Inspiring singing

There are many churches around here - no, that's not right...

There are myriads of churches around here (we can see a handful just looking out of our window and we lose count going by bus to the shopping centre), only a few as big as you imagine a church to be, most of them as big as a local house, some of them as small as a room. They have services on Saturday evening or on Sunday morning (and/or evening) and some of them one or two evenings per week. Being the vast majority of them on the evangelical-pentecostal side, they mostly sing, or they only sing apart from when the preacher screams at them (1). With this set of data, you can do your own calculation and grasp the amount of religious singing our hearing system undergoes on a weekly basis. Once you reach that piece of information, please add a fundamental element to the equation: most church musicians, sorry, keyboard players, around here know from three to four chords (maybe not most, only the skilled ones) and the number of tunes they can play with those is quite low, let's say it rarely passes half a dozen. 

All in all, a very grim outlook for our hears? Maybe, but wait till you read more... 

Solo singers, sometimes used by congregations for mysterious reasons, are not much better than the musicians and quite a few preachers opt to sing from the microphone, or more precisely eating the mike, though whatever kind of training they received or self-inflicted for preaching, it didn't include singing.

Still, despite the dramatic reality of the situation affecting our ears, we found this singing quite inspirational and our prayers often raise up on the wings of those notes.

Unfortunately for the local churches, the content of those prayers is not exactly benevolent towards the musicians or their instruments, the buildings or the whole congregations, or simply their electricity connections...

Actually, luckily for them, our faith has recently developed to a point where we don't really believe in supplicating prayers, so the congregations are still safe, unless one evening Mattia or Elena are too tired and can't stop the other from going outside and mete justice out by themselves.

(1) As to the preachers, we are eternally grateful to our dear friend, fellow volunteer and next-door  (behind-the-wooden-wall) neighbour Marlene who, one of her first nights here, asked us whether there are preachers coming to these small congregations or they only sing; we were scared to answer, but out of courtesy we told her that preachers do come down here. Of course, our fears came true, with a vengeance, and since that fateful conversation we've had a spate of dreadful screamers tormenting our ears even more than before.