We chose the Second Baptist Church in Elgin, Illinois. I do have some background knowledge of religion I growing up with multiple religions, but now I consider myself an agnostic. Definitely, before this experience, I definitely have some preconceived notions of what religion is. To be honest I haven 't had a lot of interaction with my own culture and where I come from. The experience at the Second Baptist Church really has opened my mind up maybe not to become religious, but to be more open to people that are.
The Second Baptist Church is a majority black church which has a lot of history behind the church itself. According to Church History, 25 slaves escaped from a plantation in Alabama, 22 of the slave started a church in the Elgin area. The reason it is called Second Baptist Church is because was named the second church because of they of segregation. Over the years they have had multiple pastors, and they allow women to be pastors as well. Also, it is in a neighborhood that was one of the few where blacks could live near Summit Road. They are very open and involved in the community ("Church History," n.d.). Before even walking into the church I definitely had some preconceived notions of what a church service should be like and what “those people” do. For example, a church service is usually quite boring, and the people go to them are usually less than smart, those are some of the biases that I had. It reminded me of the exercise we did in class. When Dr. Raval said an occupation like a doctor and we all had to come up with their own responses. What We up came up with is everybody thinks of a white male doctor. But after talking to each other we realized that most of our doctors and people of that profession are not white. The same thing goes for the church, before even stepping in having these emotions and feelings of anxiety and already thinking that you know what this is about. It isn 't true: Dr. Fountain who told us about …show more content…
We came in very well-dressed for service, but when we walked in people are wearing sweatpants and are so relaxed. People kept coming up to us and saying hi and asking their names. The pastor’s secretary came to greet us and asked if we had met the pastor already, we got to speak to him for a couple moments. He seemed very open to allowing anybody to join the church there 're no criteria which I found odd. He said we could email him at anything or follow them on Twitter or Facebook. They told us that we could come back at any time if we wanted. There go another one of my prejudgments is out the window that church people aren 't nice. I feel bad that I was wrong.
The service begins very casually. It was a call and response service, something I didn 't know was that originally started in Africa. The original process was that a guy would get in the middle of a circle and hit the drum and people would respond. This translated over to the Second Baptist Church where the pastors preach and the audience responds. The music was something that you would hear on the radio. I also noticed that nobody actually had Bibles their bibles are on their even the pastors and the