Brannon Burke Church Visit #1

Blog Title: Brannon Burke – Church visit #1

Church name: Lawndale Community Church

Church address: 3827 W Ogden, Chicago, IL 60623

Date attended: September 21, 2014

Church category: nondenominational

1)      The musical worship part of the service that I attended was very different from what I am used to. The worship team was on a stage in the middle of the congregation, whose seats were in a giant, five-layer circle. I really appreciated the philosophy of this formation because it made the church service feel more like a community affair than a performance or a show. The worship was led by one leading singer, who acted as a soloist and was supported by about eight other singers, who all stood at the four different corners of the middle platform. Another thing that was very different was the diversity within the worship team. I go to an Anglican church in Wheaton, which is very white; but out of the eight people on the platform, there were at least 3 races represented, including a woman in a full Indian sari. The lead pastor was a white man who they called, “Coach,” and I loved everything about that. He was their leader spiritually and communally, and addressed the congregation holistically, not just concerning their spiritual lives. In this way, I think that he helped embody the purpose of the church, which, from what I gathered, it to be a place for the community to live and be and grow.

2)      I really, really enjoyed how “real” the sermon was. At my church, sometimes “intellectual Christianity” can take over too much, and the congregation can lose track of what it means to live a practical Christian life and make an impact on your community as Jesus calls us to do. There was no room for lofty intellectualism here. That is not to say that these people were uneducated; they were far from it. But the sermon was practical; about calling Jesus to a community that was so clearly hurting. I also really appreciated that the pastor called out people in the congregation by name; it was indicative of a successful community where the congregation is known actually and personally by the pastor. If a church can achieve this, I would say that they are a huge success.

3)      I would not say that I found anything disorienting about the service. It was, however, very challenging. The core of the service was about calling Jesus to Lawndale specifically, a community that has suffered seven murders in 2014 alone. Coach started listing off facts about how there had been 121 murders since 2007, and me, being naïve, immediately thought that he was talking about Chicago as a whole. Then he pulled up a map of Lawndale and my heart broke. The last murder, Coach said, had happened while they were in church just last week and only a few blocks away from the church. I looked at the young African American children sitting in front of me and my heart broke. Uncharacteristically, I broke into tears thinking about the injustice and awful hardships that these children had to face solely because they were born into a family that lived in Lawndale. I felt overwhelmed and disgusting the privileges that I had just because I was born into an upper-middle class family in the suburbs of New York City. It wasn’t fair. It’s not fair. And learning how to use White Privilege (which is most definitely a thing) well is something that I am actively working on ever since leaving those church doors.

4)      Like I wrote earlier, there was no room for lofty, not-practical (which is different from impractical), Christian intellectualism in this service. And once again, that by no means is to say that they’re uneducated. Instead, I think that Coach was intentionally bringing scripture at a very practical level because of the nature of what he was talking about. A portion of the sermon had to do with the healing power and redemption of Jesus Christ. One part of his message, which made the congregation laugh, was when Coach said that Jesus had the power to give a clean 63^rd year to someone who had been shooting heroine for 62 years. This is not the sort of redemption that gets addressed in a church like Church of the Rez. Furthermore, Coach finished his sermon with a huge emphasis on fasting (specifically Wednesday lunch), not to try to make Jesus do something, but to try and make room in the hearts of his congregation to hear the voice of God. I think that this was a really important distinction, and not one that I had heard before.