Reflection On A Visit To The Church

For my third church visit reflection I chose to go to a Lutheran church titled Word of Life Lutheran Church in my hometown of Surprise, Arizona. My overall consensus from this particular church, in relation to the services I had previously attended, was that the Lutheran denomination focuses largely on both tradition and the impact of Jesus Christ on our everyday lives. This being said, if I were to make a spectrum of the three church services I attended for this class, the Roman Catholic would be the most traditional and serious, the Assemblies of God would be the most relaxed and focused on Christ, and the Lutheran service would fall somewhere right in between the two. One of the first things that I noticed upon entering the campus was that it was small, only one building, and very simple in respect to building architecture and decoration. The service was held in a small room that held close to 100 chairs arranged in rows, with one chair at the front and center for the pastor to preach from. The next element I noticed was that the “stage” that held the band playing worship was located off to the right-hand side rather than in front of where the rows were facing. I had heard of this set up previously as the church’s attempt to place the glory of worship on God rather than the humans that provided …show more content…
The words to the prayer were given on the screen, along with the Psalm passage they were derived from, and the congregation was invited to speak this prayer out loud. Similarly to the Roman Catholic Church, this seemed to be a uniting prayer for the congregation as a whole, however it did not appear as though it was a prayer that was previously memorized. Unlike the Roman Catholic service, I was much more comfortable with this style of group prayer in the Lutheran service due to the fact that the words were made easily accessible to newcomers of the