Tipping the choir

We went to church yesterday at a place we've visited a couple times before (you might remember a blog post from Easter 2012 about the Kibubwa Mennonite church) and really enjoyed the choir there.  The church is located near an all-boys high school and a good-sized group of twenty-five or so young men attend the church on Sunday and have formed a choir.  The school has only the top two grades of high school so the students are older, and those guys can really sing!  One of them plays a drum and they all sing and dance with great harmonies and rhythm.  Side note: I couldn't help but notice that the 13- and 14-year-old girls in the church seemed pretty into watching the boys' choir, too - their local boy band.

During one of the songs that had a little more avid dancing and an upbeat tempo, several women in the church started doing the Tanzanian equivalent of hooting and hollering, ululating.  Also, a couple of them danced up to the front where the choir was performing and tucked money into the shirt pocket of one of the guys while he was dancing away.  I've seen this before - when the church audience really likes a choir song, some of them will put some small bills of money into the pockets of the front and center choir member right in the middle of a song.  I guess it is like a tip for the choir!

Weaving through the choir (yes, while they are singing and dancing - everyone just adjusts a little bit so nobody gets trampled) while waving handkerchiefs is also a popular way of showing passion for the group's performance.  Once I even saw a woman dancing through a choir while holding an umbrella high above her head and snapping it open and closed!  Everyone loved it - she was as much of a hit as the choir at that point.

Coming from a church which has no choir, just a worship team whose job is to be as unnoticed as possible while leading congregational singing, it's a little shocking to me.  Sometimes I wonder how worshipful it is when everyone is watching a choir dancing and singing.  For many choirs, though, and certainly the boys' choir yesterday, the words of their music are often prayers or Bible verses.  I imagine that when those words are set to catchy tunes and given during memorable performances (not to mention what seems like endless repetition of verses), those words really stick in listeners' minds for days.  And really, how can I be critical if people are going about their daily lives with that in their heads!