So the worship part was pretty neat, and generally easy for me to understand. The sermon was kind of another story. I got out my new Chinese-English Bible to look at the reading, but they said the reference in Chinese, so I didn't know where to turn. Fortunately a nice girl in front of me turned around and whispered "Genesis 12!" While most of the books of the Bible are translated phonetically, it turns out that Genesis is translated literally as chuangshiji, lit. 'record of the world's creation.' Probably wouldn't have been able to find that one by myself. Anyway, the sermon was full of words I didn't know, so I concentrated really hard and just tried to get the gist of things. The pastor talked with his hands a lot, which helped. There were a couple of words that I heard over and over that I didn't know, so I wrote them down and asked Patty what they meant ("prayer" and "praise," as it turns out). After the service, I chatted a little bit with the nice gal in front of me, and she invited me out to lunch with her friends. Her name was Helen, and it turned out that she had lived in California for 11 years, so her English was very good. I had a nice time chatting with some other church ladies at lunch, and now I've been invited to like 4 different small groups, total. I doubt that my Chinese language skills would be up to participating in a Bible study, but maybe I will give it a try sometime. Everybody promises that they will speak slow and translate a little to help me understand.

I won't be in town next weekend (Fulbright conference in Taipei!), but I think I'll try to keep going to Chinese-language church and working to improve my comprehension. Even though the language is different, what struck me was how much of my experience on Sunday transcended language. Even when I didn't understand all the words, the spirit of worship was as palpable and as powerful as in any English-speaking church, and the disjointed pieces of the sermon that I managed to catch still resonated with me. I would recommend it to anyone.