Kathryn McGregor - Church Visit #3

Willow Creek Casa de Luz
 67 Algonquin Rd, South Barrington, IL 60010
November 1, 2015
Multicultural

The church felt very different from my home church, and also different from other hispanic churches i had attended before, mostly because of its size. This spanish service was one of the larger ones I had attended, and the sheer magnitude of Willow Creek was a bit distracting. However, one thing that was similar to my home church here in Wheaton is that they are faithful to greet people and are very intentional about welcoming the visitors that come to the church, which is always for refreshing for me. Obviously, the language barrier was also something that I'm not very used to. I am working to get a minor in Spanish, so my Spanish is not horrible, but it is always a challenge to understand the sermon fully and difficult to communicate with the other native speakers before and after the service. 

I have always enjoyed worshiping in the Latino context. I attended Iglesia del Pueblo my sophomore year for an assignment in my Spanish class, and ended up attending the church for a couple months. The people that i met there, and at casa de luz, were so incredibly welcoming and loving. I felt genuinely accepted and not like an outsider when i attended Casa de Luz, which is a testament to the way they love Jesus and seek to spread his Gospel. I also enjoyed the way they were very scripture oriented. The pastor was speaking on Nehemiah, and had working through the book for the past 2 months, chapter by chapter, also drawing from other passages in the Bible. I really enjoyed his method of preaching, and always enjoy using the Spanish i know.

While I thoroughly enjoy using my Spanish, it was also the most challenging part of the service. The sermon was fairly long, and it took a lot of energy and focus for me to stay engaged and also be constantly interpreting the message in my head. While I could understand most of what he said when I was focused, there were definitely times where I lost my concentration and missed most of what he was saying. The language barrier was definitely something I struggled to overcome on my visit. If the sermon had not been as lengthy, I may have been more successful. 

Worshiping in other cultures and languages has always illuminated the unity of the body and universality of Christ for me. It is so incredible to be able to worship God in another language, and see how hearing sermons in a different language can bring new light to the way i view God and also the body of Christ. While I was worshiping at Casa de luz, i was reminded that Christ supersedes every language and cultural barrier that we are limited by. It is so easy to get trapped in the "Wheaton bubble" and forget that all over the world, in many different tongues, millions of believers worship the same exact God. This was a super helpful reminder of how big God is, and also how united we are as body of Christ through our common worship of a God who is bigger than every cultural, geographical, and language barrier that exists.  

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. 

Hannah Hacker - Church visit #3

Church name: Resurrection Catholic Parish

Church address: 30W350 Army Trail Road, Wayne, IL 60184

Date attended: November 1st, 2015

Church category: More Liturgical

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

            The service followed traditional Catholic liturgy. During the first part of the service, a small ensemble of a pianist and a few choristers located at one side of the sanctuary led the congregation in several hymns and two people read portions of scripture. Then a priest delivered a short sermon while walking all around the center space of the sanctuary. Afterward, the congregation recited the Nicene Creed and went through the Eucharist ceremony. At home, I attend a non-denominational church that does not use liturgy. At school, I attend the Anglican Church of the Resurrection, which is similar to this Catholic because it also emphasizes Eucharist along with the sermon message and because it uses similar interactive elements in worship. However, it has draws from a greater diversity of music for worship.

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

            Because of the use of liturgy, this church service seemed uniquely connected to churches around the world and Christian communities of the past, which is a very different feeling from more contemporary or forward-focused services in non-liturgical contexts. Additionally, the ceremoniousness of every aspect of the service, from the signing of the cross, to bowing before the crucifix, to kissing the Bible, created an atmosphere of holiness and reverence for God and conveyed the gravity of our worship. I personally liked the way the physical structure of the sanctuary, which was almost round and had all the seats facing a central open space, allowed the congregation to feel more united, even with the musicians and the priests. Rather than creating an audience/leader dynamic in most church contexts, this service made it seem more like we were all, congregants and clergy alike, coming together to worship God. And I have to admit that although the sermon was very short and seemed like something was missing, it was easier to focus because it was so brief.

