Nathan Trump-Visit #2

Church name: Nuevas Esperanzas

Church address: Scripture Press. Wheaton, Illinois

Date attended: 3/30/14

Church category: Ethnic Demographic

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

The Nuevas Esperanzas service was conducted entirely in Spanish save for a few phrases in English that the pastor would throw in periodically. This made the experience very different from my normal context. Although I understand and speak Spanish, it was difficult to completely follow along and I didn’t understand as much of the content as I would have in an English context. Despite the language difference, the service was very similar to an evangelical, nondenominational church; there was some worship, a sermon, announcements and refreshments afterward. One distinctive was that the pastor’s sermon went for about an hour which is much longer than I’m used to and it seemed to become very repetitive.

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

The service was very energetic and the pastor was obviously very passionate and expressive in his speaking as well as touching on the very important topic of the prevalence of sin and the harm in being hypocritically judging of others. He spoke of how we are too quick to judge when we ourselves are sinful and used the insanely popular Telemundo show Caso Cerrado to illustrate his point. Another interesting tidbit was the simple fact that we sat in rather uncomfortable metal chairs at a location that wasn’t originally intended to be a church building. The humble setting was reinforced by the announcement the pastor made reminding people of the opportunity to sign up for health insurance through “Obamacare”. Although it was casual and didn’t seem out of the ordinary, an announcement about a government social welfare program was not something I would likely find at other suburban evangelical churches.

                                                                                                     

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

There were a few elements of the narrative that underneath every social ill there is the problem of personal sin, which is difficult to hear in a context where so many people have difficulties living as Spanish speakers and sometimes undocumented workers here in the US. It wasn’t an overwhelming theme in the sermon and there is a great deal of truth to it, but it reminded me of some of the prosperity gospel-like sermons I heard while living in Nicaragua last year.

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 was on Romans 3:5-20 and the Pastor really emphasized the sinfulness of all of humanity and the fact that we are not in a place to judge one person’s sin over another. I immediately thought of my host dad in Nicaragua who taught a Sunday school lesson on the same theme. He told me that he decided to teach on that theme because the people at his evangelical church in Nicaragua were prone to dismiss people over what they dressed like, or over alcohol consumption. This made me wonder if this is an issue throughout the Latino evangelical church and if that is why the pastor was emphasizing it in this case.