Adam Worley - Church Visit 2

Church Name: Our Lady Immaculate Church

Church Address: 410 Washington Blvd., Oak Park, IL 60302

Date Attended: October 23, 2016

Church Category: Tridentine Mass

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

The church was approximately what I expected from a Catholic church, with a large number of statues, stained glass windows, and other images and items scattered around.  It was not a very large church, but the people were not particularly welcoming.  The one man we spoke with directed us up to the balcony, out of the way.  There were no service guides, so we felt much more out of the loop than at the Orthodox church. (My friend’s lack of head covering may have also contributed.) The sermon was about miracles, which was going well, but then the priest veered off and talked about how the government could use holograms to make videos of Jesus in the sky to control people. I really like the physical space and the service itself, but the people seemed to be very inward-focused in more ways than one, making it feel less like a body of believers and more like a number of individuals and families.

How did the worship service illuminate for you the history and contours of global Christianity?

Unfortunately, this service did a lot to show me one of the declines in the church.  The service was an example of what can happen when a church stops engaging with any significant wider world. The people were more concerned with following the liturgy than greeting newcomers, and it seemed to me that many regular attenders did not know each other. While the service may have connected congregants with God, it did nothing to connect them to each other, which is a strong departure from New Testament styles of worship and community.  There were a few other references to work days and rosary campaigns that made it sound as if the church had little more engagement by proportion than a stagnating Protestant megachurch. I fully respect the idea of staying true to your roots, but if that leads to a failure of the church it becomes harder to defend.

How did the worship service illuminate for you your personal identity as a Christian?

This visit was a part of a process for me of recognizing the need for community in church.  Multiple weeks of Passage readings and discussions did not convince me, but a few tours of various churches showed me that Christians should exhibit care for one another, rather than ignore everyone and follow the procedure.  Since I’ve tended to be isolationist and independent with my spiritual life, this was something of an eye-opener.  In a completely different area, the priests speech on miracles and his rabbit trail into conspiracy theories clarified again how completely ridiculous Christianity is if you don’t believe it.  Likely, what the sermon seemed to me is what my beliefs seem to the world: poorly researched, self-centered, and irrational.      This means that we should both expect the kind of resistance from society that these old-school Catholic churches face, and we should endeavor to engage with culture in ways it can understand.