Romanian Church (Joni)

I have so many pictures to share with you all of the many things we have done in the past few days! But I don't want to overwhelm you all at once, so I'll split it into several posts over the next couple of days. I'll do them in chronological order, so first I'll tell you about the church we visited Sunday morning. We went to our first Romanian-speaking church with our boss and his wife, Ghena and Alina. This is also the church Kelly goes to, and Valentina from our office attends here too. So there was a pretty big representation from CAMED this week at Jesus Savior Church in Chisinau!

This is the biggest church we've been to so far - it was a huge building and the place was packed! We sat up in the balcony, so we had a full view of all that was going on both on stage and in the audience. It was so neat!

Ghena kindly agreed to translate the sermons for us. (Note that I said "sermonS." In all the churches we've been to so far, there have been more than one sermon - some of them even had three! The worship services all last at least 2 hours. Much different from American churches that are tied to the clock!) So we sang a lot of songs in Romanian, the choir performed some lovely pieces, and Ghena translated the first short sermon. Then we sang some more and it came time for the second sermon. Ghena prepared to translate for us again, but then we noticed that two men stood up at the pulpit - one of them to translate for the other! Then, the preacher began to speak - IN ENGLISH! He was a visiting pastor from Indiana, and so we got to hear a sermon in American English! Very cool and it blessed us immensely. Another good thing about it for me was that it actually helped my language some, because I heard a sentence in English, then got to hear it translated into Romanian. I was excited about how many words I could pick out in the Romanian, even though he was speaking very fast.

So it was a neat experience for us to be attending church with friends and to get to hear a sermon in English! We'll definitely visit there again.