Mountain View Community Church celebrates native countries of congregants
Nov. 14—The Mountain View Community Church of today looks a lot different than the one Guy and Lorrie Kneebone moved from Iowa to start almost exactly 25 years ago.
After meeting at Urbana High School for 13 years, the church now spans two campuses — one in Ballenger Creek and one in Urbana — and averages about 1,000 worshipers every week.
The congregation has also changed in ways other than its size, said Guy Kneebone, the church's senior pastor.
As Urbana grew from a rural community to a more suburban one, it diversified racially and ethnically. Over the years, the racial and ethnic make-up of Mountain View's regular attendees has followed suit.
On Sunday, the church hosted its second "Festival of Nations" to highlight the multitude of cultures represented in its congregation and give members the chance to share food and music from their home countries with each other.
"We're living in times where things can separate us in the world," said David Moreno, Mountain View's pastor of missions and the event's organizer. "But this event is an opportunity to unite us and celebrate each other's differences, the beauty of each other's cultures."
Moreno, who grew up in Colombia, said there were 23 countries in total represented at the festival.
Inside the church, worshipers danced to lively Christian music or roamed around, balancing paper plates piled high with aromatic dishes. Many wore traditional clothes from their cultures, or donned brightly colored soccer jerseys representing their native countries.
Around the room, there were tables representing Ethiopia, Côte D'Ivoire, Indonesia, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Honduras, El Salvador, Ukraine and about a dozen other countries.
Close to the door, Lionel Hounkanrin passed out Dixie cups filled with a deep magenta liquid — hibiscus tea, a traditional drink from his native Benin, which features the hibiscus flower, as well as vanilla, sugar and cloves.
Hounkanrin, who has been attending Mountain View for about a year and a half with his wife and son, arrived in Frederick to study at Frederick Community College in 2006. He's been in America ever since.
On Sunday, he learned that other countries serve a similar kind of drink to the West African hibiscus tea. Members of the congregation from Mexico and El Salvador stopped by his table to share that they were already familiar with the beverage, although people from their countries call it different names.
A few feet away, Marlene Facine eagerly displayed an illustrated map of Ecuador, the country where she grew up. She pointed out Guayaquil — the port city where she is from, which borders the Pacific Ocean — and Quito, the country's capital.
Facine moved to America in 1988, when she was young and naive, she said with a laugh. She was happy to share three traditional dishes with her fellow worshipers, although one of them — empanadas — was quick to run out.
"Where there is food, there is happiness," she said.
As Mountain View's congregation has changed, the church has changed with it. During services, people sometimes pray in their native languages. One day, Guy Kneebone said, he hopes the church is able to give sermons in Spanish, as well as English.
The mission of members of Mountain View's congregation is reaching their neighbors, the next generation and the nations for Christ, Kneebone said.
God loves everybody, he said, citing verse 16 of the third chapter of the New Testament, which reads, "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."
"We're a church for all people," Kneebone said.
Follow Angela Roberts on Twitter: @24_angier
