Anna Jakubiec - Church Visit #3

Church name: East Aurora Community Christian Church

Church address: 76 S. Lasalle St, Aurora

Date attended: 10/25/2015

Church category: Different ethnic/racial demographic

Describe the worship service you attended. How was it similar to or different from your regular context?

The worship service of the East Aurora campus was held in a tiny auditorium at the top of a building. From what I could tell, they have a very small congregation (even in the relatively small room not all the seats were filled), which is different from the church I go to in Wheaton but more familiar to me from my church at home. They also had their pastor give the sermon via a prerecorded video on a screen, but this was apparently atypical for the church. If the paster had not been temporarily preaching elsewhere that week, he would have preached in person. The church building itself was also different to me, as the congregation met a few floors up in an out-of-the-way building. And of course, the most obvious difference was the fact that most of the congregation was Hispanic and the service was bilingual.

What did you find most interesting or appealing about the worship service?

Let me start by making clear that I do not speak Spanish. This is not something I do even a little bit. Nevertheless, something I thought was interesting—something that I in fact loved witnessing even if I was not really a part of it—was how when the songs were sung in both English and Spanish (alternating verses), more people joined in during the Spanish verses. I loved that it was bilingual, that the church had made a space for that community to exist, even though I did not fully understand—although to be really honest, they made it fairly easy to understand in English alone. I liked the small congregation, too, because it felt very familial to me, although partly due to the language barrier again I did not really get a chance to interact much with the churchgoers.

What did you find most disorienting or challenging about the worship service?

As I alluded to before, I was surprised to find that not knowing Spanish did not present as much as a challenge as I expected it to. However, coming to the service a few minutes late (as my friends and I did, having gotten lost on the way) created a bit of an awkward situation for us. Still, that might just have been from our perspective. Another thing that threw me for a bit of a loop was that I did not know their traditions for taking communion, so after the elements were passed I just sat there holding them for a while and kept waiting for something to happen, instead of just partaking when I got them. These were small things; for the most part I did not feel disoriented. I do wonder how the experience might have been different if the pastor had been present.

                                                     

What aspects of Scripture or theology did the worship service illuminate for you that you had not perceived as clearly in your regular context?

Something the pastor specifically said in the sermon struck me pretty strongly: “God wants to speak to us.” It was a simple concept, but I could not stop thinking about it. The importance of language and gratefulness for language in the congregation—by which I mean not only Scripture, but also the ability to communicate with God—was something I had not even realized was lacking in my other contexts. Not until it was present in this one. The implicit trust in words and in the Word was rather refreshing; I feel like sometimes in other churches there is more skepticism about how God can and has communicated, or more trying to convince the congregation of it rather than simply presenting it. The fact that the congregation was bilingual also emphasized what a wonderful gift God’s communication with us is.