Gender in rural Niger

Years ago, some friends took us along to a Sunday night youth rally. The theory, if I'm not mistaken, was to show me some warm Afrikaaner piety. The rally was on campus in a big chapel area at what was, back then, the Pochefstroom University, Pretoria, South Africa. The Mandela era had just begun, the New South Africa.

What I remember of the youth rally is that it was really cute. I'm serious. Okay, cute is a strange way to describe religious piety, I know, but I'm not lying because it was really cute. Four hundred kids, maybe five, just about every last one of them doubled up with a sweetie. Sunday night--date night--church. Think of it this way--250 couples, every last one of the males hanging one muscular Afrikaaner arm around his pet squeeze so that the rally looked like a huge blonde in-looped flag. It was cute. Really.

Some pastor's sermon got 'em all astir, and the eagerness was palpable. Love was in the air. Some of it was agape--sure; but you couldn't miss a touch of eros, too. Okay, maybe more than a touch. I'm not quite so old as to have forgotten the kind of rapture that can arise, even on a church bench, maybe especially on a church bench.

It's possible, I suppose, that all that youthful piety would have shown more brightly if the snugglers had been separated: males on one side, females on the other. The ardor might have been more pure if those guys had kept their arms and hands to home.

Sitting separate is the old way, the way things were done in church more than a century ago, and not just in Dutch Reformed churches. Most every northern European Protestant fellowship would have kept an aisle's width between the sexes lest, I suppose, communion descend into carnival.

Okay, I'm overstating. But I know very well that my ancestors worshiped in churches where, like some synagogues yet today, men and women keep a safe distance. Do women even pray in mosques? I don't think so. Put 'em together and you got a volatile mix, you know?

I don't think I'd ever worshiped in a church that split people up by gender until two weeks ago at the evangelical church on the top the page, a little church in a small city in Niger that was predominantly--overwhelmingly--Muslim. Still, there we were--praising the Lord with men on one side, women on the other. Only the choir was integrated--well, one bench anyway.

It seemed strange, but then I remembered that crowd of kids in Pretoria, and even my own youth, the sheer bedlam of chemical reactions that will hardly stay in the test tube, even in church. Maybe--or so I thought--splitting up the sexes wasn't such a bad idea, silly as it seemed. Besides, it's a tradition as old as the hills.

Still, I just wondered why.

"I don't get it," I said to a man appointed to be my translator. "What's the deal here?--the women are all over there--" I was trying not to point, "and we're all over here." Famously, Billy Graham would never be alone in a room with a woman--I remembered that. Maybe we were missing something back home. Maybe we'd wandered. "Is there a reason for separating everybody up?" I asked him.

"It's for our neighbors, the Muslims," the man told me. We were singing, I think, and I didn't know the words. Besides, he seemed to want to use his English on me.

"You split up for them?" I said, only half in a whisper.

"If they 'd walk by and see us all mixed up together," he said, then halted, as if there were no words to explain, ". . .it just wouldn't be worth it. They'd think it was terrible."

I suppose the word is taboo.

It was, I thought, a price to pay to get along in an overwhelmingly Islamic neighborhood. Given what's happens elsewhere in the world, keeping men on one side, women on the other is hardly the "supreme sacrifice." One could suffer worse, far worse.

Eugene Peterson liked to say that worship is really about learning to live with that bawling kid in the pew in front of you who just won't stop, learning to praise God in the middle of the mess of real life.

So I didn't question the man or the practice of that little church. I didn't try to enlighten him or press him to engage the Muslims. It seemed to me, right then, one of very few Christians in the city around me, that keeping men from women in church was the prudent thing to do, a wise move, even enlightened.

Besides, it didn't really matter a whole lot. In that little church that Sunday morning in Niger, both sides and the choir--we were all praising the Lord.
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I'm disassembling the blog these days, well over 4000 posts. You'll see old ones, like this, a little more often now, stories I'm not quite ready to let pass into wherever old stories go in the digital age.