Letters from Overseas

July 2008

• Conselho Cristao de Mocambique
  Zambezia, Sector de Comunicacoes
  Ave Julius Nyerere 948, CP 400
  Quelimane MOCAMBIQUE

They broke bread [from house to house] and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day [God] added to their number those who were being saved.

Acts 2:46–47

These verses from the start of the book of Acts show Christians (though they weren't yet known by that name) in the earliest days, before what we would call a "church" existed, in the sense of a designated building, hierarchical administrative structure, and established dogma. Ever since then, that's always what has best made churches grow: glad and generous hearts praising God and building goodwill.

The church where we worship on Sundays, when we're not called to some other ecumenical program, is a congregation of the Evangelical Church of Christ in Mozambique; in Portuguese, IECM. We last wrote about it in February 2004. Swiss and Scotch missionaries founded IECM over 90 years ago, in the interior highlands of Zambezia province. It's closest in governance, doctrine, and worship practice to the Methodist and Presbyterian churches in Mozambique. All its leaders now are Mozambican, and have been for two generations.

When Mozambique's civil war ended in 1993, the IECM was worshipping with the Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Methodists in the abandoned 18th-century Roman Catholic cathedral on the Quelimane waterfront. Gradually each of these built its own modest stick-and-mortar church in barrios farther from the city centre. The handful of IECM folk started up on their own in a storefront which they borrowed on Sundays, on its long, narrow front veranda—the same building where we still worship now, on Julius Nyerere Avenue near the CCM office. Most were refugees from central Zambezia and other Mozambican provinces.

PEDRA girls on the IECM veranda.

The veranda is about two metres wide, a dozen metres long, and seats about 50 on its wooden benches. You see one end of it in the photo in those simpler early-book-of-Acts days of 2004—the veranda's total width, the pulpit with the cross-and-crown IECM emblem, the stacked benches, the PEDRA girls at the communion table which they've turned and moved forward, cutting and pasting biblical landscapes from dried banana leaves. Now that's communion.

The congregation didn't have, still don't have, a pastor of their own. Lay members take turn preaching, reading the psalm, announcing, leading the liturgy, organizing work bees and visits to the sick, and attending monthly meetings of the synod. Just before the service a small and varying group meets—various elders, women, men, and youth—to sort out who'll do what that day. (Try preaching on 10 minutes’ notice. In Portuguese.) About 10 children aged four to 14 come to Sunday school at 8:00 a.m. (worship starts at 9:00), and sing at most Sunday services. About twice that many youth aged 16 to 24 turn up each Saturday afternoon for choir rehearsal, and always sing on Sunday. Almost always it's one of the youth who leads the service; they make up about half the congregation.

Fifteen years ago as postwar resettlement continued, many IECM members and others displaced from rural districts moved into rapidly expanding Quelimane suburbs. In the next few years the tiny original group at Julius Nyerere Avenue planted and tended three congregations in three different suburbs, all of which still are thriving, and all of which now are much larger than the mother congregation. We ourselves first came to worship here because we were invited, and stayed because of that inspired volunteer goodwill, the glad and generous hearts, and because they invited the PEDRA program in, and it stayed for two years on that narrow veranda till it got its own building. Today there's an IECM minister for Quelimane, and currently a student minister too. They've kept up contact with the Scots and especially the Swiss, who visit periodically.

They'd like to build a church in the yard in front of the veranda. They've started up a little building fund, and started collecting sand and stone and making hand-built cement blocks which they stockpile in a growing mound outside the veranda grates. But it's going to be a modest affair. No one in the congregation has much money, just stubborn faith and energy, and their priority has always been the spiritual health of new congregations. They've just started up another congregation in a nearby district—inaugurated last Sunday—among people they've been ministering to who have been displaced permanently to unfamiliar uplands from low Zambezi river islands in this year's disastrous flooding.

We feel blessed to be living among people who live as if at the start of the book of Acts. We are witnessing first-hand the way the church began. Maybe the church is healthiest that way, closest to the ways of Jesus Christ as Mark of the earliest gospel describes, before Saul became Paul and invented Christianity, and congregations moved to expensive buildings, and bishops and bureaucracies took over and made the church an institution.

In mission and service,
Karen and Bill Butt

Karen and Bill Butt are United Church of Canada Overseas Personnel serving with Conselho Cristao de Mocambique in Mozambique. The work of this ecumenical partner and the work of overseas personnel are made possible through your gifts to the Mission and Service Fund of The United Church of Canada.