International Church

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Luckily for me, I met a guy who knew Qingdao really well the night before and he was an American! Scottie is an aeronautics specialist from Missouri who has been teaching English at QU for the last 3 years and his mom came over to teach as well within the last year.

They took me to an international church that is held in a big banquet hall on the top story of the Haixin Dasha (Hisense Bldg). You have to have an international passport to get in because it is not a censored service but Taiwanese and Hong Kongers are allowed. The church is also not allowed to have an official minister so people take turns every week giving the sermon so it's pretty neat. The worship songs are the same as in the states and the congregation had an attendance of about 100 or so when I went so it was by no means small compared to what I expected.

There are at least two other Chinese churches in old Qingdao (the old German part of the city) where the Chinese are allowed to attend and worship. There is a Lutheran church and a Catholic Cathedral, both of which are quite old. The worship songs are similar to Western ones only with Chinese words. The way the Chinese government regulates what happens is that they have the clergy submit a weekly copy of the sermon for inspection and/or censoring before it is presented on Sunday. I'm just glad the Chinese government is open enough to allow this.

Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me as proceeded to explore the city and seaside for the 4 hours that followed but I will visit all of those places in the future. I was also in church clothes which were very hot considering the humidity from the Yellow Sea and all of the fog along the coast. My feet were sore in dress shoes as well because it seems like no matter where you are in Qingdao, you are always going uphill. Shandong province is very mountainous and Qingdao happens to be particularly hilly. 😊 It really makes for a beautiful landscape though.

Later that evening we had dinner in the same restaurant as the night before with some more professors and explored the foreign student section of campus since it is way too big to see the whole campus in one afternoon. We live in the South Asian dormitories so most people in our dorm are Indian students at the medical school. All of the dorms around us are Korean but there are a few other international students in our dorm including Americans from Ole Miss, AZ State, and UOregon.

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Comments

[Bill Norris]

Keep Blogging Ben!!!
Great stuff you've written and shown in the pictures - almost like I'm there with you Ben!! Keep it up.

[G$lyce]

DUH
That one guy in the white shirt was totesss in my Criticizing Television class.