Between 8 and 12 January 2022, I participated in an online Esperanto congress (for Australia and New Zealand, but we had people from all over the world). On the final day, there was a session called “Montru kaj rakontu”, which means “Show and tell”. Anyone who wanted to, could talk about an object in their home that had some personal significance for them. My object was a T-shirt. The following video (my part goes for just under 4 minutes) is in Esperanto, but below you’ll find an English translation.
[You can also see the Esperanto version of the text.]
My item is this T-shirt, with the words “weird church, Cumberland BC” on the front, and “Spiritual growth for weird folk” on the back. (I would translate these into Esperanto as “kurioza eklezio, Cumberland, Brita Kolumbio” kaj “Spirita kresko por kuriozuloj”.)
Some of you already know that my two daughters, and a granddaughter, live in Canada, in a small town on Vancouver Island. My wife, Wanda, and I have visited them often (but of course not since the beginning of the pandemic). Each visit, we regularly went to worship services at a nearby church, Cumberland United Church. However, in 2017, due to insufficient numbers, the worship services ended, and the church closed.
At the beginning of 2021, we saw on Facebook that another small congregation had started using the same church building but, due to COVID-19, all of its worship services were taking place via Zoom. The name of the group was – yes – Weird Church. However, it has no weird beliefs. In fact, it has a minister, a woman, who was ordained in the United Church of Canada. It is completely inclusive: Everyone is welcome, whether a believer or not, regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, race or anything at all.
So, one Monday in January last year, at 11am, we attended our first Weird Church service, which took place on Sunday at 4pm in Cumberland, Canada. And basically, we have participated every week since then. We feel that this is really our church – we are members, even though we live thousands of kilometres away!
(Those who attended the “alternative church service” on Sunday may be interested to know that I based much of it on my experiences at Weird Church.)
In May, Weird Church produced special T-shirts, and our daughters decided to send two T-shirts as birthday presents. I was really happy when it was warm enough for me to wear mine.
When we announced that we would be travelling to Canada in June this year (if the pandemic makes it possible) the other members got very excited. So now, we have another reason to look forward to our next visit. And we will definitely wear our T-shirts there.