Exploring Religion and Culture1/21/2019 The church that I went to is called South Church. It is located in HartforD Connecticut and here is the link to their official website. http://scchartford.org/ . The church often has service on Sundays; there are two service time that the first period starts at 9:30 and the second period starts at 11:00. They are about one hour and 30 minutes long. The full name of the church is South Congregational Church. It belongs to the branch of Protestant in Christianity. It believes that God has given Congregational churches the authority to govern themselves and therefore it belongs directly to the Christ.
The service I went to was a special event it has for the Harvest Festival. So I think it might be a little bit different than their traditional services. The Pastor used the pumpkin as a metaphor to tell people to believe in Jesus: He took out the inside part of the pumpkin- which symbolized the sin that people have. Then, he put a small candle in- which means that Jesus can light up our world. Then, he connects the Bible with the current events that happened- about the arguments in politics. There were about 35 people who came to the service. About a half of them were African Americans; another half contained majorly Latinos and Caucasians. I think I was the only Asian person there. People had various ages: a lot of them were about 20 to 30 years old; there were some senior citizens and little kids who came with their parents. The female to male ratio was about 1:1. The church has it own band and they played a lot of good songs before the service. Then, the played more songs at the end of the service. In between, the Pastor read the Bible and had the passage presented on the screen. I noticed that a lot of people were really faithful- that they opened their arms as the band played music and shouted “yes” when Pastor said something meaningful. The service was very different than what I have experienced. I believe that I am agnostic so that it is interesting to see that people who have a religion actually believe in what they believe. It surprised me (as I mentioned), that the Pastor connected the political current event to the Bible and the religion itself- it showed the practise of the religion and how it implies to the real world. It is especially important because in that way, people are able to see the impact and engage in it.
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