This Sunday, Church Crawler took a break – a well deserving break and made its way to an Orthodox church.
Tell your neighbour – Orthodox church. Good!
Trust me, I’ve not recovered from the experience. Bethel Baptist Church, Tanke Ilorin is a stone throw from my house so it was very easy to make that decision when I had to visit an Orthodox church but I was shocked throughout the service. The Church can’t exactly be categorised as an Orthodox church due to a few Pentecostal doctrines that had become a part of the church. So, can we call it a “pentedox church”. Fine? Good.
Another thing about this church was its culturality. This wasn’t exactly a Yoruba church but due to the fact that it was in a Yoruba community and yeah, a pentedox church, there were several sprinkles of Yoruba tradition all over the place.
I almost cried when I discovered we would spend 30 minutes at the beginning of the service for Sunday School. All ye new age Pentecostals can’t relate but Sunday school is like a Sunday pre-service when the church is broken into several smaller classes for a 30-minute to 1-hour in-depth study of the Bible after which the service can now begin.
Since it is an Orthodox church, you shouldn’t be amazed to know that the service began with a Hymn. Fam, I just stood there with all my new age Pentecostalism and joined in the Hymn as it was projected. By the way, the Church has a projector (another pentecostalist attitude). Okay, so this is not a battle of Pentecostalism against Orthodoxism and if you think it is, please go wash your head in river Jordan. (Yeah, another sign I was at a Baptist Church this Sunday). Please forgive me.
The praise and worship was kinda lit. One reason I enjoyed it was that it had a touch of spontaneity. I love spontaneous worship. I believe that sometimes, our quest for excellence and beautiful music gives too much order to our worship. But, I missed my Hillsong, Bethel Music, Elevation Worship, Nathaniel Bassey and co. Many of our songs were Yoruba songs – the core ones at that. I would need a week dose of listening to just Hillsong and Elevation Worship to detox my system. By the way, in case you don’t have an idea of what those names I mentioned earlier represent, you might need a Gospel Music 101 master class session from me after this. Just See Me after the service.
We also had a speech from the chairman. Believe me, I hadn’t heard anything like that in such a long time.. Chairman’s speech in church?? The beautiful thing is he inserted Pentecostal words like “Hallelujah”, “yeah” and “tell your neighbours”. That “tell your neighbour part” was really cute because I was sitting beside a lady until it wasn’t. Within the 15 minutes of the chairman’s speech, we had done over 10 tell your neighbours and I was getting tired of telling my neighbour anything.
Testimonies at an Orthodox church isn’t always a pleasant experience. It’s always a battle of who can sing the best and the longest. Sigh!
Somehow, the prayer session was characterised by silent prayers. I don’t know the reason behind this but unlike where I come from where prayer suddenly jerks us into high spirits of skabashing, everyone here just stayed in their lane and prayed quietly.
There was no word session as it was a drama service so we watched a drama. The drama was about salvation, the politics that happens in the church. I’m not going to go through that rigorous experience of recounting the drama again.
The service ended but not after we had spent almost 1 hour past the scheduled time. Sigh! These churches sef.
Till I attend that church and church crawler crawls into your church, better be prepared, “for the hour cometh…
