Yaounde, Cameroon Africa. (Cameroon News) – Immigrant students bring back the fading glory of the Mass. Pentecostal church.
When Ange-Therese Akono took her first step into the U.S a couple of years ago, the student who was a Cameroonian national felt a bit of both excitement and fear almost as if she was overwhelmed by what she saw.
She had few contacts in the country, even less familiar faces and was finding her way into a busy career which would follow a course civil engineering master’s program at MIT which was by no means going to be an easy task and all this to be achieved in a country quite alien to her.
A fellow student offered her a suggestion to calm he frayed nerves- a visit to Pentecostal Tabernacle, a Cambridge church located in the same neighborhood which was holding open arms to students like her who were in the huge country for the first time.
Religion in Cameroon Africa
“I walked in and I could feel the glory of God,” said Akono, now 23. “There were a lot of students from all over the world there … singing and praising. I’ve been coming ever since.”
Pentecostal Tabernacle, a small and highly insignificant black church with a history of its own located in between MIT and Harvard, has been a haven and a source of solace for hundreds of students like Akono who find their student life a major change from their homelands and take a lot of time to internalize the change.
The church is now getting back its lost glory and making good the losses it had gained from its once struggling congregation. Just more than a decade ago, membership had dropped down to as less as three dozen.
But now the church can proudly say that it has more than 350 members all courtesy to an aggressive campaign to bring in immigrants and international students all of who were mesmerized by the sermons preached by senior pastor Brian Greene’s which talked endlessly about topics like social justice, immigrant rights and “restoring broken lives.”
“It’s a place where we can all be as one, no matter where we come from,” said Offiong Bassey, 25, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. “We let our guards down and got through what we need to go through.”
The change took, Greene said, when God instructed this Pentecostal church that was set up way back in 1927 by Barbadian immigrants to flag off a brand new mission after the church had to go through a very rough patch which saw a sharp decline in its membership-‘start servicing the sojourner’
Almost a decade ago, members started on strong and stringent routine of weekly prayer sessions calling upon God to rope in new members, or “partners,” as Greene calls them.
“When the pews were empty, we would pray to the east and ask God to send people in from that that direction,” remembers Greene, who has been a member of the church for quite some years now what with being a resident of the area with his house just a few houses from the church.
“But we were thinking East Cambridge … not Eastern Europe. We had no idea what God had in store for us.”
Today the church has got back its lost glory what with being one of the most sought after destinations of students who come in from all parts of the world to undertake various courses in prestigious institutions like Harvard or MIT.
Students say that listening to the sermons not just helps them adjust better to the new land and its culture when they come in for the first time but also helps them to cope with the stress of their everyday lives and studies.
