Rachel Poel - Church Visit #2

Church name: Iglesia Cristiana Community Christian Church

Church address: 76 S. Lasalle Street, Aurora, IL 60506

Date attended: 25 October 2015

Church category: different ethnic or racial demographic, significantly lower socioeconomic demographic

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

After getting lost on our way there, we arrived at the service about 10 or 15 minutes late, so I don’t know exactly how the service started.  By the time we arrived, a video on the front screen was displaying a toddler’s reaction to receiving hearing aids and hearing his dad’s voice for the first time. About 80 people sat in rows of plastic chairs, while a few loitered at tall tables in the back. The whole meeting felt more urban than traditional.  We met in a large room upstairs in an industrial building, with an illuminated red background behind the small stage area. When the video-turned-sermon-illustration ended, the pastor showed up on the screen; we later learned he was preaching at another campus’ service that week.  Looking like a Latino hipster, he preached by bouncing eloquently between phrases in Spanish and English.   He spoke enthusiastically about the importance of reading the Bible regularly, but he did not use the Bible much in his preaching.  Instead, he used analogies to baseball and taco fillings.  After his preaching, a worship team sang, alternating between English and Spanish songs.  Communion was passed around, we sang again, and the service ended maybe 45 minutes after we arrived. 

The unadorned style reminded me of my home church.  However, the congregation hardly joined in the singing at all, especially the English-speaking members during the English songs. Also, the entire service was much shorter than I am used to.

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

I really enjoyed hearing the preacher switch incessantly between the two languages. Not only was it an impressive linguistic feat, it continually reminded me that I am not the only type of recipient of the gospel.

I was impressed by the kindness of the people in the church.  As we tried to figure our way through the industrial building to the meeting, already 10 or 15 minutes late, two greeters welcomed us, and one led us through the maze of halls and stairs to the meeting room.  When we got there, a few more people greeted up warmly and asked where we were from. After the service, we were again greeted. People answered our questions enthusiastically and thanked us for coming repeatedly.  The woman we talked to after the service praised how the church was involved in a ministry to the East Aurora schools. 

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

As I reflected on the service with classmates, we were concerned about the ethnicity of the leadership versus the ethnicity of the congregation.  The congregation was probably about 75%, but most of the people serving and leading – the greeters downstairs and upstairs, the people serving communion, about half the worship team – were white.  It almost seemed as if this “campus” were a ministry granted by the larger campus.  However, this could have been emphasized by the pastor’s absence and by the fact that our limited Spanish and late arrival limited the people we could talk to.  However, the urban style of the room contrasted with the simple, low-cost clothes most of the congregation wore. The service felt somewhat like a production before a largely passive audience.  However, it was hard to discern to what extent my discomfort came from the privilege Wheatie’s desire for an idealized “authenticity.”

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

As a bilingual church, the congregation included English-speaking and Spanish-speaking members who were content to remain in long-term community with people who were obviously different from them.  From my limited vantage point, it didn’t seem that people viewed these differences as a problem.  The two language groups wore different types of clothes and sang at different songs, but they sat mingled among one another and chatted in blended languages after the service.  This freshly affirmed the lasting place of diversity in the body of Christ, as cliché as that sounds. Some of my professors have described the recent critique of the “melting pot” image of America as gradually producing a homogenous average. Instead, they’ve advocated the image of America as a “salad bowl” where individuals retain their differences in such a way as to complement one another.  This church seemed more comfortable with people retaining their differences rather than overcoming the differences to get to more homogenous fellowship.