Erin McCord – Church Visit #2

Church name: Trinity United Church of Christ

Church address: 400 West 95^th St.

Date attended: Sunday September 25 – 6PM

Church category: different racial demographic

Describe the worship service you attended. How was it similar to or different from your regular context?

The worship service I attended was an evening service on Elder’s Sunday, which honors the elders of the church. The service began with a large choir singing first a gospel song, then a spiritual. The congregation was almost entirely African American, and therefore more racially homogeneous then any of my usual worship contexts, which are more diverse racially. The elders were actually elderly church members, including men and women, which differs from my typical church experience, in which elders can be often as young as forty and often exclude women from eldership. The sermon was given by a guest speaker, Rev. Dr. Charles G. Adams, a nationally known speaker and writer. His message was compelling in its delivery and its content, as he drew from 1 Corinthians 3:21-23 and from literary and historic sources.

What did you find most interesting or appealing about the worship service?

The service was a well-ordered, beautifully executed, genuinely enjoyable experience. The choir’s singing was strong and of good musical quality. I enjoyed hearing different genres of music from the African American church tradition including old and new gospel songs as well as several spirituals. Rev. Adams was a skilled speaker with excellent command of both his content as well as the flow and rhythm of his delivery. The whole experience felt to me like a skillfully organized and executed musical production. I left with the feeling of intellectual stimulation and wanting to discuss the message I had heard, which in many ways felt like something I had wanted to hear in church for a long time. I felt as though I had received encouragement simply by being present; in the sense of having witnessed something beautiful or having had an enjoyable experience.

What did you find most disorienting or challenging about the worship service?

I was deeply challenged by the content of the sermon. Rev. Adams framed his sermon around the phrase “All things are yours,” from 1 Corinthians 3:21. This took on several meanings: possessing all things must exclude any colonialist attitudes of ownership, Christian ministry includes communicating to marginalized people that all things are theirs, and Christians must perceive and demonstrate ownership of all the world’s sources of evil and truth by taking responsibility towards all the world’s problems and looking to all resources for finding solutions. I think this is an important exhortation, but I felt as if I could have heard the same speech in a mainstream secular setting just as well. This left me feeling as though the message neglected a radical trust in God as the ultimate source of liberation from sin and evil. In my opinion, this robbed the message of the power to effect meaningful and lasting change for marginalized people.

What aspects of Scripture or theology did the worship service illuminate for you that you had not perceived as clearly in your regular context?

In the service at Trinity I perceived a strong identification of the congregation with their history as of a group of people. This came from multiple sources within black and American history: spirituals, literature, historical narrative, etc. that were all apparent within the service. This is an important aspect of a theology of the people of God. Oftentimes evangelical churches, in their independence from institutional structures, lose a sense of history of themselves and of their participation in the people of God. However, in Scripture, the people of God are always deeply connected with their history, as the people of Israel look back to the calling of Abraham and the Exodus from Egypt through the Psalms and the historical books, and Gentile believers are described as being wild trees grafted into a root system of the historic people of God, Israel (Romans 11:17). So, the congregation of Trinity shows that it sees itself as a part of a historical trajectory that identifies itself uniquely as a body of black American believers and as the people of God.