March 3, 2019 -
“Here I am, here I stand, Lord. My life is in your hands” - William McDowell
It’s Sunday. Colleen came across an internet post showing a Christian service in English in this huge city. We decided to go.
We took a car across town and found ourselves in a area where embassys from around the world are located. The trees were old, big, and leafy. The streets, for Delhi , were in good shape and fairly clean. The temperature was mild. The cab driver dropped us in front of ‘Carmel Convent School’.
There was a guard at the gate. No church to be seen. He pointed across the playground to the doors of a small auditorium. We were late.
We were let in the back of a small school auditorium. Some plastic chairs were set up and there was a make shift altar in the front with a burgundy table cloth and a simple cross and candle. Musicians were singing. An Indian man, a Caucasian woman, an African American woman, and a Nigerian man.
The Australian pastor was offering comfort to the congregation. A young female African parishioner had just passed away after a battle with HIV. She was unaware she had the infection until it was too late. I learned later that some other African women in the crowd are also afflicted with the virus.
You looked around. The congregation was wonderfully diverse with people from around the world. There were people from India, Zimbabwe, North Korea , Japan, Yemen , Australia, South Africa, The Congo, America, and many more. It was inclusive, comforting, and profound.
Martin Luther King once commented that Sunday Morning was the most segregated hour in America. But not here. As the young woman sang the haunting refrain from William McDowell’s classic “I Give Myself Away”, you felt more power here than in St Paul’s Cathedral. It was intimate, honest, and beautiful. And it was quite unexpected in this vast city where your faith is very much the minority.
As I watched people mingle in the playground after the service I couldn’t help but think how much better we would be if our Sunday mornings in America were more like this one. People from all backgrounds meeting, talking, sharing, comforting, and laughing together. How many of our differences could be solved with just one hour a week like this one.
A postscript-
https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/the-radically-inclusive-christianity-of-rachel-held-evans
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