The following post is from CBF field personnel Bob and Janice Newell who serve in Athens, Greece.

Recently, we met with Albanians to do what most Christians today take for granted. We met to plan a worship service in the “heart” language of the worshippers. Praising God in one’s mother tongue originated with the earliest Christians. The Pentecostal miracle included, among other things, the experience of people from many nations hearing the Gospel in their native tongues. The Bible describes a service with multi-cultural worshippers in which “each one heard … in his own language.” (Acts 2:6b)

The early church adopted Greek and later Latin as the voice of its worship, evidencing a world dominated by Greece and Rome. The western branch of Christianity claimed Latin and the eastern branch retained Greek. A special liturgical language and a corpus of prayers, hymns
and rubrics came to be accepted as normative in each of the two divisions of Christianity. For the Roman Catholic Church, that did not change
until the 2nd Vatican Council in the 1960’s. Acknowledging that many worshippers no longer spoke Latin, the council moved to allow and encourage worship in the language that people use to express love, show respect and voice hope.

Baptists and other nonliturgical traditions often opposed fancy worship language, due in part because we began with uneducated clergy; but, it is also true that, over the years, “stain-glassed” language and non-ordinary, words were standardized. Thanks to the King James Version of the Bible, in English-speaking churches, it was also easy for what soon became archaic 17th century English to become normative. Today, many yearn for simplicity and few would question the right to worship in the “heart language.” Contemporary Albanian believers are the first
generation from that country to be allowed to put their trust in God since the forties. Their still-new freedom to worship God came about with the overturn, in the 1990’s, of their atheistic government. As a result, most of the twenty and thirty-something believers with whom we work, who first placed their lives in Christ’s hands when they were teenagers back home, have adopted worship language from the hodge-podge of
English-dominant patterns utilized by missionaries who were first allowed into their country from the late 1990’s.

Only recently, for example, has original, Albanian language music utilizing Albanian musical forms begun to appear in Albanian worship.
But Albanian believers in Athens, carry another worship language challenge. There is yet no indigenous, Albanian language church in this city of
over 5 million. As a result, when an Albanian believer goes to church to worship God in this town, s/he must choose to do so in a service driven by Greek or English language.

So the meeting that we recently held at PORTA – the Albania House in Athens was precedent-setting and historically significant. We planned for Albanians from across this city to praise God and to be encouraged in their spiritual growth. We were careful to ensure that the medium for worship would issue out of the heart and soul of the worshippers and would be expressed in the language they first learned as children.
We hope that believers from the few Albanian Bible studies will praise God, using cultural forms that go back to their motherland. We have no
plan to create one Albanian church in Athens; but, we recognize the need for believers with a common cultural heritage to worship
from time to time, as only they can.

Where will this idea go next? Only God knows! What are we hoping? Well, as English-speakers and given our still-developing fluency in
Shqip (the Albanian language), we just don’t have the words to say!