Series: Looking for Membership in a New Local Body

Day 10
Yesterday I attended a local Evangelical Free church. I went to its earliest service, so I had the advantage of beating the crowds later on in the morning. The pastor was preaching on of the last sermons of the current series "Wisdom for Relationships". It thought-provoking, but rather general and non-intrusive. Although evident he had a plan for what he wanted to teach, the sermon itself was fairly improvised; it was clear he did not give much attentiont o straying away from words and phrases he natually gravitates towards as a person and as a speaker. This was my first time there, and I was already getting too comfortable with his style; his rhetoric was rich with Chrisian lingo and lacking both edges of the sword. At the start, he lamented not having a prop with him as he usually does. In this case, he wanted to have an old-fashioned scale; instead, he just added a picture of one to his PowerPoint.

I appreciated the way he utilized multiple translations at a single time. Not that he used multiple translations - my old pastor used to use six in a single sermon every Sunday, and it was very cumbersome. It was the way he did it. It appeared that he used the ESV by default every Sunday. This particular one, though, he was preaching through Proverbs and wanted to help make the similes more accessible to some of the congregation. He used the NLT for contemporary parallels to Hebrew life. I think what made this different for me was that he started with the essentially literal words of the verse, brought in relevant comparisons from the NLT, and then brought it back to the original meaning. This was a little refreshing from what I am used to: someone switching the translations so often that I become suspicious that they are doing this just to make the Word of God say what he wants it to say.

The music was both a blessing and a little overboard for me. There were two electric lead guitarists, a bassist, a pianist, a keyboardist, two solo vocalists, another guitarist for rhythm, and a drummer completely enclosed in a sound-resistant fiber glass container. The emphasis on loud music during worship is exactly what I have been trying to get away from.

What I did find very engaging about worship, though, was that I had never heard any of the songs before. The lyrics had many layers to their depth as well as texture to their message. One of the things I have recently become critical of is whether the lyrics are directed at God or an individual. For the moment, I am not referring to man-centered worship songs. I am talking about music that really is glorifying to God, but that may have more of a conversational style to it's lyrics, as though they are directed at another person but speaking about God. This is what they were. Songs telling another person about the love of God instead of words one may use to worship God apart from an evangelistic agenda.

In the middle of the sermon, the pastor called the band back on stage, and they sang "American Dream" by Casting Crowns. It was to help emphasize his point about pursuing a life after God instead of worldly things. There was a PowerPoint with words and graphics to go along with each verse of the song, emphasizing various parts of the lyrics.

In the church brochure, there were pictures of everything from Bible studies and Sunday school to church pot lucks and youth group. It was very clear that the children's ministry operated completely separate from the rest of the body. The current campaign was to get the kids of Funkytown to sign up for the summer camp where they would hopefully come back on fire for Jesus.

When I was leaving, it occurred to me that if I took a friend of mine here, who was a non-believer, I would really have no idea if he would hear the gospel, because, as Al Mohler once said, their back door is bigger than their front door.