The Church Search: A Conclusion of Sorts

After Nick chided me last night about my infrequent blogging, and after Roger noted elsewhere that he’d never really heard any conclusions from our church search, it occurred to me that I’d never really written a concluding chapter to that story. Let me fix that now.

We knew when we made our list of churches to visit that it wouldn’t be a long list. We started with three churches that were our primary focus, and after ruling out one of them midway through, it was really down to two: Maranatha Bible and Stonebridge. We visited both of those churches multiple times, evaluating and praying that God would direct us. Looking for churches is frustrating from a time perspective, too - there are only so many church services per week that you can visit. Patience is required. Not easy.

In the end, while we liked both churches and could’ve probably been happy at either, we decided back in mid-November that we would give it a go at Stonebridge. There’s a lot of good going on there, the teaching has been solid, there are lots of ministry opportunities. We’ve signed up to join a small group that will start meeting next week. I’m excited to get the chance to start to get to know some people and really feel like I’m a part of the place. We’ll see how God continues to lead, but for now, we’re happy to start calling Stonebridge home. Let’s hope it’s a while before we have to do the church search again.

The Church Search, Week 7

There was no post for week 6 last week since we were out of town for the weekend. So now we come to week 7. Yesterday we visited Maranatha Bible Church for the second time. I gave quite a bit of detail when we last visited, I’ll just note a few updates here.

First Impressions

  • Took a slightly different route to get there this week and hit all the lights green… and it’s a quick little trip from our house. 6 or 7 minutes, max.
  • The place was definitely fuller this week than last time we attended. We parked on the street a few houses down from the church.
  • Having now visited twice, we look familiar enough to some of the Maranatha folks (especially the ones who we’ve faced off against in church softball) that you can tell they recognize us and are this close to saying something to us… but none did.

Music The regular music leader was back this week. Just looking at her (a short, grandma-aged woman who reminded me a lot of one of my college calculus professors), you wouldn’t expect that she is an aggressive, guitar-playing music leader. But she is, and she was excellent. The closing song after the sermon was Victory in Jesus, and while I might’ve resisted the very last almost-end-and-then-do-a-slow-drum-fill-into-a-final-final-chorus thing, it was just so much fun I can’t really complain a bit.

Children’s Ministries No real updates here. The girls had a good time.

Sermon Pastor Aaron was trying to crank through two chapters of Isaiah (34 and 35) in the space of 45 minutes, and he did a great job. Very much enjoyed the sermon.

People/Observations

  • Had a nice chat after the service with the youth pastor, Thad. He had been reading this blog earlier this week (Hi, Thad!) and said he enjoyed it. He told me he had read my “church search” posts on the other church we visited, and then went to read the one about Maranatha. And while I might’ve expected him to hope that I’d give a good review, what he told me was actually not that at all. “Please, find some bad stuff,” he said. “That way we can take it to people [here at Maranatha] and say, ‘Look, we need to work on this…’”. I thought that was pretty cool. Always thinking about improvement.
  • Ran into a couple more folks that I knew from other places but was unaware that they attended Maranatha. That was neat.
  • The service ended a bit early this week because they were holding their annual meeting directly after the service. They planned on electing two elder candidates and one deacon candidate.

All in all, it was an enjoyable Sunday morning. Good to be back in the house of the Lord after being out of town last weekend. Becky and I haven’t really discussed the church search any more since yesterday morning, so I’m not sure what our plans are going to be for next Sunday or following Sundays. Much prayer and discussion will be involved, I’m sure.

The Church Search, Week 5

This morning we got up off our behinds and visited the next church on our short list: Maranatha Bible Church. Maranatha has been around for nearly 30 years in Cedar Rapids, sitting on 25th Street near Mount Mercy College. We were familiar with some of the people before we visited; we’ve known Pastor Aaron Telecky and his family for several years, Youth Pastor Thad Joyce and his family live just a few blocks up from us here in Hiawatha, and several other faces in the church were familiar from many years of church league softball. It’s a bit interesting giving my update on Maranatha this afternoon since I know Aaron reads this blog. Aaron, feel free to comment if you want to.

First Impressions

  • Maranatha is in an older church building in the middle of a residential neighborhood. There were several cars parked on the street, but we found a spot in the parking lot.
  • A couple people greeted us with “good morning!” as we walked in and found the foyer. An usher handed us bulletins and we hung up our coats. After we had stood there for another ten seconds or so, obviously looking around, the usher asked if we were visiting. When we said yes he introduced himself and welcomed us, but didn’t volunteer any info about children’s ministries even though we had both girls in tow.
  • About that time Pastor Aaron walked into the foyer, welcomed us, and introduced us to one of the men who was helping teach one of the girls’ classes this morning. That guy (whose name escapes me now) took us downstairs and helped us find the girls classes.
  • We had just time enough to sign our girls in, get back upstairs, find a seat, and just start looking at the bulletin before the service started.

