At last my blog is letting me make a post after a month frozen over! Last night our little Roma Church made a quantum leap forward. A group of Roma pastor's who I had met in Luton the day before came and led our service. They seem keen to move to Luton and settle amongst us. If this happens it will be one huge leap forward for Luton Roma Church. As usual these days, the school aged children are taken to another local church, as the adults worship with the little children and babies. Last night, overall we had about 100 on board. It took 3 round trips in the minibus to ferry people in. So we have an urgent need to find a way of funding a second minibus.
In the service many were brought to tears as testimony after testimony was given to the accompaniment of real Roma worship led by two accordions, and keyboard with a dulcimer-sounding stop, and voice. Most of the service was in Romanian with the pastor leaning over to me to translate into Romani! It looks like I may have now to get to grips with Romanian as well. They hold the Romanian Bible in very high regard and I have yet to meet a Roma pastor who seems interested in creating a Romani Bible. It seems odd to me to worship in Romanian when the only language spoken amongst all our Roma is Romani. They say this is in part because of the great variety of Romani dialects, Romanian thus becoming a kind of lingua franca. My point however is that in 10 years time all their children living here in England will only know Romani and English. We'll see!
Today, one Roma guy told me he had a dream last night. He had seen himself in a small room with me and some other people. Today that meeting actually took place in the Luton Red Cross. We were amazed. Another Roma lady told me she had got up in the morning today and found herself singing for the first time in her life. Her children confirmed this to me!
