Chin Emmanuel Baptist Church
Chin Emmanuel Baptist Church (despite the name) is a Mennonite congregation in Houston, Texas. Chin is a language spoken in a small region of Myanmar that has experienced political unrest, famine, and violence in recent decades (for extensive background, see the Human Rights Watch report). In 2011, a group of Chin people who immigrated to Houston formed a Christian congregation and sought out a larger denomination with which to partner. Pastor Simonlian Tlumang said they chose Mennonite Church USA because of personal connections and shared beliefs, such as adult baptism.
On Saturday evenings, people from this congregation gather in homes for prayer meetings. When I attended on November 11, 2017, around 30 people sat together in the living room of an apartment. Children took turns standing to say Bible verses by memory, and everyone applauded them. Some adults stood with prayer requests, and the group prayed and sang songs with acoustic guitar accompaniment. Some people had hymnals printed in the back of their Bibles, and others accessed them on their phones. At the close of the meeting, the hosts served noodles and spicy fish soup and participants stayed to talk.
Sunday worship services take place in the afternoons, in a building shared with a Korean congregation. Congregational singing, primarily Western-influenced popular Christian music, is led by a group that would commonly be called a praise band: singers, guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums. They lead some songs translated from English, such as “Above All Power”, written by Lenny LeBlanc and Paul Baloche in 1995, and recorded several years later by Michael W. Smith.
“Jehovah Samak” (first line: “Zisuh nih a zultu hna sin ah”) is a song the musicians said is especially meaningful because it was written by one of the first Chin Christians. In the following video, Olivia Tluang explains what the song means to her, and the band demonstrates the song. The melody and harmonies are similar to Western songs; the anonymous writer could have been influenced by learning music from nineteenth-century European missionaries.
On the Sunday I visited, other special music included kids’ music and a youth a capella choir, audible when hovering over the score below. The choir’s written music features the solfege notation common in many regions of Asia. The letters stand for do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti, and indicate the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass parts from top to bottom in each bracket (similar to a grand staff in Western notation). The lyrics can be found in the middle line of each system.
Audio clip of a song by the youth choir.