Kelsey McDonald Church Visit #1

Kelsey McDonald - Church Visit #2

Church name: Chicagoland Community Church

Church address: 836 W Aldine Ave Chicago, IL 60657

Date attended: September 14, 2014

Church category: Lower Income

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

Entering into Chicagoland Community Church, the other Wheaton students and I doubled the congregation. It was a small to say the least. The worship team consisted of two people; a man on the piano and a woman singing. The songs were classic Christian hits from the 90s. I enjoyed the intimacy, but it is a little disconcerting when you can hear your own voice singing. This would is great if you can sing, but unfortunately I cannot. The songs were  similar to the worship in my regular church context. However, I normally attend a church a bit bigger, and the worship band is consisted of more people.

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

The smallness of the worship service was startling at first, but then very appealing. Many worship teams rely on emotional swells and dramatic music to engage the audience, creating a spiritual high. I have been to some megachurches, where I was more concerned with the graphics and light show than the words I was saying. It felt more like a concert than church. This was far from the case at Chicagoland. The words of the songs were the focus. This was both refreshing and convicting. I was actually confronted with whether or not I believed in the words I was saying.

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

The most challenging thing about Chicagoland was the seating. I was with seven other Wheaton in Chicago students, and we sat in the middle pews. There were two or three couples in front of us, and a few people behind us, who we soon realized were the pastor and his family. About a third of the way through the service ,a group of black men and women came and sat in the back corner of the church. They looked about our age, maybe a little older. This church was small, and so they could not easily sneak in and out. I could not help thinking of how segregated the seating was. The preacher preached, we sang another song, and then everyone left. There was no interaction between the front and back congregation. It was interesting because the church’s website has a big headline reading, “Come as you are. Meet Jesus as he is.” I completely resonate with this statement, but the church’s actions did not reflect this. Now I do not know the history of the church, and maybe they are fairly new in engaging the community. Despite the pastor’s enthusiasm while he was preaching, he seemed a little naive to the city life. He talked to our group afterwards, but not the black kids. He also opened his sermon describing the three art pieces on displayed on the side wall, explaining that they were apart of the church’s effort to create a gallery feel. This felt forced to me, as if the pastor was trying too hard to create a space where the youth of neighborhood would come to his church. I understand his intentions, but it did come across as genuine or welcoming.

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 pastor preached about Matthew 8, where Jesus casts the demon out of the beggar and into the pigs. The sermon was long and had a lot of anecdotes. He worked Lord of the Rings into the sermon somehow, but I honestly did not understand the connection. The pastor just got really excited and pretending to be Gandalf yelling, “You shall not pass!” He also had a lego version of Gandalf, which he threw into the audience. Again, I did not understand the connection. I did however enjoy his historical context for this story. He mentioned that the town the beggar was ostracized from was livestock based. Their economic livelihood was based upon the pigs. The fact that Jesus cast the demons onto these pigs was a message to the surrounding town. Jesus was giving a picture of the validity of the human life. These people were more concerned about their pigs, essentially their money, than the man behind the demons. By casting the demons into the pigs, who sent them running off a cliff, Jesus was saying correcting their values. Human life is more important than money. I had never heard this cultural context to this story, and really enjoyed the perspective it gave to the passage.