We hear from Jemima Firman who has just finished her nine month Stride placement in Brazil and Bolivia.
I write this piece to you many miles above the Atlantic Sea, in flight on my way back home to London in an obnoxiously large Bolivian poncho!
As a language student of Spanish and Portuguese, I am required to spend my third year abroad and I knew fairly early on that I wanted to do something faith-based, that allowed me to experience church cross-culturally.
“Nothing I had imagined matched the totally immersive and transformative nine months that awaited me.”
Going into it, I knew that I would be working in social care projects for children, but I had little knowledge of what this would look like. Perhaps this was for the best; if someone had told me last August that I would be leading English lessons, devotionals for staff, all-age services or have to nurse a severely burnt puppy back to health, I definitely would have recoiled with nerves.
I now believe that everyone should have the opportunity of spending time abroad. From the little adjustments of having to throw toilet paper in the bin, or shower at least once (but preferably twice) every day to avoid total Brazilian horror, to the impacts of full-blown culture shock; it definitely uncovers what’s at the core of who we are.
This is something that has really rung true to me with regards to church culture. On arriving in Brazil, I reflected that the evangelical church was generally a lot louder than I was used to. I found the slightly ear-deafening worship and shouting preachers quite confrontational and would mentally disassociate from them, often allowing myself to believe that they were worshiping the expressive, Brazilian God and I the meditative, peaceful English God. This took a while for me to shift, and I still would say that I feel calmest in more gentle approaches, yet it helped me to deconstruct all the preferences that we unconsciously feel necessary to be able to connect with God.
“I will always be hugely grateful to God for being given the opportunity to see the world with a splash more colour.”
It’s helped me to see a slice of the great diversity and character of God’s church that is not reduced to just one particular style or country. They say that our culture is the lens through which we see the world and although there have been some tough moments in the last nine months (and some even tougher goodbyes), I will always be hugely grateful to God for being given the opportunity to see the world with a splash more colour.
