Morning Worship

Singing has already begun when we drive through the entry gates  Iglesia Christiana Verbo a few minutes after 9.  

Inside, keyboards, drum, guitar bounce sounds off the green walls as 700 people clap and tap their feet to songs of praise and of longing. The opening song: Si, Senior. Si si, senior. Amen. (Yes, Lord, yes, yes Lord. Amen.) A white-haired man in the front row waves a shirt aloft and dances. Some arms are upraised, some heads bowed. On the projection screens, Spanish words appear. A cross-covered globe rotates behind them.

Padded brown folding chairs on a painted cement floor fill the wide and shallow sanctuary, cooled by eight air-conditioners near white ceiling tiles. An hour later songs give way to announcements. First-time visitors are applauded section by section and an usher shakes their hand in welcome. Members walk to the platform to present their offerings, and the message begins.

“Apart from me you can do nothing,” the pastor reads from John 15:46. And then its counterpoint in Galatians: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” He talks, and around me black-haired men and women in crisply pressed skirts and dress shirts listen, nod, take notes. An elderly man at the end of our row dozes momentarily mid-sermon, then stirs himself awake.

The sermon circles like a row of chickens on a rotisserie, repeating the theme in multiple ways with varying examples. The sermon ends in prayer: Lord, we recognize our weakness and your strength. There is none like you. Give us the power to meditate and to change. It’s why you died. Take control, Lord. Thank you Lord.

Amen, he says, and we depart into the already-hot 11 a.m. sun.

Half-a-globe away this morning, my congregation worships amid padded pews, carpet, and a towering vaulted ceiling. The projected words are English, the message is more linear, the theology more honed, the music more sedate, the service shorter. And after one hour instead of two, they exit into frozen snow.

But we share same rotating globe.

We are covered by the same cross.

Si, Senor. Amen