After taking a short break, I am getting back into gear with the “Journey Through The Faith” series. As I finish up my thoughts for the remainder of my faith journey, I wanted to offer you the last in a series of guest posts on some of my friend’s own faith journeys. The next three posts are from Carolyn Givens, a fellow Cairn alum, as she recounts her time spent in as a young expat in very different faith communities.
When I was nine years old, my family moved to Hong Kong for a year. Though a child of an internationally transient family, I, until that point, had grown up in a single church in the north central United States and had very little church experience outside our Baptist-in-name-and-form-but-not-denominationally-affiliated. My parents would probably not have defined themselves as fundamentalist Baptists, even my church may not have fit that definition, but it was definitely the direction my young ecclesiology leaned.
And then we went to Hong Kong.
To call that year’s church experience eclectic would be an understatement. Quite honestly, it was the best thing that ever could have happened to nine-year-old me. All the rules I’d built in my head of what church was and was supposed to be were thrown out the window by experience after experience.
We attended an Anglican church on Sunday mornings: a vicar, pulpit to the side of the altar, standard order of service, infant baptism, stone cathedral-like building, kneeling rail at the front for communion from a single cup (with wine!). Church there was about as far from what I had known as possible.
On those Sunday mornings I learned about the beauty of the liturgy. I learned that the old church traditions hold deep meaning and deep truth. And I learned these things in a church community where, as a Caucasian American, I was the minority. The people were Chinese, Indian, British, Canadian, Malaysian—and they all worshipped together. Two vivid memories stand out to me as the best examples of what was modeled to me in that church: grace and beauty.
One was when our good friends—the family that had introduced us to the church, likely the only other Americans there—had a baby son born. This family had come from a church tradition which practiced believer’s baptism. They wanted to dedicate their son, but did not want him baptized. So they approached the vicar with their conundrum. Without blinking, he offered to hold a service of dedication rather than a baptism. He understood that his congregation was made up of people who came from diverse backgrounds. He understood that it was truth taught and the body worshipping together that brought them. And he understood essentials and non-essentials of faith. He practiced grace.
The second memory was from Easter Sunday. Along with the gorgeous music, the violet hangings turned white, and the preaching of resurrection, there was ballet. Little Puritanical me was slightly shocked at first. And then, as I watched two women and their lithe movements, I saw art and beauty turned to worship. It sounds a bit silly today—when we see things like this quite commonly in many American churches, but in 1991, it was revelatory to me. I had no idea you could worship God by dancing. I had no idea how much He delighted in beauty.