Nicole McNevin - Church Visit #2

Church Name: St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church

Church Address: 1424 N. Dearborn Street, Chicago, IL, 60610

Date Attended: Sunday, October 30, 2016

Church Category: More liturgical

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

            

The church I regularly attend is Wellspring Alliance Church[1]. Racially, the congregation is fairly evenly split between Asian[2] and White. Most of the congregants are young or middle-aged. It is a Protestant, Christian Missionary Alliance Church. Our services typically consist of worship through “contemporary” Christian music, prayer, a sermon, and closing worship.

          

St. Chrysostom’s, on the other hand, is an Episcopalian church. The majority of congregants are white and over the age of 50. Aside from the sermon, the entire worship service was printed out pamphlets, which were sitting in a basket at the entrance of the worship hall. Musically, we worshiped the Lord through hymns and German and Latin choir songs.

            

The worship hall itself was very aesthetically pleasing, full of bright colors, carvings and paintings depicting various scenes from the Bible, Latin symbols, and so on. This was very different from  my typical context, which contains very few (if any) works of art. I found myself wishing that I knew more about Episcopalian symbolism and art in order to more fully appreciate the beauty of the place.

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

           

There were two things that surprised me about the service.

            

The first was that at one point during the service the liturgy reader listed off the names of all of the people who had died from gun violence in the city over the past week. Once this listing was done, the congregants spoke the names of people who had been missed, and wel had a moment of silence. This was extremely interesting to me – I expected the church, being liturgical, to be highly conservative and somewhat isolated from its surroundings. This practice, along with a prayer for Standing Rock Reservation, the high number of females and racial minorities given the mic, and various aspects of the sermon shattered my stereotype of liturgical churches; it was evident that St. Chrysostom’s was not a “Noah’s Ark” church, but rather quite aware of and engaged in its surroundings.

            

The second was Communion. We all came up to the front of the worship hall, got on our knees, and were given the elements by the elders. That is, the bread was placed in our hands, and we all drank out of the same cup, which was brought to our lips by the server. I absolutely loved this – it reminded me of my status as a child of God, receiving his sacrifice not by my own power, but by the agency of Christ.

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

            

I was certainly made aware of my status as an “outsider” several times throughout the service. At Wellspring, everything that we are supposed to say and do is either spoken by the pastor or projected onto the screen in front of the congregation. At St. Chrysostom’s, however, there were times when the congregants spoke memorized words which were not printed in the pamphlet, which Leya and I mumbled through together. Everyone knew when to stand and when to sit without being told, whereas I clumsily dropped my notebook, phone, and pen several times throughout the service attempting keep up with everybody. I also had a difficult time with the hymnal, desperately paging through it to find the correct tune before the rest of the congregation began singing.

           

All in all, most of my difficulties with this church sprang from my unfamiliarity with its worship style. If I attended St. Chrysostom’s more frequently and studied Episcopalianism more thoroughly, I probably would not have had as hard of a time.

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

            

Much of the sermon was centered on Sister Emmanuel, a missionary who was known for her impassioned money-gathering efforts (for Christian missions, of course). There was a passive reference to Zacchaeus toward the end, but overall, Sister Emmanuel was the main subject. This struck me as unusual because my regular pastor grounds his sermons in the stories of biblical figures such as David, Daniel, Ruth, Peter, and so on, only making passive references to contemporary non-biblical figures.

           

I liked this, because it seemed to acknowledge more directly the work of the Spirit in today’s world. It gave me a greater sense of involvement with the historical and contemporary church – after all, biblical figures and modern-day Christians are only human, and I believe the work of God and the Son should be seen and acknowledged in both.

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[1] In my previous blog entry, I referred to the church I regularly attend as Blanchard Alliance Church. We recently changed our name to Wellspring Alliance Church, to reflect the merged congregations of Living Water Alliance Church and Blanchard Alliance Church.

[2] Ethnically, the Asian population is made up of foreign-born Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese members, in addition to Korean-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Filipino-Americans.