Happy New Year!

No, it’s not a typo (or an excuse for this delayed 1000:1 e-mail). Yesterday and today are the respective Vietnamese and Chinese New Years. Growing up in the middle of Iowa, I had no idea until today how fun a New Year’s celebration can be. In my past it was always the New Year’s Eve that was the real holiday. My family would join the other families in our bible study group and all of us would do a progressive dinner, traveling to each family’s house at some time in the night for a different course. Even in recent years, New Year’s Eve is the holiday; New Year’s day is simply a day off of work.

This morning one of my housemates (Vy) took me and six of our friends to worship with him at First Vietnamese United Methodist Church here in Chicago. Vy has attended this church for most of the year, in a large part because he’s interviewing different generations of Vietnamese christians for his Senior Ministry Project. I’d met the pastor before today and have even heard Vy’s recorded interview of him. That being said, I shouldn’t have been as shocked as I was about the type of community I witnessed and enjoyed:

When I first walked in the door I saw men dressed up in suits and women in traditional (and beautiful!) Vietnamese dresses. The bulletin I picked up while entering the sanctuary was filled with 90% of the words in Vietnamese. Vy had an encouraging and apprehensive look on his face … one that few people can pull off as well as Vy. Someone handed me a lifesaver as I stepped into the row of seats: a headset. For any tech geek, headsets are new things to play with; in this case, though, I took extra-special care of it. I even made sure to turn it off during the songs, just to make sure that the battery didn’t fail on me during the sermon. Yes, these headsets had people on the other end translating the service into English. HOW COOL IS THAT?!? It’s the first bilingual service I’ve attended that showed this much care for visitors.

As you can probably guess from that last paragraph, this congregation does technology better than most churches. The graphics on-screen were clean, there were few “hiccups,” and the technology that was used aided the service instead of detracting from it. I realized something else from the headphones situation: this is BY FAR the best way to do bilingual services when you have a minority of attendees speaking only one language. Most of the people in the congregation (at least those under 50), speak English, but the sermons and songs switch back and forth between languages, and in doing so, they preserve both languages within the community life. Having someone on the other side of the microphone concurrently translating created a tighter relationship than what happens in many bilingual services where people don’t know both languages; in those instances, most of the content is said twice — first in one language and then the other. What I experienced this morning, however, was a translator speaking directly into our ears and occasionally looking above his desk to make sure it was clearly coming across. It was a dialogue; it was great!

My favorite translator was a kid — probably around 16 years old — who would occasionally throw in funny phrases. At one point, he had me laughing so much that Vy turned around and glared at me … priceless! The kid’s name was Oliver and some of his memorable phrases include:

[While starting the congregational praise-song singing session] “Don’t worry, there’ll be English songs, I’m sure!”

[Oliver missing what the minister said] “Umm … don’t worry about that. Oh yeah …” [then picking up the sermon again] ” … he said something like ‘walking by faith will include this choice of obeying'”

“Now is the time for people in the community to stand up and give testimony. OH WAIT! Never-mind that, it’s offering time.”

“When you’re leaving the sanctuary, please hand your headsets to the tall Asian kid in the red shirt. Yeah, that one … the one waiving his hand.”

Having a personal translator is SO fun. Besides getting [most of] the message across, the translator can keep people attentive better than many ministers. At first I hesitated on wearing the headset: wasn’t it going to distract from the worship WITH the congregation? Wasn’t the headset going to set us apart as visitors? Luckily, the second question wasn’t really an issue since we were obviously visitors. Also, since it was an obvious, intentional ministry the congregation provides, listening through the headsets was a better way of attending to the worship with the congregation than disregarding the headsets. Needless to say, I enjoyed the community and its wonderful potluck of Vietnamese food afterwards.

On another note, I need to explain the picture above. Chicago gets snow. Last week, in particular, we had enough snow and enough wind to cause huge drifts. My car was covered to the point of leaving only two inches in the middle uncovered by the snow. After the plows finally came through Hyde Park (there’s a rumor Mayor Daly hates our neighborhood … who knows!), they pushed the snow up higher and the drift came to the start of my driver’s side window.

This afternoon, after a relaxing grocery shopping session (in which someone else obviously drove), I took 30 minutes and dug my car out with a shovel. I still didn’t completely remove the three inches of snow on top of the car, but the wheel wells and case are no longer encased in the iced-up white powder. All of that white snow beside the car was connected to it this morning. (Clicking through the picture’s link will give you a bigger view.)

So, Happy New Year! And, hopefully none of you are entrenched with snow beyond what you can handle!

Peace and Blessings,

Adam