Church address: 412 Crescent St Wheaton, Illinois 60187
Date attended: 9/20/15
Church Category: Liturgical
1. I attended the Divine Liturgy service in English. Most of the service was a time of call and response as well as singing hymns. The priest stayed in the iconostasis at the front of the sanctuary and faced away from the congregation. Most of the call and response was actually sung and we were given large pamphlets at the beginning of the service. The congregation recited the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed without the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. Orthodox Christians then partook in communion and the priest made announcements and gave a sermon. This service was very different from my own church tradition in that 1) my church says hardly any liturgy, 2) worship only takes about 20 minutes at my home church, while here the singing took about 1.25 hours, and 3) there was much more congregation participation in this service due to the extended singing and liturgy.
2. The aspect of the service that I found most appealing was the involvement of the congregation in the service. My voice was hoarse from singing for that long and the congregation, while small, participated fully in the singing, crossing themselves whenever the Trinity was mentioned, and getting down on their knees to bow. This service required a lot more dedication on the part of the worshipper than many of the evangelical churches I’ve attended. Another part that I found very interesting was that most of the liturgy was sung by the congregation. The singing was unaccompanied and so very different from even traditional evangelical churches that use an organ and choir. The spoken liturgy was said very fast and would have been hard to understand if it had not been written in the pamphlet we were given.
3. The parts that were most challenging about the service were the Hymn of the Cherubim, communion, and singing and praying to the Saints and the Virgin Mary. About halfway through the service we sang a song that attributed us to in some way representing the cherubim. This was very confusing to me and I had not heard anything said like this before in church. Learning more about this hymn and what it means would help my understanding of the Orthodox Church. Like Catholic Churches, communion in the Orthodox Church said that the sacraments became the body and blood of Christ. Coming from an evangelical background, I was very uncomfortable with this and chose to look over the words but not sing them. Finally, many prayers said during the service were directed towards Saints and the Virgin Mary. Once again, as an evangelical, this did not sit well for me.
4. One part of theology that the service illuminated for me was the acknowledgement of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Every time the trinity was mentioned throughout the service, the congregation would cross themselves. Added to this was the saying of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed which speaks of the relationship of the Godhead to each other. This orthodox church placed a major emphasis on the Trinity throughout the entire divine liturgy. This is something that, while mentioned often, is not present as much in many of the other churches I’ve attended. The service also had more aspects of community than most other churches. In between communion and the sermon, there was a time of announcements in which congregational members could speak about life events that had occurred or were coming up. There was also a fellowship hour following the service in which all were invited for food and conversation. This was much more feasible in this church of about 150 than for a megachurch, but it still felt more like a community than other larger churches.
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