Carolyn Givens, a fellow Cairn alum, continues her reflection on time spent in Asia as a young expat in very different faith communities.
The year I was in fourth grade, my ecclesiological world burst open as, for the first time, I experienced church traditions outside the American, conservative, Baptistic church in which I was raised. I loved my church growing up, but when my family moved to Hong Kong for a year when I was nine, the door to my comfortable little church world was blown wide open—never to shut quite so tightly again.
I think my parents were intentional and deliberate in the choices they made for our family that year. They both had an appreciation for the diversity among the cultures of our world and the traditions of the Christian church. I think they wanted to share that appreciation with their children and used the year in Hong Kong to expose us to many things that were outside our comfortable little American Protestant bubble.
Following our Sunday mornings at a traditional Anglican church, we fellowshipped regularly on Sunday evenings with a different body. Broadly defined as “Evangelical Christian,” it was an eclectic mix of church traditions within. The congregation was primarily made up of Hong Kong Chinese and ex-patriots. Many of the expats were missionaries who gathered there on Sunday evenings because on Sunday mornings they were involved in leading church plants all over Hong Kong.
Our evening church met in an auditorium that belonged to either a hospital or a university—I never quite knew which. There were drums and guitars on the platform (remember, this is 1990, that was a big deal). We sang more praise choruses than hymns. The words were projected on a screen! And—most shocking of all to my nine-year-old self—people raised their hands and moved as they sang.
My North Central United States conservative Protestant background was not big on the Spirit. We tacitly acknowledged Him as a member of the Godhead, but He was kind of the rambunctious, unpredictable relative that you only invite on special occasions because you just never quite know what He’s going to do. God the Father, God the Son—they fit the strictures we built quite nicely, but the Spirit…that was dangerous territory.
I look back now at that congregation and chuckle a little at how shocked I was; frankly, it was all pretty tame. But I will never forget the feeling that the Spirit was there, that He was moving in the hearts of those in attendance, that He was living water and we were there for restoration.
We sang new songs and new hymns at that church. Many of them were penned in Britain and Australia, and sadly, only a few of them made it to the US in the following years. They had depth of meaning and strong biblical theology in them. I can’t help but think that if more had come along, our ’90s American church worship wars might not have been fraught with such ire—we might have seen that new songs can be written with musical depth and lyrical truth.