Immanuel Baptist Church
1443 W Roosevelt Rd, Chicago, IL
9-14-14
Lower Socioeconomic Demographic
The worship service I attended was very similar in terms of
the type of service of my home church.
However, the largest difference was in the building itself. All of the churches I have ever been to are
in larger buildings in suburban neighborhoods.
To get to this church I hopped off the pink line and walked a few blocks
passing through the UIC campus, which didn’t seem low income to me, and then a
few blocks lined with broken bottles, boarded up shops, and rusted cars. I walked right past the church the first time
and on the second time walked into a one story building with concrete walls and
chipping paint with a metal gate opened before the doors into the church. There was no lobby of the church, you walked
into an open room with chairs and sat down.
The most appealing part of the service was the service
itself. Coming in I had no idea what to
expect, but once the service started it was incredibly similar to what I
experience at my home church. The
worship was lively, I could clearly understand the message, and I felt safe the
entire time. The demographic of the
church definitely had lower income people but it also had quite a few Wheaton
and Moody grads that made me feel welcome and not like a complete
outsider. I think that I found the
service pleasant because it wasn’t at all what I expected. In all honesty, I thought that I would feel
like an outcast as soon as I stepped into the church, and I expected the
message to be tailored towards an audience that was completely opposite from
myself. So when the message and worship
were relevant to me and I was welcomed openly, my interest peaked.
The most distracting part of the service had to have been
the location and size of the church. The
church I attended was so incredibly different from my home church that it was
hard for me to focus on what was being said.
The location of the church made me feel an initial unease (which was
gone after about two minutes of socializing with some of the congregation). I counted six times during the service police
or ambulance sirens scream past the building.
And, due to the size of the building, I could hear the little kids
playing and crying in the room where Sunday school was happening. On top of these reasons, I think that the
most challenging part of the service was getting over my own preconceived
notions of what the service would look like and how it would be run. It wasn’t until I had a change in mind and in
heart when I could fully soak up the experience I was having.
One of the most important theological aspects I picked up on
from this service is that God can be worshipped in any setting. This service was a constant reminder to me to
check my own pride and ideas of what I thought a service in a poor neighborhood
would look like. Throughout the service I
reminded myself and continued to see through the service that we all worship the
same God and the setting in which we worship Him is irrelevant. I realized that my pride and preconceived notions
of what service would look like were totally wrong. I saw God’s unifying power at work in that
church, and realized the strength in a community of Christ-followers is
something truly beautiful and should not be taken for granted, no matter what
setting it is in.
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