Last Day in Goma

19 October 2008

On Sunday, the final full day our team spent in Goma, each American went with one of the ALARM staff to his/her church. I attended Pastor Kivi’s church, which was a small congregation of forty people. We worshipped in a halfway-completed building located in the middle of the slum of Goma. When I first entered the church, there were only a few children playing between the wooden pews. Since we were waiting for church to start, I called the children together around three drums sitting in the front and we started making music together. I would start beating a rhythm on one drum and have one child repeat the sound, while I went to the second drum and repeated the process until all three children were making a melodic rhythm together in succession. I started dancing and singing, “Jesu” because it was the only word I knew that the kids would understand. I had such a great time watching the children laugh and play together. It is amazing to see how music truly is the universal language that surpasses cultural barriers and brings people of different backgrounds together.

The church meeting started after about a half-an-hour after which parishioners started entering the building to prepare for worship. Three worship teams sang and danced at the front of the church in praise to God. I could sense their reliance on the Lord for hope and joy. As in every case, all churches have their problems, but I could tell these people in their material poverty relied on the Holy Spirit for spiritual riches of joy as their strength.

Originally, I was invited to preach at the service by Pastor Kivi, but instead, when the time came during the service for the sermon, Kivi told me to remain seated. The sermon was on 2 Corinthians 8, which spoke about sacrificial giving by the Macedonians. I was quite surprised that Pastor Kivi called on his congregation, who were mostly impoverished, to give what they could to complete the church building. From what I understood, the members had not given since the previous year and needed to be reminded to give again so the church building could be finished. The most expensive pieces to the building were the corrugated metal sheets used for the roof.

Overall, my time in Goma, Congo was a wake up call to the diverse forms of poverty and hopelessness that exist in the world. There seemed to be few answers for the impoverished except that the violence in Goma caused by warlords would cease and the leaders of the city would come together with one mind to lift up the great burdens their community faces, which individually not one of them could bear alone.

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