Nathan Smith - Church Visit #2

Church Name: St. Peter's Catholic Church
Church Address: 1891 Kaneville Rd, Geneva, IL 60134
Date Attended: 12/10/14
Church Category: Significantly more or less liturgical

Describe the worship service you attended. How was it similar to or different from your regular context?
There were many differences between St. Peter's Catholic Church and College Church, the church I normally attend. One could say that College Church, follows a very, very, very loose liturgical structure, I suppose. You always know what's coming next - there never will be any surprises. But we don't have any liturgy to speak of outside of a weekly reciting of The Lord's Prayer and sometimes the Apostle's Creed. This was not the case at St. Peter's. In fact, the service was so well and so consistently structured that it was very apparent that everyone already knew what they were doing. Also, although I would definitely consider College Church to be a pretty church, St. Peter's Catholic Church was very beautiful. The whole building was regaled in stained glass and what looked like perhaps relics of some kind.

What did you find most interesting or appealing about the worship service?
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this service - something I literally never anticipated - was that I think I would consider the worship at St. Peter's Catholic Church to be significantly more contemporary than the music that is played at the main service at College Church. The "cantor" was a group of elderly women in the back who would sing all the parts of the service marked "cantor". They were dressed in normal old-lady formal clothing but they were accompanied by soft drums and, occasionally, a saxophone. I also found interesting the fact that they sung a couple of times out of a worship booklet that was meant for, as it said, "Catholic teens" - perhaps something that would be a little more congruous to our "youth group" songs. What I also really found fascinating was that the sermon was clearly not the center of the service in the way that it is at College Church. In a typical College Church service, the who service leads up to a long sermon (after which the service wraps up pretty quickly). At St. Peter's, the homily was only about 5 minutes long. The focus was on The Eucharist. This was demonstrated so clearly to me in that, after the Eucharist, even though there was still about 20 minutes left in the service, at least half of the congregation left.

What did you find most disorienting or challenging about the worship service?
There were a couple of things that were challenging for me about the service. I think the area of greatest difficulty for me was that I felt so left out of the entire thing. I felt like everyone knew what they were doing and that I had no idea. Because most of this was probably so routine for them, they didn't really need to reference any sort of guide to know what was going on. I, on the other hand, was not in that boat. It wasn't until the end of the service that I discovered an order of service type thing that was mildly helpful in that area.

What aspects of Scripture or theology did the worship service illuminate for you that you had not perceived as clearly in your regular context?
I think the thing I appreciated most about the service was that it really helped me see even more clearly the majesty, mystery, and grandeur of God. The formality and rituals really helped me to appreciate these attributes of God in new ways. Similarly, the heavy focus on the Eucharist was really helpful for me. As a product of College Church-type churches  my whole life, The Lord's Supper has always been something we've practiced on a monthly basis. But St. Peter's heavy emphasis on the Eucharist has caused me to do some re-thinking about what the purpose of this practice is and thinking about how and why it is practiced in a variety of different contexts.