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

             I am not familiar with the Catholic liturgy, so I constantly felt like I was a step behind everyone else. There were no cues about when to sit, when to stand, the right response to the priests’ statements, or when to sign the cross. But what was most challenging for me was the content of the sermon/homily. Since it was All Saints Day, the priest posed the question, who goes to heaven? Immediately, the typical evangelical answer came to mind: anyone who believes in Jesus. So I was shocked when he said that the answer was anyone who obeys God. Which in a sense is true, for faith in Jesus and accepting the grace of salvation should be followed by obedience. But the blatant omission of any reference to salvation and eternal life through Jesus Christ during an entire homily on how to get to heaven seemed to miss Biblical truth. Attending this sermon highlighted the difference between Catholic and Protestant theology.

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

             Even though the homily essentially pointed to human efforts as the source of eternal life, it did help me to see ways in which I may emphasize the importance of free grace to the exclusion of the importance righteous living. This service reminded me that God does really care about how Christians live and while we are not saved by good works, we are saved for good works. My assurance of salvation on the basis of Jesus’ death and resurrection is not an excuse for apathetic living; rather, it is the basis for both being sanctified and loving others. One aspect of the worship also struck me. Before reading from a gospel, the congregation sang a very joyful “allelulia” while the priest paraded the book around the sanctuary. This emphasis on the joy of the gospel and its precious nature is not as evident in a context where the Bible is taken for granted and everyone reads along on their phones or from a projection at the fro

David Batdorf - Church Visit #3

Uptown Baptist Church
1011 W Wilson Ave, Chicago, IL 60640
October 25th
Multicultural

The worship service would have varied from any of my "typical" Sunday morning worship experiences because I was singing in the service with Concert Choir. Because I was part of a larger group of people all aspects of the service were experienced as "different". However, even if this would have not been so the experience would have differed from any other worship service I have attended for several reasons. First was the racial demographic of the congregation. While a majority of the people were black, there was great diversity and I remember thinking to myself that I expected to feel much more out of place than I did in the moment. As the choir sang to open the service people trickled in, talking humming along with us (even though we were singing more classical-style music). This easy going nature continued throughout the service. People were quick to respond to the preacher, raise their hand, stand up  and even cry. There was a clear lack of stigma. I also noticed the service was preacher centered. He spoke for several minutes at the beginning of the service, sharing announcements before praying. The service clearly climaxed in the sermon, which was very lengthy and explicitly tied social and political matters into the spiritual content.

I found the freedom and gratitude with which the congregants displayed during the service very appealing. Even though the music we were sharing with them contrasted their typical worship music (this was addressed and welcomed by the pastor), the people still stood up and responded to our singing by joining in, waving their hands and clapping. While it felt a bit strange to singing in a white choir at a predominantly black church, I only felt appreciation and  welcome from the people. They seemed genuinely thrill to share their church with us. They were also very thankful for their own people. It was apparently preacher appreciation week while we were there and about 25 minutes was taken to give gifts and words of thanks to each of the pastoral staff by each of the small groups within the church. During the service a slipped off the pole in the front of the sanctuary. Soon the two sound guys come to the front - mid-sermon - and tried to fix it. It didn't feel awkward, it just happened.

In some ways, I did feel like an intruder on their service even though they were very welcoming. There was still an obvious reality that it was largely black church and I was a white guy in a white choir. However, I was expecting to feel this tension and since it was diminished by their warm welcome, I pushed it out of my thoughts and didn't find it very disorienting as the service progressed. One thing I did find myself pushing back against was what felt like to be an overstepping of the pastoral role. I noticed this in the pastor appreciation time. While I think I am simply being over critical of the well intending words of many of the congregants, many of their remarks explicitly mentioned things such as, "you hold this church together Pastor," "Our faith depends on you pastor," and other things like it. While I don't really think that is what is believed it still made me uncomfortable. I was also uncomfortable when the pastor began moving into social and political issues during his sermon. They tended to back up one particular side of the political spectrum and even through I agree with that side I wonder if the pulpit is the appropriate place to address controversial political topics.

