There’s a saying attributed to John Wesley, that ‘any Christian worthy of the name, lay or ordained, should be prepared at short notice to pray, preach or die’.  Well, today has demanded two out of the three and of course I’m still alive to tell the tale. 

The day has taken me in and out of Brunei (via the only church in Christendom with two main road exits to its carpark but no entrance) and to a 48 door longhouse right up in the north of Sarawak outside a city called Limbang.  It has brought two new experiences: an opportunity to participate in a Eucharist in Iban (a native language) and the need to preach with an interpreter.

I left Mulu for Miri yesterday morning, and by 10.30 I was been driven north towards Brunei by Stephen, a lay member of St Andrew’s Church in Bandar (the capital).  Stephen is a self employed Chinese businessman originally from St Peter’s Church in Ipoh, West Malaysia.  He’s taken two days off to be my chauffeur: it’s the kind of sacrificial hospitality I’ve experienced repeatedly here and which has just been very humbling. 

It only took an hour or so to cross over into Brunei.  Brunei is not part of Malaysia.  It’s a Moslem state, a sultanate -- a small, separate country deriving great wealth from its natural reserves of oil and gas, but whose wealth goes directly into the coffers of the royal family.  There is no elected government here, only appointed officials. 

In some respects, the church here enjoys a little more freedom than in Malaysia (mission schools are still controlled by the congregations that found them, for instance) – but severe penalties are imposed on any Christian found attempting to evangelise Moslems and restrictions on the shared life of the Church can seem arbitrary.  Strictly speaking, for instance, a church needs to apply for a licence each time it holds a public meeting for more than five people away from its registered premises.  Strictly speaking, that would include every housegroup meeting, every time it planned to meet.  On the whole, the church assumes in practice that such routine meetings are exempt from the need to seek permission, and on the whole there are no repercussions.  But the sense of restriction remains.

There are only three Anglican parishes in Brunei and we visited two of them before lunch: St James’ Church in Kuala Belait and St Margaret’s Church in Seria.  The priest in charge of St Margaret’s then took us out for lunch.  St Margaret’s Church has a claim to fame, which speaks volumes about the life of the Christian community in Brunei.  Although the Church sits on a main road, it is not possible to turn off the main road into the church car park.  Both possible entrances have large ‘No Entry’ signs across them.  There is no good reason for this.  Instead, it is necessary to go round an entire block of housing, to enter the car park at the rear.  It is however possible to leave the church via either gate, directly onto the main road. 

St Margaret’s was, of all the parishes I’ve encountered since I arrived in England, the most reminiscent of England.  The English speaking congregation is 80-100 strong.  The new priest in charge is wrestling with familiar issues: the tension between contemporary and traditional kinds of music in worship; the tendency of housegroup members not to support central prayer meetings, the pros and cons of trying to links housegroup materials to Sunday sermons. 

We drove on, further north, out of Brunei and into Sarawak again, in order to visit the parish of Limbang, where we have stayed overnight.  In addition to weekly services in St Mark’s Church, the parish priest has 22 other dispersed worship centres to pastor, and last night he was presiding at a monthly service of Holy Communion in one of the longhouses, about an hour’s drive away.  As we made our way there, he explained to me that he would preside and I would preach.  It wasn’t a request so much as a point of information. 

The longhouse accommodates 48 families, under a single roof.  It’s like a wooden terrace street, I suppose: there is a shared porch which runs the length of the building, off which are a row of doors, with one family living behind each.  The service took place in a small purpose built chapel, and about 100 people turned up.  The service was held in Iban, and again I had the surreal experience of singing hymns from the English Hymnal (tunes identical, number indentical, words literally translated).  The sermon was fun, I think – for me, for the translator and for the congregation (some of whom had better English than the translator, and were not slow to shout out help when he couldn’t think of a word, or to correct him when they could find a better one!). 

Afterwards we retired to the longhouse for a feast and I was called upon (no notice) to say grace.  But this happens pretty often in England too…  The meal was great, and the evening ended with rice wine, cultural dancing and as we prepared to leave I was presented by the chairman of the longhouse with a lovely piece of cloth, woven by a woman in the community.  Once again, the hospitality was humblingly generous. 

It was well after midnight by the time we got back to Limbang, but it’s now a lovely blue sky day, and I’m due back to Brunei this morning.

Pete

Friday 18 January 2008