I’m curious as to what you, dear reader, would do if you were in this situation (however unlikely it might be that you would be in the situation.

Let’s say you are at a non-accredited (that is, not for credit in a recognized degree program) Bible school abroad, in a country where you do not speak the language. You are enjoying the experience and one weekend you, and a fellow student, go to a salon where you pay over $150 and sit in a chair for many hours in order to have your hair arranged in the dreadlocked style.

You return to the Bible school campus and are told by Leadership that you have a choice to make: you can stay home from upcoming “outreach” trips to nearby churches which are sometimes conservative, or you can go on the outreach, after cutting off your dreadlocks.

What do you do?

Please, please go visit the old bill to read about his day at Folk Fest on Saturday, when he managed to get free tickets for some of his Somali friends. The mainstage bill that day featured the Refugee All Stars of Sierra Leone (musicians who were discovered in the refugee camps, playing music on makeshift instruments) and K’naan, a Somali rapper who now lives in Ontario. His friends got to spend a lot of time with the performers, even partying with them until they had to leave the next morning!

I officially am no longer annoyed with K’naan, who showed up late to the festival and missed his first workshop and then had “no time for interviews.” Media folk like me don’t take kindly to that kind of talk, until you hear that he had no time because he was hanging out with his fellow refugees.

I’ve never in a situation like the one African immigrants face, living in a completely foreign culture. The closest I ever came was being in non-urban Germany, where very few people speak English. I found the language barrier to be unexpectedly debilitating. When I travel in English-speaking countries, I feel pretty confident about being able to find my way, but when you can’t rely on your language skills, it makes leaving the house a lot more intimidating, knowing you can’t ask for directions or read a bus schedule. So I kind of try to multiply that by a thousand to imagine what immigrants feel like when they come here from far away.

Last weekend I visited the United States of America for the first time in many years. I visited the fine metropolis of Minneapolis/St. Paul (current home of everyone’s hero, Tony Jones. I briefly considered undertaking a Celebrity Pastor Stalking mission, but abandoned the project in its planning stages as in the end I’m far to lazy and not nearly Emergent enough). The Twin Cities are quite nice, and I say that without irony — I enjoyed looking at many pretty, old houses, lovingly restored and/or maintained.

I stayed with a friend who attends a Lutheran church which, during the summer, holds drive-in services. I personally enjoy outdoor services, but something about the drive-in concept rankles me. Maybe it’s the idea of staying neatly insulated within one’s vehicle (gas-guzzling SUV or not) that seems to run counter to the idea of corporate worship. Or maybe it’s the aftertaste of church-as-product/entertainment that the drive-in concept imparts.

During my visit, I indulged in a visit to the Mall of America. (OK, actually two, but one time was just to eat at Famous Dave’s, to sample the barbecque which my brother adores enough to make biannual trips to Fargo.) I was born in Edmonton, so I thought I knew a few things about giant temples of consumerism, but I was wrong. Canadians cannot and never will be able to do consumerism the way Americans can. We’re just not as willing to get our glitz on the way they do south of the border. We’re satisfied with weird bronze whales and deadly dolphin tanks. West Ed, once the largest mall in the world, is completely quaint when compared to the gleaming, carpeted halls of the MOA, glass and silver shined to a blinding glare (by legal or illegal immigrants? Only the night staff can tell!).

In a place where you can buy anything from designer jeans to designer hot sauce and Lego a la carte, it’s no surprise then, that you can also consume yourself some religion, before you consume some coconut shrimp at Bubba Gump’s.

NB: I’m sure we have mall churches here in Canada, too. But they’re probably not this… pretty.

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