As a whole the service illuminated a new aspect of freedom and community to me. While it was a bit awkward at first singing "white music" in a black church, the people quickly shattered that insecurity by beginning to worship with us in their familiar ways of movement and response. It quickly became a beautiful combination of structured music and freedom in worship. There was freedom to worship and display one's heart. During the singing of "I want Jesus to Walk with me" and woman stood up and began weeping with her hands raised. No one in the pews around her look at her strangely, many with their eyes closed nodded their heads and hummed along in agreement. In regards to community, not only were we welcomed profusely, the time of greeting each other in the service lasted 5-10 minutes. It was a real thing. Not a bulletin listing. They were worshiping freely and explicitly with people that they had acknowledged and displayed care to.

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.

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.

Nate Heeren - Church Visit #3

Church name: Lawndale Christian Community Church

Church address: 3827 W. Ogden Ave, Chicago, IL 60623

Date attended: 11/01/15

Church category: Significantly lower socioeconomic demographic

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

For one, the building was different because it was located in a gym. It’s true that a church is not truly the building but rather the people, but the building still makes a difference. When the church is poorer, it can’t necessarily afford a dedicated building to call its very own, and I’m reminded that it’s important not to take the dedicated buildings of churches for granted. Although this visit is categorized as the socioeconomic demographic, the ethnic makeup distinction was also noteworthy--to be blunt, my regular church is nearly homogeneously white, while the congregation at Lawndale was mostly black.

In terms of similarity, there was the non-liturgical music component in a fairly contemporary style, a lengthy sermon, prayer, etc. Overall, I felt that this service was far more similar to my regular church experience than either of my other visits conducted for this class.

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

I really appreciated the musical component of the worship. Despite its limited resources for presentation (unlike many contemporary churches which can boast a professional musical staff, a plethora of instruments, and cutting edge technology to convey it), it was soulful and heartfelt. Its song selection ended up being very nostalgic for me--“Give Thanks” in particular. It may have been short, but it will stand out in my memory more than many a worship session.

I also appreciated being united in Christian fellowship with people outside of my normal context. It’s refreshing and encouraging to sit with, stand with, sing with, pray with, and take communion with believers whose situations are so very different from mine. It is evidence that God is working in more than just the world which I know, which can be easy to forget when you stay in the bubble.

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

Before I engage in this criticism, I am reminded of Dr. Lee’s tirade against essentially being too picky about our church experiences. I call it a tirade (and indeed it was prolonged denunciation), but it was both just and convicting: We should not make our own experience into an idol by consulting it first instead of God and his glory.

So, with that being said, I was not a fan of the sermon style. It was simple, and although the sermon integrated Scripture, its message was general enough to be non-unique to Christianity; I ultimately did not find it intellectually engaging. Yet I wonder if this sermon was what the congregation at large needed to hear more than a sermon I would have found more pleasing. Isn’t there a best-of-both worlds approach where the content can be intellectually stimulating and yet truly important and applicable?

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

To connect back to the musical component of the service, its unpolished nature reminded me of how God cares more about the state of our hearts than the quality and refinement of our presentation. It sounds obvious, but it’s easy for our behavior and major mode of thinking to disconnect from that truth and become warped. We can get caught up in our own elegance, but God exalts the humble, not the lofty. My experience at Lawndale helped illuminate that for me.

One man caught my eye during the singing: He had long hair and a colorful hat, and he was dancing as he sang. His dancing was perhaps less graceful than a student I’ve often seen dancing at chapel during worship. My initial reaction perceived this spectacle as silly and a little foolish. Yet it reminded me of David’s dancing as he brought up the ark, and the subsequent Michal’s scorn, where she criticized him of acting in an undignified manner. I was ready to think like Michal, and in my regular context I’m less aware of my own inclination to judge because the people are more like myself. It is yet another reminder of how God looks on the heart, and how we are prone to pride when we do not actively combat it.