This evening my co-tenant invited me to cell group. It was quite big for a cell group at about 50 people. Dinner was pot-luck, which turned out to be a huge spread. When the meeting started, I got my first culture shock – when somebody is speaking, after every phrase everyone said ‘amen’, like it was punctuation, during singspiration/prayer. They even repeated the song/hymn excessively like about 8 times, both fast and slow, then read out line by line a few times, and in the end only sang a total of one song which took 15-20 minutes. Oh yea, they also are still singing hymns from a hymn book; I scanned through and didn’t see many that I know. Then during prayer, people took turns to pray, and everyone helps ‘punctuate’ the phrases with ‘amen’, even though some of the phrases doesn’t need it. It’s not that I’m against saying ‘amen’ to confirm with another person’s prayer, but it is so unnecessary and super excessive the way they use that word.
However, they broke up into several smaller groups, and that was when things turned out better. Everyone took turns to read the lesson from the handouts. It was about group dynamics and why prayer meetings are important. Not everyone was fluent in English. I learned that prayer is necessary as an individual, but prayer meetings are meant to be a more powerful platform in which the church can gather to pray for things that are too big for one person to be responsible for, so that the church can move forward together in unity and in God’s will.
