Church Address: 27W500 North Avenue West Chicago, IL
Date Attended: March 30th, 2014
Church Category: Racially Different Church
Describe the worship service you attended. How was it similar to or different from your regular context?
The church service for Iglesia del Pueblo takes place within the massive building that they share with Wheaton Bible Church, although there are different sanctuaries for the English Wheaton Bible service and the Spanish service of Iglesia del Pueblo. The time leading up to the service was filled with members of the congregation conversing with one another and greeting one another. Although I took Spanish at Wheaton and passed competency, I'm by no means able to hold a decent Spanish conversation with anyone else, much less someone who has been speaking it their whole life. Thankfully, the greeters and those in the congregation seemed to sense that I was in over my head, and they greeted me very kindly in English. When the service began, the actual order of the service was very similar to that of my home church. One of the assistant pastors went to the front of the congregation to greet everyone and to give some announcements. After these were completed it then proceeded into a time of worship. This consisted of a worship band singing largely contemporary songs, in Spanish of course. This was also very similar to my traditional context. One particular difference was the length of the sermon. While the sermons back at my home church usually span about thirty to forty-five minutes, the pastor of Iglesia del Pueblo's sermon was just over an hour. This as well as the language difference were the most apparent differences.
What did you find most interesting or appealing about the worship service?
As I described above, most of the worship service was similar to mine in terms of the order of the service. This allowed me to gain a certain comfort level, language barrier non-withstanding. So while there was certainly an aspect of comfort given from that, the thing that I think I found most appealing about this particular worship service was simply the level of passion that was apparent in all of these Spanish worshipers. Coming from a white English background, it can be easy to lose perspective on the global nature of the church and the inherent large number of languages that come with such a massive scale. With that knowledge it was great to be able to simply stop during worship and be able to listen to the numerous voices raised up and praising God in Spanish. Not possessing fluency in Spanish contributed to this in a way as it added to the wonder that I felt for God that he could reach out on such a global scale.
What did you find most challenging or disorienting about the worship service?
The most challenging aspect of this service to me would undeniably have to be the language barrier. The worship style and the order of the service were familiar to me, meaning that the largest difference that I had to zero in on was that I couldn't understand a large portion of the service due to my lackluster Spanish knowledge. During the songs I was able to get by decently, as the lyrics to the songs were projected up onto a screen and they were often simplistic enough that I was able to decipher the song's core meaning. However, once the sermon began I was as good as lost. I was able to ascertain the Scripture passage that was being taught on due to the bulletin, 1 Corinthians 13: 1-13. I was then able to follow along in my English ESV Bible and know the basic meaning of the day's sermon. However, the pastor was speaking at a rate that I wasn't able to pick up many of the details of his message to the congregation. This was tough for me because he spoke with obvious passion on the subject, so not being able to gain the full understanding of his sermon was disappointing.
As I said above, the sermon itself was difficult for me to decipher due to my Spanish language inadequacy. I was able to read through the Scripture passage in my English Bible though, and I was then able to try and parse out things here and there that the pastor was trying to say. The Scripture passage is basically talking about the characteristics of a true and proper love. From what I was able to decipher from the Pastor's message, he was basically talking about how we as Christians should take this groundwork for love and apply it in our daily interactions with each other, both believers and non-believers. This message was nice for me because it seems that often in my church context back home, it can seem like many of our messages have a much more abstract theological aspect to them. While there isn't anything bad about that, having a more basic and straightforward sermon about God's love and it's implications for our daily lives was a nice change of pace, even if I was only able to get bits and pieces.
No comments:
Post a Comment