today's agenda: tour international scene in dublin (including a mosque). chuck's "project" details for saturday. communion service.
we started the day off by walking (which we did A LOT) to trinity college to meet chuck. while waiting, we looked around the campus a bit. amy took me to see the dorm that oscar wilde used to live in. very exciting! i'm a big fan!
me in front of oscar wilde's door
once chuck arrived, we headed out. chuck took us to a mosque. it happens to be in an old church, believe it or not. a very interesting sign of where christianity is at in this country. the girls all had to wear our scarves on our heads to be able to get in. everyone took their shoes off. the gentleman that showed us around and told us about their beliefs was very friendly, but in an a somewhat uncomfortable way. it's hard to explain. the women worshiped in a separate area than the men. they pray according to a time schedule. definitely a different worship environment than i'm used to. the gentleman did tell us that the muslim community / church has shown huge growth over the last few years. i wasn't sure if that was due to population increase or conversion. christianity in ireland has not grown.
mosque in church building / prayer time schedule
after the mosque, we started back to the city centre of dublin...thank heavens we found a bus! we went to lunch with chuck who explained his project for us. i won't go into huge amounts of detail, but he had some brain-storming to do for sure. it will be more clear in saturday's blog post. :)
when we finished our project with chuck, we had a couple hours to do whatever (shopping, sight seeing, etc.) until heading back to abbey church for holy week service stuff. a few of us opted to go to the guinness factory for the tour during this time, instead of shopping. and if you aren't aware, guinness beer is native to dublin, ireland. another massive walk to the factory, 5 stories, and one glass later, we are finally at the top of the guinness factory looking out the 360 degree windows over the city of dublin. awesome!
we all met back up and headed over to the church for communion service. all the services during this week are shared between three churches. none of which are the same denomination. that is almost unheard of here in the states. a baptist and methodist church would probably never hold a function together here in the U.S. but in ireland, it almost seems necessary due to the small number of members. they have to band together and i love that. i wish we were more blind to our 'so-called' differences here too. it's like the gentiles and the jews...jesus' message was for everyone, not just one religion vs another. that's actually what i love so much about the church i attend now...the message is 'love everyone' not just 'love pca members only.' refreshing.
finally, we had team meeting time. i think we were all pretty worn out at this point. emotions were high, nerves were frayed, but we trucked through it...and we all still love each other. haha!
click here for pictures from day 5
No comments:
Post a Comment