Church Experience Paper

In the more than two years of attending Luther College, I had never been to a Sunday morning church service in the Center for Faith and Life. In fact, I have attended very few church services in my life. As a child, I went on rare occasions with my family to my grandfather’s Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, and often felt intimidated during the experience. I can remember the time I accompanied my grandfather to a service on a day in which the congregation received communion. During communion, I reached for the bread at the incorrect time, which displeased my grandfather, and prompted him to apologize to the minister for my behavior after the service. This experience reinforced my feeling of being an outgroup member at church services. Thus, over a decade after that experience, I decided to attend the service at Luther to be an outgroup member once again. Before and during the service on November 1st, I became aware of my ethnocentric attitude regarding church, which lead to certain stereotypes of those in the church going ingroup. In addition, as I noted my interactions with members of the ingroup, I identified the three stages of perception at some point in my experience. …show more content…
Specifically, I grouped anyone who attended church into the same category of “church going.” This generally included all people who went to church, without taking into consideration the differences between churches. I assigned certain stereotypes to this ingroup by labeling its members as narrow-minded and crazy for spending Sunday mornings sitting inside. Therefore, churchgoers became the “other” for me, since I viewed them as significantly different from myself, and so anyone I encountered who went to church became a part of this category and received the associated