Church name: St. Peter's Catholic Church
Church address: 110 West Madison St. Chicago IL 60602
Date attended: Oct 19, 2014
Church category: significantly more liturgical than my regular experience
1. The mass had a lot of readings from the Scriptures as well as other phrases that was read. The whole mass consisted of a call and response between the priest and the congregation. There also was a designated priest(?) who seemed to be in charge of singing. The mass had quite a few numbers that needed to be responded by singing, which was very different from my own experience growing up at a Presbyterian Church. I was used to singing praise songs in the beginning and the end, lead by a worship leaders, rather than singing hymns and in Latin. Also, at my church we only stood for Scripture reading and worship, but this mass consisted of continuously sitting and standing throughout the whole thing. The priest only gave a short sermon on the texts that was read, which was different than the 30-40 minutes sermons I was used to hearing. The mass overall only took about one hour to finish, where the services I was used to attending took one and half hours to two hours.
2. I found the rituals to be the most interesting about the worship service. The use of incense in their service was one of the rituals that I took the most notice of. I have only seen it in movies so seeing it first-hand was an experience that I did not have before. They used the incense throughout the service and I wondered what the pattern was in which way the priests had to swing the incense first. I also found the acts that each person did once coming into the chapel to be intriguing. The water basin in the middle and kneeling before sitting down. They also had a place where people could kneel on the pews. The architecture and the building of the church itself was something else I found appealing. It was just so beautiful and something that I never grew up with at my church.
3. I found the monotone voice of the speaker to be challenging to stay awake. Not the one who did the singing or the priest who gave the sermon, but there was another person who read the Scripture and other liturgies. Another thing that I found challenging was the short sermon. I also had a hard time figuring out how it related to the Scriptures that were read. There was two readings of Scripture, one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament - which was something that I was not used to. I could not tell if the priest was trying to relate to the first or second passage that was read. The priest did a great job relating the message to the theme of the week, which was World Missions, but even then he spent majority of the time listing those who used to be part of the congregation who were now currently in various mission fields.
4. The attitude of worship was something that helped me to realize in the way in which I should be when coming to church. They had a reverence for the Scripture and the worship service as a whole, which was not something that I was used to seeing in my church context. For example, in the beginning they had the Scripture being brought forth to the altar with music. Also, the way that there was a time for the congregation to kneel during a prayer time in response to the message was something that I wanted to emulate. There are not many times in my church where I am brought to my knees to pray to God, but St. Peter's church provided a knee cushion and a time during service for that act to be performed. It shows the act of humility before God and it showed their seriousness when coming before God.
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