I arrived at
Mission Rhema two hours into the four-hour Sunday morning service. An usher
helped my friend Henri, who lives nearby but is not a member, and I to find
seats in the full but orderly semi-enclosed space that the church rents from
the Central African Women’s Organization. Bright pink and yellow cloth draped
from the ceiling gave the place a festive, circus-like feel. From the front, a
woman spoke into a microphone, her voice intense yet a bit flat, trance-like,
in its cadence.
She told of how
she’d had nothing and had no idea how she could give the church anything, but
somehow she managed to give more than she ever thought she could. And lo, she
was immediately rewarded: for her job, she was supposed to go en mission but when her boss saw her he
didn’t even greet her. He just said, “You have been given a promotion!” And
that promotion came with a huge raise, of course.
We had arrived
in the midst of testimonials, the heart of the service at this evangelical
church. One by one, men and women, most of them between the ages of twenty and
forty, came up to recount how they had been destitute, or unlucky, and then
gave some huge amount of money (referred to as donner les voeux, or handing over one’s wishes) to Mission Rhema.
Having given to God so much “that it hurt,” he then provided for them.
One woman
recounted how she had been scammed out of a house (she purchased the house not
knowing that the person she bought it from was not the owner) and then, after
having given her wishes to Rhema, she was rewarded with not one but two houses, each far larger than the one
she had lost. Each testimonial was precise in the amounts of money spent, lost,
and gained, the value of the houses acquired, as well as the terms of the “appels d’offre” and the “droits d’exploitation” received in
return and so forth. The frankness with which those bearing witness rattled off
these sums unnerved me, both because I’m not used to discussing personal
finances so forthrightly in public and because I couldn’t quite understand how
people with so little could give so much – on the order of a thousand dollars or
more.
Everyone (except
the young kids, many of whom napped) listened, rapt, to the tales. The entire
body of a young woman sitting near me and wearing the sash that marked her as a
church stalwart was joyful: she leaned forward in her chair, her expression
open, as if ready to leap up at any moment. The stories were as satisfying as
good Hollywood films. I could empathize with people’s tragedies all the more
knowing that things would inevitably turn out better than ever in the end.
And yet they
also made me uneasy. The helping hand these people received from on high after
they handed over money to the church was more helpful than I could quite
believe. Wasn’t this really some kind of pyramid scheme, in which people with
very little give it all away and receive none of the expected material benefits
in return? The witness accounts couldn’t possibly be true, could they? They
must have been embellished. The whole affair seemed exploitative. And yet that
was clearly not the experience of the congregation, which was, in a word,
joyful, even despite the paucity of song that is usually my favorite part of a
service.
Eventually the
pastor recovered the microphone. He had laryngitis but told us not to feel
sorry for him. And it was easy to do as he said – he was funny and had an easy
rapport with the audience, teasing us about God catching us unawares in our
bathrobes. He too had tales of having given far more to the church than he ever
thought he could, and how it had so obviously paid off. He told of the Mission
Rhema bus that had recently been purchased and was en route from Cameroon, of
the parcel of land purchased for the Mission Rhema conference center,
plantation, and school they were starting.
As things we
winding down, the pastor began calling up the couples who would soon wed at the
church, sweet-looking young pairs who he ribbed in a good-natured way, telling
only-slightly embarrassing stories of their arrivals at the church. The clock
showed that we were an hour and a half past the stated end time for the
service, but I’d have gone on listening to him for a good while longer – the
pastor made me laugh, and I liked him.
We had an
appointment to chat after the service, so I made my way to the front and waited
while he received people. He knew everyone’s name, and he inquired after their
families and their affairs. When I’ve seen ministers or other Central African
dignitaries interact with the populations they are meant to serve, the encounters
have been marked by a profound sense of hierarchy, as if the big person and the
supplicant are not just from different classes, but are rather different kinds of people, almost as if they are
different species. That was decidedly not the case in the way the pastor
interacted with his congregation. He was a kind, fun, and yet also wise uncle.
I was shown a
chair to wait in. From behind me I sensed people busy with some task, and I turned
to look. A man held a black plastic bag (the kind offered at the Lebanese
grocery stores in town – thin but not ultra-thin) as wide as he could, and a
woman reached into a blue barrel (the kind people use for rainwater catchment,
larger than an oil drum) and scooped out fistfuls of cash and coins. The
plastic bag was by now bulging, impossibly full, and as they closed it and
moved on to the next I heard the faint tinkle of coins settling amid the bills.
They noticed me noticing them, and I turned away.
As the pastor
and I walked to his office one of the women who had witnessed during the service
came over to say hello. The pastor asked how she was doing and she replied that
she had never been better. Her face radiated joy. The pastor explained as we walked
away that the woman had been poor but started a sewing business around the time
she joined the church. Now she had eleven employees and supported an even
larger circle of relatives.
The pastor could
not find his key so we settled in the shade outside his office and chatted for
the next forty-five minutes about how he had gotten into this line of work.
After obtaining a university degree, he had expected to be integrated into the
public service, but he graduated just a few years after structural adjustment
ended the policy whereby all graduates received state jobs. He worked as a
commercial lawyer for the Central African oil company, and when they were
bought by Total he was told he could keep his job but the salary would be cut
by 75%. So he returned to another interest: evangelical Christianity, which he
had been active in while an exchange student in Romania. He was accepted into
the Haggai Institute, a program that trains people to be missionaries in their own countries, and upon return to CAR founded Mission Rhema.
He claimed not
to take a salary from the church and instead to live off the proceeds of his
livestock businesses. (He raises goats and chickens, growth industries in this
city of people who love meat, especially since the supply of cattle has
declined now that the Muslims involved in that market have by and large left.)
His attire seemed to back this statement up. It was fancy, but it was Central African fancy, not the kind of
international fancy of someone who lives much of the year in France or Dakar,
like so many Central African politicians. He explained that he wanted to help
Central Africans learn practical business skills (investing, planning, accounting)
so that they can succeed in the private sector and not see working for the
government as their only option. Through the church, he would provide various services
traditionally associated with the state to the congregation: transportation,
jobs, health clinics, schools.
When I left, I
didn’t know what to think. On the one hand, I was still uncomfortable with the
idea of people giving so much money in the hopes that doing so would cause God
to bring them vast material benefit. And yet I’d quite enjoyed the experience
and was inspired by much of what the pastor had to say. Mostly I appreciated
the rapport he had with his congregation, which violated what I think of as the
norms of comportment governing relations between important people and the hoi
polloi, which dictate formality, supplication, and a decided power imbalance
(the supplicants have no recourse if they are in the end ignored). I’ve written
articles about this political divide. And yet this church compound provided the
experience of a different world, one in which God provided agency and efficacy
for all.
Mostly, visiting
this church was a chastening reminder of the fallacy of thinking about politics
in Central Africa like a secularist, cordoning off politics and religion as if
they were entirely separate realms. It also reminded me that however much
mistrust and uncertainty I see in social life in CAR, there remain public
places where you can leave a handbag unattended and not have to worry about it
being stolen. Admittedly, that might be partly because all the money inside has
already been handed over. But it’s not the only reason.