Daniel Davis - Church Visit #1

Church Name: St. Michael Catholic Church
Church Address: 310 S. West St, Wheaton, IL, 60187
Date Attended: January 26, 2014
Church Category: More liturgical than my own tradition

Describe the worship service you attended. How was it similar to or different from your regular context?
This Roman Catholic mass was significantly more formal than worship services in my Baptist/Reformed context. The eucharist was the central point of focus, and the homily was comparatively shorter -- only 10-15 minutes, compared to roughly 35 minutes at my church.  At my church, we celebrate communion about once per month, rather than every Sunday.  But, interestingly enough, the order of the mass was somewhat similar to what I would experience on a communion Sunday at my church.  The service begins with one or two songs of worship, then a church member reads Scripture aloud, and then the pastor/priest (who are necessarily males in both contexts) delivers a message.  After the message, the pastor/priest prepares for communion and then dispenses it to the laity.  After communion, a song is sung, and then the benediction closes the service.  Of course, the nature of these activities differed starkly between this church and my own -- for instance, we have widely differing understandings of the eucharist.  But the strict order of these activities was relatively similar to that in my own church.

What did you find most interesting or apealing about the worship service?
If found the priest's homily most interesting, and one point he made particularly salient.  He spoke on the issue of church unity, and expressed concern over factionalism that exists today even within the Roman Catholic Church.  He associated factionalism with Christian "leaders" -- or in other words, celebrity Christian leaders who find a niche with a particular kind of Christian.  He argued, citing the apostle Paul, that when we begin to follow a human person over the all-unifying Christ, the church loses its unity.  I agree wholeheartedly with this point.  This is not a critique of Protestantism per se; he was not criticizing the breaking off of sects strictly due to theological disagreement.  He was criticizing a kind of celebrity guru Christianity, which indeed has infected much of today's Protestantism and has come hand-in-hand with much of what I consider to be good theology.  This was a good word to hear, and something Protestants can do well to remember.  If we divide, it must be over sincere and irreconcilable theological disagreement, and never over a celebrity Christian leader.

What did you find most disorienting or challenging about the worship service?
I found myself unsettled by what appeared to be a highly ritualistic understanding of worship.  The service appeared to emphasize outward action as the indispensible component of worship, rather than internal spiritual reverence.  This is not at all to say that the service didn't encourage inward reverence -- it did in many ways.  But I think the high emphasis on ritual has a tendency to obscure the laity's understanding of what worship most fundamentally is: inward reverence for God, manifest in outward acts.  One example is the requirement that each individual kneel and perform the sign of the cross before entering the pew.  While this ritual is certainly intended to precipitate inward worship (and is, on this ground, defensible), I think the heavy emphasis on ritual can be unconducive to a healthy, spiritually rooted understanding of worship. Well-intended rituals of this sort can, when excessive, prove more unhelpful than helpful for the laity. But of course, this danger is not unique to Roman Catholicism.

What aspects of Scripture or theology did the worship service illuminate for you that you had not perceived as clearly in your regular context?
There were corporate times of kneeling built into this service.  Kneeling for prayer is not a practice in my own tradition, but the practice has deep roots in Scripture, particularly in the way worship is portrayed in the Old Testament.  Throughout the Old Testament, the people of Israel are shown worshipping God in various physical postures, particularly prostration, bowing, and kneeling.  The posture itself is a recognition of our proper relationship to God: one of reverence, awe, and submission.  Now, I do believe that physical acts of reverence to God can become problematic if they do not correspond to an internal, spiritual posture of submission.  We are both body and soul, and so the two should correspond.  And, being tainted by sin, we are prone to turn good ritual into a kind of ritualism.  But I think this particular physical act of kneeling is unique.  It is entirely biblical, and it is a simple but powerful reminder of the spiritual posture we ought to have toward God.