A Rabat Church

One of my friends here is pretty religious, and has been going to church every Sunday. I thought it would be interesting to see how Church was conducted in a mostly Muslim country, so I went along with her. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was that everyone was talking in English. This was really strange to me... in Morocco, if people aren't speaking Arabic they're speaking French. That's just how its been. But here we were greeted with a Good Morning and everyone was speaking English. I guess it was the choice of service we were going to. It is called "Rabat International Church" and considered itself "Multi-denominational" and "Multi-ethnic." When I look around, I see the most white people I have seen in Rabat, with almost the same number of Black Africans and then quite a few Asians. I did not see a single Moroccan. I think that's mostly because there are so few Moroccan Christians, but also because the service was in English. I also think that the fact that it was not majority Black African is due to the fact that it was in English, French services seem to be mostly Black African here. It was different than other services I've gone to, since we only sang one hymn and the rest were just Christian songs (very upbeat) and instead of an organ we had a guitar player, that just gives a different feel to a service. It was also interesting what the pastor chose to preach about. He took a part of Matthew and explained how it's more important to make sure you truly believe in your heart than performing the actions of Christianity. It was really interesting to me because Islam (and for that matter Judiasm) is very different in that way: a lot of religion has to do with doing the right actions and doing the actions is then supposed to lead to the right mental state. Christianity seems to encourage religion to go the other way. It made me think of a piece we read about Islamic women where a woman was trying to learn to be modest and how she became modest at heart by first acting modest. It was especially interesting because the part of Matthew that the pastor preached about is when Jesus tells a certain group that they don't need to wash their hands before a meal and how Jesus says its not what you eat that makes you unclean but what you say. This struck me as interesting since ritual washing is so important to Islam, and eating clean food is so important to both Islam and Judaism. Overall it was a very nice service, partly because it was so laid back. Afterwards I went with a group to have brunch at a restaurant and I got to find out their stories. It was interesting to see why people had come to Morocco, from working with organizations that helped handicapped children to learning Arabic to simply wanting to live abroad. I think the most interesting thing was when my friend and I both talked about our love of the hammam. I guess that all of the people I'd gone hammaming with had been so open to it and ok with being naked that I had forgotten how strange it is to Western culture. They were a little shocked that I wanted to take my mom with me. Overall, it was nice to meet other English speakers actually living in Rabat. Sometimes we kind of get in a little bubble around our lives at the center and with our families.