Music

  • They had a six-member worship team this morning: piano, two female vocalists, leader w/ acoustic guitar, bass player, and drummer.
  • Six songs were sung throughout the service; four were relatively new songs, two were old hymns. Four of the six songs were familiar to me; Becky said she was familiar with all of them.
  • The guy running the overhead had a little trouble keeping up with the music on the first song, which was a fast one. Otherwise, everything ran quite smoothly and the group sounded pretty good. Overall the congregational singing was strong.
  • We were told afterwards that this wasn’t their usual music leader, and that things could sound quite different when she was present. I don’t know whether that’ll be good or bad, I guess we’ll find out another week.

Children’s Ministries

  • Maranatha has Sunday School at 9:00 - we didn’t make it to that this morning. Then they have age-segregated nurseries for children up through 4 years old during the service, and kids from 5 - 9 or so are dismissed to a Children’s Church during the sermon time.
  • Laura and Addie both seemed to enjoy their mornings. The rooms were big and there were several kids in each room. Haven’t heard much else from either of them about it.

Message

  • Pastor Aaron is on a sermon series through the book of Isaiah. This week was chapter 32. At a chapter a week he has another 7 or so months to go.
  • The sermon was maybe 40 - 45 minutes long, but good, solid stuff. Pastor Aaron seems to pretty much have one speed, but it’s energetic and not hard to listen to.
  • The Gospel was clearly present in the message, as was a reminder of the hope that we have in God’s kingdom that will be established for eternity.
  • After avoiding one church on our list because of their strident insistence on a particular sort of end-times views, it was good to hear from the pulpit (and I paraphrase here) that ‘a lot of Bible-believing people have come up with a lot of Bible-believing ideas about how the end times will happen, but in reality we don’t really know for certain.

People

  • The congregation was a fairly mixed age there at Maranatha; there were lots of families with young children, but there were also a bunch of teenagers and a fair number of older folks. Good to see the variety.
  • On the whole, people weren’t unfriendly, but weren’t perhaps as purposefully outgoing as the folks at Stonebridge were when we visited there. Outside of the folks we already knew (and the few people that they introduced us to), no one specifically came up to greet and welcome us. If it hadn’t been for Pastor Aaron finding us and shepherding us around, I got the feeling we would’ve had to ask a bunch of questions and more or less find our own way around to get the girls down to the children’s ministries.

Observations

  • The church sanctuary is interesting; they have adapted what was obviously once a rather long, narrow sanctuary and turned the whole thing sideways. This makes the sanctuary very wide (4 rows of pews wide or so) but only about 6 rows deep. It works pretty well.
  • In general, the church feels like they’ve outgrown their building but don’t have a solution for what to do next. The sanctuary wasn’t overly full this morning, but I can see where it could be. The stage felt somewhat cramped with the whole worship team up there. The basement has temporary walls set up to make the children’s classrooms, and the doors are short - like 6-foot-high short. Their website tells me that they had a baptismal service last week at a church several miles away, since they don’t have the facilities at their own building.
  • It looks like there’s a lot of good stuff going on at Maranatha. There’s an emphasis on small groups, an apparent focus on missions, and a seeming dedication to qualified leadership.

As with Stonebridge a few weeks ago, it’s just impossible to get a full impression and make any sort of decision based on only attending for one Sunday. Next week we’ll be out of town, but I expect that the following week we’ll be back at Maranatha to give it another shot. Thanks to Aaron and the whole group there at Maranatha for a good Sunday morning.

Good friends say things like this

Good friends aren’t afraid to say hard things.

Last night I had a friend tell me: “Hey, Chris, this church search blog thing is cool, but you need to get your butt in gear and actually get to church.”

Now, he and I both understand that we’ve had good reasons for not getting to church the past two weeks, and his comment was somewhat in jest, but still, that’s the kind of thing a reliable friend will tell you. I’m blessed to have a friend like that.

The Church Search, Week 4

We had plans to go to church on Sunday. And the best of intentions. But even though we were all up quite early thanks to the time change, the cold and cough situation at our house made it seem prudent to stay home. As much as we’d like to attend, everyone would probably appreciate not being infected by Addison’s runny nose and my cough.

Next week, Lord willing.

