Church address: 9s200 State Route 59 | Naperville, Illinois 60564
Date attended: September 23, 2014
Church Category: Different Ethnic/Racial Demographic
Describe the worship service you attended.
How was it similar to or different from your regular context?
Mariel and I attended a Spanish
speaking service at Calvary, a mega church in Naperville. The service was
held in a small auditorium and they were already in the middle of contemporary
worship when we walked in which continued for twenty minutes. Then they
gave announcements, followed by the offering, and then the pastor gave the
sermon, which lasted about thirty minutes and we sang two worship songs to
close. One of the first differences I noticed between my church and
Calvary was that at College Church, promptness is important. People are
expected to be in the santuary seated and quiet, ready to start right at 9:30.
At Calvary, as the worship music played people wandered in greeting
friends, laughing, and whispering as they found their seats. We sat
towards the middle, but I realized halfway through the service that people had been
consistently coming in during the first thirty minutes of the service.
What did
you find most interesting or appealing about the worship service?
There were a lot of things I really liked about
the service. I liked how
enthusiastically people were engaging with the worship. Almost everyone was clapping and
smiling. It felt full of much more life
than my usual Sunday morning experience.
The one thing that also stood out to me was that it felt more like a
small group even though there were at least 300 people in the room. The sermon felt more like a conversation,
somehow. People weren’t necessarily
talking back or making lots of noise. But
people seemed very engaged. People were
laughing and nodding and sitting up straight to listen. It just generally felt far less sleepy than the
church services I am used to. I also appreciated how they had multiple people who
welcomed us when we came in. Then after
the service, a woman came over and took us to meet with the welcoming team who
told us how we could get plugged in to the church.
What did
you find most disorienting or challenging about the worship service?
The church is not bilingual, so the entire service
was in Spanish. Since I don’t speak any Spanish,
Mariel had to translate everything. She
did a great job, but in order for her to be able to listen well, she would only
translate every two or three minutes to give me the gist of what he was saying
or to repeat a really important point. I
felt a little awkward to be in a room full of people I could not communicate with. I found myself praying that people wouldn’t
approach me because I wouldn’t know what to say. At one point we did shake hands with the
people near us, but everyone just smiled and shook my hand and whenever someone
started speaking to me, they would register my confused expression and start
speaking in English. It was challenging,
but humbling and I actually liked that it made my hyper aware of what was going
on.
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
service was not liturgical at all, except for right before the pastor read from
Scripture. Everyone stood and he had
them repeat some phrases. I didn’t get
all of them but Mariel translated one in particular that stuck with me. Everyone held their Bibles and said “this is
the Bible. The word of God. I will never never never forget who it says that
I am”. I loved the way that they
reminded themselves of that truth and their identity in Christ. How powerful to be reminded of what the Bible
says about us before digging into the word.
The sermon was also about identity and the pastor talked about how what
God says about us is right and how we see ourselves is not always true. He used humor a lot in his talk, but all of
it was rooted in scripture and truth. I
really valued the authenticity or it.
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