Everyone is a Performer! - Explore Archived World Race Alumni Blogs

We arrived in Mbeya, Tanzania on a Wednesday morning and went to our first church service two days later. About twenty minutes into the service I learned something about the Tanzanian church body that has been confirmed over and over again since then-

Everyone is a performer.

From the children to the elderly, boys and girls, clean and dirty, congregation and pastor, pretty much everyone is involved in performance. On Sunday mornings especially our group is blessed with a range of performances that bring me back to my dance recital days.

Let me break it down.

The church service starts with a choir leader singing a few Swahili hymns into a microphone as the church sings along. This part is pretty normal.

After this one of the choirs come up. From what I gather the church has somewhere around five different choirs. There is the children’s choir, the Power of God choir, Angel Voices choir, the El Shaddai choir…and more. Sometimes they all wear matching outfits, sometimes they don’t. Most of the time ALMOST everyone in the choir has the same outfits and just one or two are wearing something different. They sing, but you can hardly hear them over the EXTREMELY LOUD Swahili music playing from about five different speakers at the front of the church. Imagine sitting somewhere in the first ten rows of a rock concert and that’s how loud the music is. Seriously. Luckily for me and my sensitive ears, I have figured out that since it is perfectly normal for women to wear scarves and fabric on their heads, I just put earplugs in and wrap a scarf over my head. I have gone through entire church services like this, and if you ever see photos or videos of this month and I had something on my head, there’s a 90% chance I’m wearing earplugs underneath it. When there is a solo in the music, the soloist of the choir comes up the front and sings to the audience (and probably also to God) as if they are the star of a B-side music video pouring out their heart to the camera. Lots of arm waving, holding a hand to the heart, and reaching out to the audience.

There is also a lot of dancing, but it’s unlike any other dancing I’ve ever seen. The steps involve stomps, jumping criss-cross, low kicks, fist pumping (seriously), and a lot of step touch step touch with the feet.

There are probably about a dozen different dances at the beginning for every service. It is also requested that our teams have music for every service, so sometimes we just sing, and other times we sing and dance. We are begun to build a repertoire of songs, including “Waves of Mercy” “Every Day” and the what we are now infamous for “One Way”. We used actions that we already knew for “Waves of Mercy”, and we used the moves that I created in Romania for “Every Day”. Dani and I worked together to choreograph “One Way”. The Tanzanians LOVE when we perform this! The first time we performed it at the crusade we ended up doing it twice in a row because they loved I so much. It’s now a crowd favorite.