Rachel Poel - Church Visit #3

Church name: Lawndale Christian Community Church

Church address: 3827 W. Ogden  Chicago, Illinois 60623

Date attended: 1 November 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?

The service felt warm and familial.  As we came in, several people stopped us to say hello and ask where we were from.  The singing started promptly, but maybe half the congregation trickled in over the next twenty minutes, greeting each other with grins and teasing. Everyone joined the singing enthusiastically. After a few songs, a larger choir crowded onto the stage until the curtain rod behind them swayed along with the singers. After that, the preacher gave a practical sermon about changing to love one another better.  He spoke quickly, addressed contemporary issues like online bullying, and jokingly referenced his friendship with various. We then had communion and sang briefly before being dismissed. 

The whole service felt surprisingly similar to my home church. We have a pretty strong record of welcoming guests and making strong friendships, we meet in a school, and we structure our service in the same pattern.  Even the format of communion – the placement in the service, the opportunity for reflection, the church members serving it from several pairs in front, the brief words spoken to the partakers, the casual lines forming – was identical.  However, my church is probably close to 80% white members with a more wealthy background, and our sermons tend to be more exegetical and explicitly theological than the one I heard on my visit.

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

I felt like the church held similar values to mine but applied them in an intentionally different context.  This appealed to me and helped me think about what it might look like for my church to grow in service.  LCCC has thoroughly integrated its Sunday services with its weeklong ministries of the clinic, the legal center, the addiction-recovery ministry, and so on.  The sermon seemed sensitive to the issues that can particularly plague high-crime or low-income neighborhoods, using addiction recovery as an example of how to change our peers and environments to change ourselves. I especially liked the preacher’s tone about women.  He made joking comments about men’s reaction to them, garnering laughs, but he also firmly spoke of them as equal partners when he described their creation out of man.  Hearing this affirmation embedded in Biblical preaching was encouraging.  

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

As I said earlier, my church has more exegetical sermons.  The sermon I heard at LCCC was intensely practical, but it didn’t seem like we spent a lot of time talking about God. I realize that there is an important balance between talking about God and talking about our response to Him, and I definitely err on the side of inactive theology.  However, the sermon felt like self-help in some respects.  While the scripture was read before the sermon, the preacher did not connect it to his sermon until maybe two thirds of the way through it.  It almost seemed more like a justification for what he was interested in saying.

I also found it helpfully challenging to be in the clear majority in the service. I was convicted of how I assumed that others would view me as an intruder.  Early in the singing, I felt like people kept turning around to look at us, and even the people on the stage kept staring my way. When I realized that there was a screen with lyrics on it behind us, I realized I was just reading my own fears of intruding onto other people. 

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

The service reminded me that Christianity is deeply practical.  It is not solely an endeavor of the soul and the mind.  My mom used to teach me that our faith, our minds, and our feelings were like three parts of a train, and the faith must always be in front, followed by minds and then by feelings.  This image has helped me, but it takes an almost neo-Platonist stance in minimizing the body.  LCCC contrasted with this, reminding me that to love people is not only a philosophical appreciation for the relational nature of personhood or a theological respect for God’s image in them. It is also hosting guests and providing work and visiting those in prison and tending the sick.  As such, this service is not just the work of individual Christians or families, which is the approach my family tends to take. Instead, it should be central to the whole church.