Grace and I went to Grace Chicago Church this morning. The service was in a Catholic high school auditorium in a relatively ungentrified neighborhood. It began at 11:00 AM, though we arrived at 11:30 AM, in time for communion, the sermon, and a few hymns. The congregation today was ~95% WASP, and the instrumentalists were very good. Grace Chicago Church is a member of the Reformed Church in America, and their website is very informative regarding their beliefs and appears to be updated regularly.
The sermon was all John 3:16 without specific reference to the passage. Pastor Bob Reid got choked up on a few occasions about the general lack of awareness of grace in our culture and the idea that, without this awareness, people are missing out, because grace is awesome. It’s sad that more people don’t get the message. Unfortunately, why it is so awesome and necessary was never mentioned, but I guess we were supposed to be sufficiently convinced that it really is important because Bob Reid was crying about it. Ironically, nobody appeared to be crying during communion. I guess the congregation seemed to grasp the concept of grace in the abstract, but didn’t seem too interested in the ultimate saving grace of God’s death. Grace is fine and good, but it doesn’t make any sense unless you first lay down what we need to be saved from. To be fair, most churches don’t do a good job of this, because most congregants don’t want to hear about original sin and how evil they are. That’s sad to me, because that’s the entertaining part, and also probably 3/4 of the Bible. People much prefer to skip over all that and go straight to John, the happy bubble gum part.
I’m not really familiar with the Reformed Church in America, but today’s message appears to be in line with their tenets. Too bad.
Perhaps the highlight of the trip to church today was stopping at a nice grocery store afterard.
