Our Little Spanish Speaking Church in Panama

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Our little Spanish speaking church meets at the pavilion right next to our house each week. We have been attending this church for about 6 years now and we used to meet at the pastor's small house, but we have a large covered area that we offered them to use, so now we meet here.

The service is usually the same - we start out with some songs (usually "Bienvenidos") and then have some (lots) of announcements. The service is held in Spanish unless there are some English speakers there who require some translation. Then our pastor's son will translate and he does a good job.

Either before or after the announcements, the kids leave for their class. We then have what they call the blessing. Everyone takes a turn reading a Bible verse to bless the others in the group, and then they call on someone else to share a verse. Our family usually reads ours in English and Spanish.

After the blessing, there are a few other songs (typically 2-3 from about 5 songs we regularly sing). We usually have them on a screen, but the power was out today, so we just sang from a hymnal.

The pastor then preaches for about 40 minutes. Today's message was from Genesis - the lineage of Terah. He has been doing a series on Genesis for the past few weeks.

Today there were some Ngobe (indigenous) ladies who were there...well, if you can call them ladies. Mothers might be a better term. The pastor's wife asked them how old they were after the service and one said she was 16 and had a 1 year old. It's a sad life the Ngobe live, a cycle that they need to break, but they literally don't know how. This girl said she lives with a man (with the other 2 girls) and doesn't know his name or age, but he's the father of their children. It is so sad for them. The girl next to her was 18 and her child was a little older than 1.

Today's service was pretty typical. We had some babies crying, babies nursing, babies sleeping, dogs barking, cats walking through looking for food, but at least none of my chickens came in to check it out... There were 17 "adults" and quite a few kids today!

After the service, they had some juice for anyone that wanted it and cookies. The kids always get cookies from the pastor's wife, but today they had cookies from the bakery for the adults.

Usually, the people who attend the service don't have vehicles, so the pastor makes multiple trips to pick people up, then at the end, he makes multiple trips to take everyone home. This is much easier than it used to be now that they have a 7 passenger vehicle and a 15 passenger little bus.

This service is not what most expats are looking for. So why do we attend and have the service here on our property? One reason is we want our kids to learn Spanish and the Panamanian culture (which sometimes is annoyingly late or disorganized). We also know and love this family and want to support them. We have visited other churches before and they are SO LOUD, so we appreciate how our little church keeps it simple. There are many other reasons, but these are just a few of them.

Our little Spanish speaking church meets our desire to fellowship with other Panamanians. It meets our desire to have our kids immersed in Spanish. We love our church family and are thankful to God for them.

Here is a link to a short about our church if you're interested.

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