This past weekend, some of my team had the chance to experience the most interesting church service I’ve ever been to. We traveled about an hour into the mountains to a small village with a little church. We spent most of the day playing games with and teaching kids, but when the church service started that evening, we immediately knew something was off. The music was extremely loud, and people were screaming more than singing into their microphones. They told people to move up front to make room for the “presence of God.” One man went around the room yelling in people’s faces and waking up the people who were sleeping (it was pretty late at night). Most of what they were preaching about was not really from the Word of God. They treated the Holy Spirit like an emotional experience. I couldn’t understand anything that was being said, but I just knew something was weird.
Maybe 2 hours in, we had to leave for a bit, because it was deafening in the building. When we went back in, it was time for our amazing ministry host/team mom, Nancy, to speak. I didn’t understand any of it because it was in Quechua, but it was explained to me later. Nancy basically called them out on the fact that they weren’t preaching from the Word of God. She called them out for preaching in Spanish even though there were some people in the congregation who only knew Quechua. She gave an inspirational, truth-filled lecture that even I felt inspired from, though I had no clue what she was saying. I could just tell that it was the Holy Spirit speaking through her.
But the pastor was not having it. After Nancy was finished, he went up and defended everything and just got the church fired up, again with emotion that they were mistaking for the presence of God. I still had no clue what was going on, but I felt so uncomfortable. Eventually Nancy got up out of her chair on the stage, told us to leave with her, and we walked out in the middle of the service. It was probably about midnight, and we are pretty sure they kept going until around 4 am.
I learned how dangerous it is to treat the Holy Spirit like an experience rather than a person. It was something I already knew but had never really experienced firsthand. God wants to have a relationship with you; He doesn’t want to be some emotional experience you get when you sing and dance to music in church. You can’t go to church, be “filled with the Spirit,” and then leave and live your life in sin. God wants to be in an intimate relationship with His precious children. He wants to continue to purify you throughout your life and make you more like Him. I don’t know what the people in that church were experiencing that night in that church, but I don’t think it was God.
The whole experience also really opened my eyes to the racism towards Quechua people that permeates Peruvian culture. There are many people that don’t know Spanish who have never heard the gospel because churches refuse to speak in their language. We had been told how Quechua was viewed as an inferior language, how kids would get bullied for speaking the language, but now I really understand why AWI’s job of translating and distributing the Bible in Quechua is so important. These people would have little to no access to the gospel otherwise. I am so proud to be able to wear traditional Quechua clothes and sing songs in their language. As we are getting ready to leave Huaraz in a few days, I am praying that God would continue to do amazing things through Nancy and AWI after we leave.
