Kari DeHaven – Church Visit #2

Church name: Lawndale Community Church
Church address: 3827 W. Ogden Chicago, IL 60623
Date attended: March 30
Church category: Significantly lower socioeconomic demographic

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

One of the similarities between Lawndale and my home church is that the churches are focused on community, and they are located in buildings that were not originally meant to be a church building. In going to Lawndale, probably everyone in the church could tell that I am not a regular attender of the church. It seems like most people in the church know each other. There was a lot of socializing before and after the service, as it is at my home church.

One of the major differences between Lawndale and my home church is that Lawndale is on the westside of Chicago and is therefore in an urban context. My home church is surrounded by farms and very rural. For example, there are kids at my home church who sell eggs from their farm to church members.

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

I enjoyed the musical worship. During my time as a participant in Global Urban Perspectives a couple years ago my teammate and I served on the worship team at another church in Chicago, and the music was very similar. Some of the songs incorporated repeating the same phrase multiple times, and while some find that annoying I actually really love that in worship. Especially when those phrases are focused on God it can take on a sort of meditative or contemplative process in which I am dwelling on who God is and what He has done. Those phrases tend to stick with me throughout the day or next several days and remind me of what I heard at church throughout the week.

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

Part of it was that it was difficult to hear the pastor during the sermon, potentially because of the microphone, but I found it somewhat difficult to track with the sermon throughout the whole service. I appreciated how he used stories so that the congregation would keep with what he was saying. He was also using a sermon structure that is largely different than what I am used to. What was helpful is that I could identify what sermon structure he was using so I could understand that he was going somewhere with most of the points he was making, even if they seemed like digressions.

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

It was amazing to see how the ministry of Lawndale cares for the whole person. Too many churches seem to only care about the soul or a person’s spiritual life and do not care enough for the physical needs of a person. Going to Lawndale was encouraging to me because the whole ministry is so clearly a testament to the work of God. I think what’s hard with attending a suburban church is that we do not as often allow how desperately we need to depend upon Jesus to show. To me, Lawndale does not seem to be caught up in the same sort of pretense that suburban churches tend to be in. It was a little shocking to hear people talk so openly about their experiences with drugs and being in prison because it’s not as if those things don’t happen to people in the suburbs, we just tend to cover it up and it affects people much differently in the suburbs. To hear someone talk so openly about the part of their past that most of us would rather cover up was incredible because their past was not something to hide, but seemed to be a demonstration of God’s grace in their lives. What would the Church look like if we let our pasts be known as part of a story that testifies to God’s ongoing work in the lives of real people?