Godly and ungodly moment outside the First Assembly of God

Aug 17, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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One of the discomforting motifs I have to live with is the almost impossible choice I have to make in prioritizing between reading the memoirs of a media operative or a politician. My whole life I have been involved in political activism. But I have been a media practitioner for more than twenty-five years.
I do not miss the memoirs of famous or infamous politicians and leaders. The experience of how leaders used and abused power should be fascinating even for the layman. I am overzealous to read about the career of famous media operatives, because the accounts must be fascinating.
I believe there is never a dull moment in the life of a media person and their life stories must excite curiosities in most readers. Sadly in Guyana only Father Andrew Morrison has written a book and it makes great reading (Justice: The struggle for Democracy in Guyana, 1952-1992. Red Thread Press, Georgetown, 1998).
There is a missing link in Father’s book, because he did not describe some of the inscrutable, dangerous and hilarious little stories he encountered during his journalistic career. I guess he wanted to look at the bigger picture. What should be made clear is that Father’s book does not constitute a memoir, because a memoir is an almost encompassing landscape of the person’s experience, formal and informal, personal and impersonal.
‘Kit’ Nascimento must be moving into his eighties and we may never see his account of his media days when Premier Cheddi Jagan was in office and when he was in charge of communications and public relations under President Burnham. Adam Harris has chalked up more than forty years and surely his autobiography would generate enormous interest.
Never mind the more serious stuff you encountered during your media career, there are little things that have large significance, as in my experience outside the door of the First Assembly of God last Sunday. It was a sociological education for me. I went last Sunday to that church on Durban Street, Wortmanville, to attend the christening of the daughter of my Kaieteur News colleague and friend Edison Jefford.
I couldn’t make the home celebration, so I felt obliged to attend the church ceremony. I was all decked out in church garb – white shirt, navy blue tie, black trousers with black shoes. Edison told me to be at the church for 11a.m. I arrived ten minutes earlier. There were a large amount of people inside the church and outside. Since the church service before 11a.m. didn’t concern me, I thought my place was to wait by the door for the Jefford family.
It was an enthralling affair. As the minutes went by I was welcomed by several persons on different occasions thanking me for coming to worship at the church. I don’t know what they were talking about. I am not a religious person, never was, doubt I would ever be, and I subscribe to the philosophical schools of anarchism and existentialism. There are times I come close to agnosticism.
I concealed my amusement as one person after another thanked me for coming to pray at First Assembly of God. Really! All I was there for was to attend a christening. A well-groomed lady offered me a seat inside with the words that she was glad that I chose her church to pray at. A middle-aged gentleman asked me why I chose First Assembly of God. Parishioners passed me on the way in, parishioners passed me on their way out, and I was greeted with comforting words about coming to the First Assembly of God. They all felt I made the right choice.
It was 11:20 and Edison was still not there.  As the greetings continued, I sought refuge in another Kaieteur News friend, Rawle Welch, who should have been there with me. I phoned him to ask him to come down, since the parishioners thought they had a new convert, and I needed someone to talk to. Leaving aside those enjoyable moments of irony, I had an education in the religious evolution of my country.
I have no experience of what a church is like for Sunday worshipping; never been in one for that purpose. But what I saw that Sunday was instructive. I grew up hearing people say that ordinary working people, especially dark-skinned folks, shunned the Catholic Churches and to a lesser extent the Anglican churches (to a much lesser extent to be honest) because they felt uncomfortable there with the church filled with the crème de la crème of the society.
Ordinary folks from working class areas needed “their own people” to sit next to. When you see the hundreds of working people in church as I did last Sunday at the First Assembly of God, then you understand why the numbers at the Catholic Church disappeared after Independence. Class and colour are present even in giving thanks to God.

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