This morning we attended church with Mitchell’s aunt and family. When we arrived, the pastor and associate pastor wanted to show us and Mitchell’s dad around again. They took us around to several Sunday School classrooms. Many of the adult classes were located in various sections of the church auditorium. The youth met in the balcony. They have a breeze way at the back of the church, which is where the children met. They also had a new believers class meeting in the partially constructed SS building. After our tour, we were taken to Mitchell’s aunt’s SS class.
I know many people want to know how different the church service was from an American service. To tell you the truth, about the only difference was the language. Mitchell and I both recognized many of the tunes that were being sung though we of course did not recognize the words. Before attending this service, we thought Bruce was the KING of long announcements.....BUT to all the Central folks, Bruce is merely an understudy. Announcements went on for a while. We thought the guy making them was teaching or preaching until Mitchell’s dad leaned over and told us that he was making the next week’s announcements. Computer geeks must run in Mitchell’s family because when we arrived at church this morning, we noticed Mitchell’s cousin was operating the computer for the projection system. For those of you that don’t go to Central, Mitchell does this same job at our church.
To wrap up this blog, I want to leave you with some differences we did notice about a Vietnamese church compared to our church, Central.
#1: Offering was taken in fish nets by three men and three women.
#2: They have women deacons.
#3: No padded pews (This is everywhere though. Most seats period do not have
padding.)
#4: Men and women set on different sides of the church. Sunday School is also
split up except for the little kids.
#5: There was no type of invitation as far as we could tell. However, one girl was
saved and came forward after the prayer to make it public. How it was made
public is hard to explain on here. It was very different.
