Will Eldredge - Church Visit #1

Church Name: Nueva Vida

Church Address: 2516 N Kostner Ave,  Chicago, IL 6063

Date Attended: 9/7/14

Church Category: Mono-racial, but severely different than my own.

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

            The worship service was in Spanish.  This in itself put a minor barrier between myself and the others’ worshipping.  What was amazing is that the service in general was almost identical to the church I attended until the fifth grade.  The worship songs were the same songs, the liturgy more or less followed the same pattern, and the speaker used the same abundance of hazy metaphors.  The service was almost a carbon copy of an English church, however, completely in Spanish.  There were people singing and dancing, and a smattering of amens and hallelujahs but there were equally as many people who were disengaged and simply filling the seats just like every other church in America.  I felt a little as though I could relate to what every person must have been feeling in the room even though at the same time I felt a little bit like a fly on the wall just observing something that I did not belong to.

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

            I really enjoyed the worship.  Each song was the same as the songs we used to sing when I was little, but in Spanish.  In a way, it made them better, because the chords were familiar, but I had to consciously think over the words we were singing because the English words were so ingrained in my head.  It made the worship much more personal and special because it combined two things I look back on in life with great fondness, my days at Valley United Methodist Church, and my days learning Spanish at Valley High School.  The speaker was also very dynamic, and pretty funny at times as well.  I was frustrated a few times when I missed a joke everyone laughed at, but it was also great experience to learn grace for myself, which was ironically one of the themes of the service.  At certain points during the sermon I was engaged, but I also found myself drifting at times, which was fine because I got to spend some time in uninterrupted meditation over what the pastor was preaching.

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

            Obviously the language was disorienting.  It actually threw off most of my day, because it was the first thing I did when I woke up in the morning and it set the tone of my day off thinking and responding in Spanish for some reason.  Within the service it was not too difficult to follow what the pastor was saying as long as I concentrated –although it was hard to concentrate that early on a Sunday morning.  The hardest and most disorienting part was after the service half the congregation greeted us, since Taylor and I are clearly not Latino.  They all invited us back and tried to give us their gift bag which is always awkward, but the difficult part came when determining which language to engage them in.  Several people seemed interested in speaking English with us, but I also felt torn, because to some degree their service was a safe haven from the white-Anglo culture they interacted with every day.  On the other hand, I did not feel confident I could do their language justice with my meager four years of High School Spanish and was somewhat worried I might let them down by attempting to speak Spanish.

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 sermon series was on Genesis and they were a few weeks in and only on chapter 2.  I felt as though the pastor did not share anything I had never heard before, but he did do what I considered to be a fabulous job of preaching the gospel right out of Genesis.  He demonstrated God’s intimacy with us from the beginning, breathing his Spirit into us to give us life.  Also, we had just finished discussing the doctrine of the Trinity in class, and I found it enlightening to hear his description at a time where I was extra sensitive to it.  He described the Father, Spirit and Son in terms of our bodies.  The Father is above us, but comes down to breathe his spirit into us –making the Spirit within and around us, and finally Christ the Son humbled himself that he would be beneath us.  He had a man lay down to prove this point and used his head as an image, his nose as the other, and his feet for the final image.  It was a simple and beautiful explanation that was very opposite of the dense thinking we had previously done on the subject.