Church in Masiphumelele

There is a place that I visited Sunday morning that I had been hearing about from people in Brentwood over and over called Masiphumelele. This is an impoverished village in Cape Town filled with shacks, trash and too many people. Towards the middle of Masiphumelele, there is a church. The church is nothing fancy either; just a small, one-floor building but differing from most of the other places around it because of its concrete walls. As our team of white Nashvillians and Living Hope Volunteers began to file out of the van and walk toward the main room of the church I could hear the growing sound of singing coming from the windows. So, by the time that I finally reached my seat, wide-eyed, the sound of the church was at a full level; rich and foreign to my ear. The people in the community of Masi have the reputation of their voices but it was more like standing under the waterfall instead of just looking at the picture. I had heard their voices on a cd that Dennis Worley gave me before I left, but as he told me before, “You won’t really grasp the full talent and volume of the church until you are actually there.” Dennis is right. The sound of their voices is, in a word: raw. Raw, but in perfect pitch and harmony.
In between each song (that none of us understood because it was in either Afrikans or Kosa) a member would stand up and address the rest of the church about how God was leading and guiding their life and thanked him for all of his wonderful blessings he gave them every day. After church, these people would return to their homes made with scrap metal and spare boards, but still they sang. One worn elderly woman to my left held a small cushion in her hand that she would “clap” with her other hand to keep rhythm. Therefore, technically this woman could have been the leader of “the Masi percussion department.” The cushion had been smacked so many times that the stitches around the cracking leather was giving way and parts of the cotton hemorrhaged out of the corner like an old teddy bear. The men and women of Masi danced in the seats when they sang, and although the language was different, those that couldn’t sing could still clap along with the rhythm, and I couldn’t help but think about that even clapping my hands to songs such as these was worship because God is perfectly lingual and speaks in ways that aren’t always spoken. I sat next to Danielle and in the middle of a song she motioned for me to look over to a little girl wearing a pink hooded sweatshirt; she couldn’t have been much older than 2 or 3. She didn’t clap or sing, but her eyes were memorizing the whole scene. The girl was watching her mother worship. Danielle leaned over to me and said, “That little girl is learning more about worship right now than any classroom will ever teach her.” I think I did too.
The group left before the sermon (also due to the language barrier) but as we snuck out of the sanctuary I felt humbled, joyful and appreciative for the experience that I had at Masi listening to the bittersweet choir.