I've been able to see more of Cameroon on the weekends, but haven't posted much of it in the blog so I'm going to try to catch up.

A few weeks ago I went to a Pentacostal Charismatic church, a church that believes (according to Wikepedia) in a spirituality characterized by a worldview where miracles, signs and wonders, and other supernatural occurrences are expected to be present in the lives of believers, including the presence of spiritual gifts, such as prophecy and healing.

It was very interesting, and definitely very different from church in Canada. Singing and music played a large part, with people moving out into the aisles to dance and even to fall to the floor. The pastor and another person worked their way through the aisles putting their hands on people's foreheads and then perhaps hitting or yelling at their ears or stomachs, I believe to remove illness or other bad spirits. People often fell down when this happened, so the ushers would quickly wrap a sarong around them or cover them from the waist down, to ensure modesty. They might lay on the floor for a few seconds to several minutes and when they got up they often looked dazed. Sometimes this would be repeated, they would be brought upright, and the pastor would work again to get rid of the bad spirits and they would fall again.

Everyone there welcomed this, but I was hoping they would just skip me. No luck, the pastor had me hold my hands up to pray as he put his hand on my forehead and he prayed for me. I didn't react (except maybe the look on my face was saying "please just move on to the next person") so fortunately he did that after a few minutes.

The entire service was 3 to 4 hours long, anything spoken in French was translated to English and vice versa. There was music provided by singers, drums and keyboards throughout most of the service. The denomination was quite young, I would say that 95% of them were younger than 40 - not like when I went to a church in France and almost everyone had gray hair.