Sarah O’Connell – Church Visit #1

Church name: Nueva Esperanza

Church address: 250 Pennsylvania Ave., Glen Ellyn, IL 60137

Date attended: February 9, 2014

Church category: Different ethnic or racial demographic

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

            I attended a Sunday morning service at Nueva Esperanza. The most obvious difference between my normal church service and Nueva Esperanza’s would be that the service was conducted entirely in Spanish. I attend an Anglican church called Church of the Resurrection fairly regularly where all services are conducted in English and the majority of the attendees are Caucasian. Nueva Esperanza’s congregation is almost entirely Latino. Compared to my Anglican church, this service had very little liturgy and strongly focused on Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

            This service had a similar format to Church of the Resurrection in that both began with worship, which led into a time of preaching. Until recently, Church of the Resurrection rented the space where it worshipped as well. The worship team was composed of mostly women and contained a wide age-rage; however, the main worship leader was male. The pastor who spoke was very passionate and animated, which is very similar to the way the leaders in my church preach.

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

The congregation of this church was extremely welcoming and engaging. Several people greeted me upon entering the building and after the service people mingled over coffee and snacks. The members also interacted with the pastor as he spoke, voicing words or sounds of agreement. A deep sense of community is felt within this church and everyone seems to know and care about each other. After he finished preaching and the service was over, the pastor made a point to come greet my friends and I since we were new faces.

            I also enjoyed the how varied the ages were of those participating in the worship team. Many of the instrumentalists were teenagers and younger, including the young, female drummer who could not have been more than ten years old. The congregation was multi-generational, especially for the number of people.

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

             The most difficult aspect of the service was the language barrier. I am on the lesser end of the conversational scale and definitely not fluent in Spanish. However, my friends who accompanied me all were fluent in Spanish and were able to translate the parts that I missed. Aside from mission trips, this service was the first that I attended in another language. While I understood most of the message, I was frustrated with my own limitations.

            The rate at which the pastor spoke and the added vocabulary made deciphering the message more of a challenge than expected. However, the content and structure of the service was familiar and made the service feel comfortable, even with the language difference.

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

            The sermon focused in on vocation and what our vocation is as Christians. The pastor distinguished vocation from profession by saying that vocation meant to live like Christ in every aspect of life. While using the term vocation to mean living every part of your life as Christ would was new to me, the theological idea behind the term was something that was familiar to me.

            When the pastor shifted his focus to what it means to “speak truth in love”, he explained this phrase differently and more directly than I had heard in other contexts. He highlighted how speaking the truth in love does not give us license to speak anything that is on our mind and call it truth, thus forgetting the love part of the phrase. Speaking truth in love is not a phrase of entitlement. He then pointed out avoiding conflict in order to not hurt the feelings of another person, but still discussing this conflict with other people leads to gossiping and does not constitute being loving.