Transcript: Orlene Williams
[00:00]
My full name is Ludeth Orlene. Orlene's my middle name but I prefer to use that. But officially my name is Ludette Orlene Williams, and I wrote you originally my maiden name's Graham, and I was born in Jamaica. I’m…My age is, I'm 66. I've been sort of like a believer, a Christian, since I was 17 years old.
[00:27]
So I grew up in… I grew up in church. Myself and my husband. So we were part of a very big organisation in London. I originally think we… We originally were Londoners, and the organisation which we came under was called at that time, which is in the ‘70s, 508 Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ Worldwide.
[00:48]
So it was a worldwide organisation. We came under a bishop from America in Washington, D.C. So that's where the origin of our church started, in America. Then it came, then it developed here in, quite fast, in the ‘70s.
[01:09]
So I've been in church from… I've been in the 70s within the Bibleway Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ Worldwide. And in 1999, we left that part of the organisation and continued as the Bibleway Church. And then recently we called… we changed the name to Global Bibleway. So that's the background.
[01:31]
So I was born in Jamaica. I came… My parents are Jamaican. My parents, obviously, came through the Windrush. So my parents came here in 1960, the same year I was born. My mom left me when I was six. When I was six months old, so I grew up with my grandmother. And then I came to the UK in 1968 to join my parents here in the UK. So primary school, secondary school, college was all done in the UK.
[02:13]
So that's basically my background. And so I've been living here for some years. I've been living in Cambridge now since 1984. I moved here with my husband. We moved here because we're both devout Christians and my husband is a minister of religion. So we moved here to take over a church here in Cambridge. I have three sons also.
[02:40]
We came across the Air Force staff to our church. So because there was also a lot of Christians on the air… on the bases. So that's how we came into contact with them. So we had a lot of fellowship with them while they were here. So that's how… that’s how that came about.
[03:03]
They were from the same church. They worshipped the same way we worshipped. We would… we would actually go to the base. They would invite us to anything that they were doing in their churches. So my husband would preach a lot on the bases, on the air base. They would invite him there. And when we had functions and fellowship, they would also come to our church in Cambridge. They were just here in the military to work, and a part of their everyday life was the church, you know? They were really involved.
[03:39]
Obviously, back in the U.S., they still were Christians. So they did not… they did not denounce that. When they came here they… they… they got together, you know, those who were Christians got together and they had places. Sometimes they rented places on the air base where they could worship. Within the congregation, you'd probably find about two, three, four white ones. It wasn't the white Americans we were with. It was the Black ones. It was never too—we never socialized with them in that way - anything that functions that they—because they used to have, like, dinners, banquets and stuff like that within the church environment. It wasn't anything to do with the clubs or the other places that they would go out. We didn't know of that.
[04:29]
We felt rather comfortable around them. It was like we were in our own church because they worshipped the same. There was no difference because we would… We traveled to America a lot. So we knew how they… the Americans worshipped. We traveled a lot to America with the Black churches that… because our church is also American based. We have a lot of… we interact with a lot of churches in America. So when we went on the base, it was no different from… it was like we were in America.
[05:02]
Worship is a big part of our service. And so music is very, very important. And I come… my family are very musical. Yeah, so my family are very musical. That is a big part of our worship, our church. You know, singing, worship, praise, that is a very big part of our… I would say it's 70 percent of the church. Because of the people we were amongst, they were very musical. And it was similar to the songs we sang and the music that we, you know, we worshipped with. Same worship songs. Even if the songs that we weren't familiar with, we were taught them. Everything was on screens and stuff like that. So we caught on to their music very well. And it was very, very similar.
[05:02]
I think, again, because I travelled a lot to America, so I was familiar with… with, you know, the— I don't think the worship was much different from here in the UK in our church. I think they felt comfortable when they came here and they found that there was a church so similar to what… how they worshipped.
[06:15] Finish