I have a friend, Abwe Abedi, who arrived in Arkansas a few years back as a refugee. Before the pandemic, I had the chance to travel with him to Washington D.C. to advocate for refugee resettlement.
Abwe lived for 22 years in a refugee camp in Tanzania and worked as a tailor there. He also established churches in the camp and served as a pastor.
This past year he and his congregation fulfilled their dream of formally establishing a Swahili language worshipping community, God’s Grace Church of Fayetteville.
Today because I’m on a month long sabbatical I had the opportunity to worship with them. Their service starts at 10 a.m., just like our Lutheran congregation, so I had the real pleasure of imagining all of our people loading up and heading for worship as I jumped in my truck and headed for their service.
The congregation is not large… we were a group of about 25, with a stead flow of children moving in and out of a side room throughout the service.
But then it is only during the last few years that enough families have arrived from Swahili-speaking parts of the world to begin organizing into congregations. I believe there are now four Swahili language congregations in our town representing a variety of regions and traditions.
Worship began with a long set of praise and worship songs led by a group of three women. The congregation knows the songs by heart, no written music required. I had to unlearn some of my own rhythmic habits and join theirs in order to clap successfully. Because the repetition of choruses is intrinsic to the worship style, I was quickly able to pick up some of the songs and join along (I know a few words in Swahili, almost all worship related).
Two of us in the service were native English speakers. Gary, a man who had just been walking in the neighborhood, joined, Bible in hand. I guess he just started walking on a Sunday morning until he found a church.
The congregation after about 30 minutes of singing sang a song of welcome for us. The assistant pastor translated a lot of the transitional elements of the service for us,and he did a wonderful job of translating the sermon.
Abwe preached on the power of prayer. I loved the level of intertextuality he employed. Although he had a focus verse on prayer (Matthew 7:7, Christ’s encouragement to knock and ask for anything), he helped us think about prayer through stories from 1 Samuel and Esther, as well as prophetic texts like Jeremiah and Malachi.
In preparation for worship, Abwe e-mailed me the notes of his sermon so if I wanted I could use Google Translate to translate them into English. I also of course had my phone so could pull up the biblical texts as they were mentioned and read along in English while they read in Swahili.
There’s something powerful about a man who lived for 22 years in a refugee camp, always maintaining his hope and perseverance, sharing a word on prayer. I kept thinking: Abwe had so many reasons to doubt the effectiveness of prayer… the whole process of getting to where he is now was so slow… and yet here he is, pastoring a congregation, working as a tailor with Interform, raising his family. And I have no doubt if he were still in the camp today, he’d have the joy and hope that has maintained him.
I’m thankful for the hospitality of God’s Grace Church today. As is so often the case when I join worship in other languages (something you can find almost anywhere you live), I gained more understanding of my faith even if the specific words used were not linguistically comprehensible to me.
I highly recommend it. It’s a powerful way to give your Sunday morning to an expanded vision of the kin-dom of God.
Thanks for sharing this. You are so good at helping me get out of my bubble.