I love the Dominican church in Cielo. It was here, after our last service worshipping with them, that it hit me how much I loved this country and these people. The people of this church are one of the best examples I’ve seen showing that we don’t material blessing to be faithful, joyful, and satisfied in Christ.
This truth is expressed the most to me in their worship. There is so much energy in their worship and praise, and it’s not just because of the style of music. There is an honesty and genuineness motivating their worship, with no sign of pretense. They sing with all they have and dance for our King because they truly love Him and know that He is worthy. Unlike us, they have not always been secure and fairly certain of having what they needed in the future. Rather, they have had to rely and depend on God, and through this have seen His faithfulness in providing. And so praise out of honest thanksgiving and love. One man in particular just embodies this feeling and personality. He’s an older man, and I don’t know his name, but he gave us so much joy as we watched him just dance and sing, earnestly praising our God for his goodness every single time we worshipped together. You have no idea how happy it made us to see a grown man just dance for the Lord, and we just know that it flows from love and true joy from the Father, not some kind of attempt to look good.
This honest desire to praise was also very apparent the first Wednesday that we were there. It just so happened that the Thursday of that week was a national holiday, Corpus Christi day, or the Body of Christ day. The church, which normally has church on Wednesday night, responded by making the service much longer, continuing to praise God long after the Americanos left – until midnight or one in the morning, simply because they could and they wanted to. I pray that such a spirit invades the American church, which is truly a part of the same body, serving the same God, our Big God. May we understand our God’s love and glory so well that we would just follow the Spirit sometimes and keep praising because He deserves it.
The genuine nature of the worship is solidified to me by the level of participation which the members of the church have in the service. Almost every Wednesday service a group or individual gets up to perform. I’ve heard some beautiful songs that way, and watched a group of girls do a choreographed dance complete with white gloves and black lights. The members of the church are in charge of the band (which is extremely talented) and the singing, and often others preach besides the pastor. In fact, the pastor doesn’t have to do that much because the congregation participates and basically runs the service. I know it’s partly because the Americans were there, but I only heard the church’s pastor preach one time, not because he’s lazy (no way!), but because he didn’t need to.
While of course this church has its flaws as does any human-run organization, when I’m there I am faced with a realness and naturalness of God that I think we sometimes lose in our perfectly planned and laid out services and our inhibitions about really letting lose in worship. I think that if we really faced our true God, our inhibitions would disappear, as did Isaiah’s when he entered the throne room, and we would worship. But only the Holy Spirit can reveal this true God to us – so let’s start praying!
This video doesn't convey it very well or do their worship justice by a long shot, but you'll get a little taste. This is us singing "How Great is Our God" in Spanish. After the video is finished, they actually change and sing the chorus in English just for us Americanos, then it changes to "How Great Thou Art," in Spanish of course. It was awesome.
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