One of the great joys of being a Methodist Woman (in Britain) is being part of a fellowship that is worldwide. Every year we celebrate this with the World Fed Day – shorthand for the ‘World Federation of Methodist and Uniting Church Women’. It’s a day that brings together women from all over the country to think about something with a World Church theme.
This year, we did something a little different. Instead of talking with one another about the challenges of global living, we invited a speaker from the Global South to take our day. Out leader was Dr Nancy Day, a British Kenyan woman, worship leader and musician.
The theme was ‘embodied worship’ under the title of the old song, ‘You Put Your Whole Self In’. Nancy has recently completed a PhD in music contrasting the differences in the responses to music she sees in African and European people. She’s well placed to know about this as she trained as a classical performer in Kenya, singing Mozart operas on the stage. The differences she sees in the general approach to music she also sees in the way we respond through music in our worship. European people, she argues, do music (and the rest of worship) largely in their heads. But African people live out Paul’s words in Romans 12:1 that our whole bodies should be offered to God – ‘this is your spiritual worship’.
So we spent the day singing and dancing and praying – giving ourselves permission to be more free in the ways we express our spirituality in church. Actually, for many women it wasn’t the physicality that was new; rather, people shared their anxieties about the responses of the congregation around them when they act with greater freedom. The day liberated people to be more confident about their bodies in worship. It also gave us time to enjoy Paul’s writing as we used the framework of one of Nancy’s African worship songs to set his words to music. St Paul has always seemed a bit severe to me, so I am not sure what he’d have thought to see this roomful of women laughing happily as they wrestled with metre, rhythm and Romans! But, through this, we came to understand Paul more deeply…
It also challenged some of our pre-conceptions. Nancy showed a video she had made in her father’s village in rural Kenya. A little elderly woman was dancing her heart out, lost ‘in wonder, love and praise’. ‘How do we react to this?’, we were asked. To be fair, I think most of us thought what one bravely said: ‘It looks more like she’s in a nightclub than in a church’. Nancy helped us to understand that, in this, African perceptions were very different from European perceptions. In a traditional church in England the woman would probably be looked on askance; through an African lens, she was a paragon of spirituality.
I was a great day, partly because Nancy is a great spiritual leader as well as musical genius. She fills her talk with spiritual and scriptural insight, as well as knew knowledge and a lot of fun. At lunchtime, we were delighted to be able to use the Stamford Second Helpings café. The fellowship and the food were great – the puddings came from M&S!
Barbara Easton
