Watch: Christians Worship in Small Boats as Tiny Church Holds Service in Flooded Sanctuary
Footage shared on Twitter by Catholic journalist Sachin Jose showed an African congregation attending mass at their flooded church.
“Amazing faith of Catholics in Africa!” Jose wrote in a Sunday post on Twitter.
Amazing faith of Catholics in Africa!- A Catholic priest celebrates Mass with the faithful in a church that is flooded with water. pic.twitter.com/QKYxRGoIPb
— Sachin Jose (@Sachinettiyil) July 17, 2022
“A Catholic priest celebrates Mass with the faithful in a church that is flooded with water,” Jose’s caption stated.
Instead of pews, congregants sat on boats with their families in this service. The priest preached from a platform. Behind him was a sculpture of our Lord Jesus Christ hanging on the cross.
When and where this footage was taken was not immediately apparent. The video appears to have been first shared on TikTok.
However, the dedication of the Christians filmed here was clearly visible in this footage. The congregants allowed neither rain nor storm to deter them from attending church.
They demonstrated such a tenacity that serves as an inspiration for their fellow Christians here in the United States just across the Atlantic Ocean.
Africa remains a place that has experienced explosive growth in Christianity, with approximately 685 million Christians there as of 2021, according to data from the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
The population is only set to grow, with estimations that it would reach around 761 million in 2025, data from Gordon-Conwell showed.
This growth in believers does not come easily.
Christians in Africa pursue their faith at risk of deadly violence and persecution, especially those who are part of the growing number of Muslim converts to Christianity, Hudson Institute fellow Lela Gilbert wrote in January.
Following Christmas last year in central Uganda, a Muslim man allegedly hanged his wife and two children because his wife and 8-year-old son accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, Morning Star News reported.
“Meanwhile, in neighboring Kenya, six Christian villagers were killed in early 2022 by suspected al-Shabab militants. Another Christian man was murdered nearby less than a day later,” Gilbert wrote. “In the first attack, at least one victim was shot, another hacked to death with a machete and others burned alive while asleep.”
By contrast, Christianity in the United States and the rest of the Western world appears to be in rapid decline, the Pew Research Center reported in 2019.
“In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade,” the Pew report stated.
“Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’ now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.”
The losses were borne by Catholic and Protestant denominations, the report found.
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