Hello all,
For this post, I will use pictures and videos to tell the story. These are from St. Andrew’s Cathedral (Anglican Diocese of Western Tanganyika). The worship service was an opening to the triennial Diocesan Synod Conference. It also included confirmation of over 300 people. Several choirs sang. I lead one song, as I noted in my previous post. And as you can see in the pictures, it was a large congregation. I’m sure more than 1000 people were attending.
St Andrew’s Choir
Ebenezer Choir – AKA Let the Children Dance!!
Ngoma (Dance) Choir – A choir performing local traditional East African dance in worship
Note: 11 minutes and 20 seconds in, you will see me come up and dance with them.
Assembling the Synod
Confirmations
When Bishops Meet!
So! Let me catch up on things. After the Wednesday – Thursday sick days, on Friday, I accompanied Bishop Bwatta to a confirmation and ordination service at Nyumbigwa Parish. I’ve been to this parish before, once for an outdoor service last year. I was asked to sing at this service, but here was the surprise. After the reading of the Gospel, I was asked to come forward to preach the sermon. Spoiler alert! I was unaware I was to be the preacher at this service. You could imagine my surprise, which I had to keep much to myself. So, what do I do? I just grabbed hold of the scripture that we just read and let the Lord guide me. Now, I’ve been asked to speak ad-hoc on Faith Alive weekends, but even with those, one mentally prepares to be asked to speak. That’s part of the Faith Alive experience: to be ready at any time to give a witness to the work of the Lord in your life. So that’s what I did. I related the passages to my experiences of living by faith. It was not a long sermon, but the outcome seemed to work. Even so, I will let Bishop Bwatta know that in the future, if I have not asked him what the scriptures are for the service, I probably did not know or have heard that I am to be the preacher for the service. I’ll bet he mentioned it briefly while I was going into fever brain fog.
Saturday was a day to relax and watch all of the activities and preparations related to the Synod meeting, which starts with tomorrow’s worship services. I’ll be attending the second service at 9 AM. I’m not preaching! (Praise God!) I will lead a worship song. I’ve picked out “Glorious” by Chris Tomlin. This is the one time I’ll keep the words to the chorus in English. I tried a few translations, but the Swahili words don’t sound right in the melody. The good thing is that there will be plenty of people there who know enough English to follow along. The chorus is really simple: “Glorious over us; You shall reign glorious”. I’ve got soundtracks to accompany me along with my guitar. It should be great to worship the Lord with them. There will be at least a thousand or more people there. There will be something like 500+ pastors and other leaders attending along with their spouses and the regular congregation. I’m looking forward to it and practicing a lot throughout the day.
If I have energy left, I’ll try to recap the service on Sunday evening. I bet it will be a multi-hour service. I’ll let you know.
Thanks for the prayers while I was recovering from the fever. The Lord bless you all!
Canon Bill