My family and I were recently on holiday. We always attempt to find a suitable church to attend whilst we are away. Obviously, when you are abroad, this is harder – particularly when you are as linguistically challenged as we are! Nevertheless, we don’t want our children to think that a holiday is a break from Christ and his people. Worship remains important. So, inasmuch as it is possible for us, we try to find somewhere to go on a Sunday.

Happily, we did find a good church to attend. It was an international church that was English-speaking. We were in a major capital city – one whose inhabitants typically all seem to speak English as a second (incredibly proficient) language – so it wasn’t utterly strange to find such a place. Here, in no particular order, were some encouraging things.

Essentially the same

I appreciate we were not in a place that was culturally as alien to the UK as one might get. It was still ultimately a majority white, Northern European, modern metropolitan area. We were hardly traversing the most far-flung cultural differences. Further to that, the church seemed to be led by Americans who, though probably more culturally different to us than the indigenous inhabitants of the place we were in, are still rightly and properly called cousins of the UK. So, we have to accept that cultural leaps we might have needed to make would always have been minimal even in their most extreme forms. But it was nevertheless encouraging to go and find – even in another country with different culture and customs – church largely looked the same. We sang (often very familiar) songs, we prayed, we heard the word read and preached. Everything was happily familiar, properly biblical and encouraging to see that wherever one might be in the world biblical churches look similar.

Same but different

And yet, for all the similarities, there were differences. Nothing major, nothing beyond what you might have seen done in other places, but different to what we do nonetheless. Instead of the led prayer followed by open congregational prayer that we do, all the prayers were led from the front. Instead of the sermon at the front end of the service where we put it, it was at the end of the service where lots (most?) churches traditionally put it. The church itself was bigger in number so necessarily operated and felt slightly different to our much smaller, more intimate gathering. There were a bunch of other things. None of them are significant or serious deviations – and I’m certainly not suggesting we are somehow the model norm – but it is always worth noticing that not everything is, or has to be, the same.

This sort of thing – particularly when the differences are much bigger and perhaps more significant in their impact – gives a good opportunity for discussions with our children. What did you notice that was different? Why do you think they did it like that? Why do we do it differently in our church? What does that tell us about biblical instructions about worship (and, more broadly, biblical commands/instructions/principles altogether)?

On that last one, it gives us an opportunity to reaffirm the case that the Bible was written for all people in different times and places with their own cultures. If it was written solely from the minds of men from a particular cultural standpoint, we would expect to see (as we often do in other texts) instructions rooted in times and places that are virtually impossible to replicate with any credibility in other times, places and cultures. The Bible is written in such a way that even its instructions and commands are able to be understood across cultures so that the same principles are applied in contextually appropriate ways. This gives us a powerful argument (I think) that an eternal God who knows both the future from the past, and every culture that will ever exist in time, stands behind the text that applies properly and credibly across them all.

Tribes, tongues and nations

This one comes less as a surprise to us, being as we belong to a church made up of people from various tribes, tongues and nations already. Nevertheless, it is always encouraging to be in another country full of a different set of tribes, tongues and nations who are all also worshipping the same God and saviour, Jesus Christ. It never fails to encourage me and fill me with such excitement for the New Creation that it will be full of all kinds of people from everywhere. It is always a joy to get a little foretaste of that just by visiting a local church here and now.