We’ve all heard about “worship wars”, where churches are forced to create extra services to accommodate the varying worship style preferences in a congregation. This seems to mostly be a “first world problem”, and often refers mostly to the musical aspect of the worship service. However, throughout the globe you’ll find a vast variety of elements and styles of music worship and Ecuador is no exception. For the most part, we have found that the congregations we have visited seem to focus heavily on loud, upbeat choruses with lots of themes relating to victory, salvation, and liberation. I am no theologian or official missiologist, but I do know that culture and history play roles in the themes certain cultures are drawn to.
Anyway, I am on a tangent. I mentioned all of the above to say in our experience here there are times where the music style pushes us out of our comfort zones and we can even get an exasperated attitude about it (pray for us!). In the church we are currently attending, for example, the worship leader seems to love repeating the refrains of songs over and over and over and over and over and over again. And then when he says “one more time!”, it usually means about 20 more times. I can tell this is meaningful for many of our fellow worshippers, but sometimes it gets to be a little bit much for me. To the point of being mildly comical. So yesterday morning was much the same, with a particular chorus we were singing. The refrain goes,
Que tu gracia llueva sobre mi
Que tu gracia llueva sobre mi
Que tu gracia llueva sobre mi
Bendito amor que me inundó
This is translated as, “Let your grace rain on me (3x), Blessed love that flooded me”. Not bad, as far as the lyrics go. But after singing it what seemed like a thousand times it sort of lost its meaning for me. However, all of a sudden the worship leader switched things up a bit. Now another thing you should know about our church that we LIKE, is that although it is an official Ecuadorian Covenant Church, it is quite international. There are a significant amount of members and attendees that hail from Venezuela and Colombia, among other places in addition to Ecuador. So, in the middle of repeating the refrain, the worship leader asked us to change the lyrics that we were singing to say instead of “Let your grace rain on ME”, to insert the name of the various countries that many people hailed from. It caught my attention in a new way and caused me to reflect on the situation of each country and pray for them as I sang the refrain. For example:
Let your grace rain on Ecuador- for earthquake recovery efforts
Let your grace rain on Venezuela- for the economic instability
Let your grace rain on Colombia- for the peace efforts after decades of war
Let your grace rain on the USA- for the upcoming election
I’m grateful God grabbed my attention in this way and helped me appreciate the diversity of our church and also reminded me to pray for the very serious situations all of these countries are facing. I encourage you to pray for these countries as well, that God’s grace would rain on them and that they would be flooded with His love.
If you’d like to hear the song yourself, here is a link to a Youtube video with lyrics: https://youtu.be/QCnym3zmVSI
