Church Name: Wheaton Chines Alliance Church
Church Address: 1748 S Blanchard St, Wheaton, IL 60189
Date Attended: 4/6/14
Church Category: Non-liturgical
This service actually felt quite similar to how the service at my home church felt. The layout of this service was similar to the one that I was used to. The songs that they played were the same songs we would sing normally at my church. The pastor, other than the fact that he had an australian accent, did not seem to have anything that really set him apart from my pastor. The biggest difference though, was the lack of standard sayings and readings. For instance, after the reading of the Scriptures, my church normally finishes with a “This is the word of God for the people of God” that many churches do, but this one did not. Also, my home church has some prayers that are always said every week or parts of a prayer are, but, other than the Lord's prayer, there was not one here. The people and how they worshiped even seemed the same, even though there were a lot more Asian people there, (though there were a lot more people of non-Asian decent than I expected). Finally, they did not have communion every week like we do at my home church, though they did this week.
One thing that I found interesting was that the pastor did not give the sermon this week. In fact, they were doing a series of weeks were various people in the congregation gave the sermon. The man who gave the sermon this week was actually quite interesting and I very much enjoyed his sermon an learned some interesting lessons. In my home church, I don't think that I have ever heard anyone besides one of the two pastors at my church give a sermon. So it was an interesting experience. Also, another interesting thing was that they did not sing the last song that was on the bulletin for the day. The pastor decided just not to sing it because they were running a little bit late. In my church they would have just gone much later in order to go through the whole service. It was quite interesting to be a part of.
The biggest thing that I found to be disorienting about the service was that I was used to saying certain phrases after particular parts of the service, such as in communion, but they did not say them here. It was just odd because I had gotten so used to doing it every week, even though it didn't detract from the service at all. Another thing that was challenging was the lack of a lot of things being written down in a bulletin. It wasn't particularly challenging to know what was going to happen next, but in my home church, nearly everything is written down and the only words that are said that aren't written down are the sermon and a prayer by the pastor. So it was quite the experience to have a single paged bulletin that simply had the songs and the order of worship.
One part of theology that this service illuminated for me was the equality of us in Christ. Sometimes it does feel like we put pastors on a pedestal above us and view them as better Christians or at least more mature, which the maturity part may sometimes be true, but I saw here how a simple layman can have just as insightful things to say as the pastor would. Even if the pastor is more spiritually mature, it doesn't mean that those who aren't as mature don't have anything helpful to say. And the pastor came up after the sermon and emphasized this by talking about what he learned from the sermon that he hadn't considered or at least hadn't considered in that light.
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