The Church Search, Week 4 Preview

This week our plans have us heading to Maranatha Bible Church. We know the Maranatha pastor and youth pastor and their families - good folks all around. From their website I see that Pastor Aaron is working through a series in Isaiah, which should be interesting. 10:15 AM on Sunday. Always tough to go someplace new, but a little easier when there’s familiar faces.

Oh, the other place I’m familiar with Maranatha from: church softball. Guess there might be a few more familiar faces there than I was originally thinking.

As usual, I’ll do some analysis/review on Sunday or Monday.

The Church Search, Week 3

After deciding early in the week that Cedar Valley Bible was off our short list, we spent a lot of time talking about where we might go next. We know the other place we definitely want to try out is Maranatha Bible Church, so we tentatively decided last night that we’d head there this morning.

Then last night Laura decided she didn’t want to sleep. From 3:00 until 5:00 she was awake in our room at least four times. Needless to say, Becky and I didn’t get a lot of sleep. Finally Laura went to sleep and slept in until 8:00. As I write this at 9:15, Becky is still sleeping. Given that we’d need to leave the house in 30 minutes to get to Maranatha on time, I think we’ll be cashing it in this morning and giving it another shot next week. Part of me feels guilty for not getting to church; the other part of me is happy that we have the freedom to just rest when we need to. God is good.

Short list got shorter

Well, we talked about it some more last night and agreed that Cedar Valley Bible Church is off our short list for the reasons I discussed earlier. So now we’re back to looking at our short list, figuring out where to head next. Not sure if we’ll visit Stonebridge one more week or skip down to the next church on the list.

More likely we’ll sit down with the phonebook, newspaper, or some other reference list and work through the short list again to figure out what places we might have missed… then we’ll go from there. Still praying for guidance on a daily basis.

An end-times deal-breaker

So yesterday afternoon I noted that the next church on our short list for visiting during the Church Search was probably Cedar Valley Bible Church. I know a few folks there, including the couple that has brought Andrew Peterson and company to town twice for concerts. I’ve been to a wedding there, too, and my overall impression was that the church might be a little further over into the conservative homeschooling culture than I’d be comfortable with, but then, it might be OK.

The only other note I’d made about Cedar Valley thus far was when perusing their Doctrinal Statement online, it seemed to me that they had a far more detailed and lengthy statement on the End Times than do most doctrinal statements I’ve read. A very literal, pre-trib, dispensational sort of end times view. Still, as of yesterday, the church was still on my short list.

Then last night I cruised on over to the Cedar Valley website again to check out Sunday morning service times, and I noted this link on the sidebar: “2008 Second Coming Conference”. That’s right, in November Cedar Valley Bible will be bringing in a special speaker from Friends of Israel to speak three times over two days. The topics:

  • “Close to Construction” - Presentation on the movement in Israel to rebuild the Temple and how it could fit into Bible prophecy.
  • “Pre-Tribulation Rapture” - A look at some different views of the rapture along with Biblical proof for the pre-tribulation position.
  • “Signs of the Times” - Biblical evidence that we are now living in the end times.

And that’s just about a deal-breaker for me. Let me explain a little bit why.

I grew up in what I’d consider a pretty standard set of evangelical churches. We attended a C&MA church for a while in Fremont, NE, then a Bible church in Granbury, TX. I got the basic dispensational teaching on the end times - basically, Left Behind without all the dramatic stuff that made LaHaye and Jenkins best-sellers. Imminent rapture, followed by a 7-year tribulation, followed by Christ’s return for 1000 years, followed by Satan being let loose again on the earth, followed by another clean-up and the ultimate destruction of the earth and creation of a new one, etc. Most of the time I was just confused by it. Maybe it was partly my practical engineering nature - we’re not gonna know what’s happening until it’s done, right? So who really cares?

I stayed basically in that theological position until reading N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope a year ago. In Surprised by Hope, Wright explains, among other things, the amillennial position on end times in a way that actually made sense to me. It turns out there is a whole ’nother way to interpret the passages in Peter, Thessalonians, and Revelation that I had never been introduced to. And that there were legitimate, reasonable Christians who believed it. Talk about an eye-opener. Since then I’ve read a couple of books by Kim Riddlebarger on amillennialism, which too have been helpful. At the moment I’d say I’m at the point of leaning toward an amillennial position, but feeling no need to be dogmatic about it. There are far more important things to get worked up about than the end times.

Which leads me to my end-times deal-breaker with Cedar Valley Bible. This (apparently second-annual) “Second Coming Conference” shows me that they’re very interested in being dogmatic about a pre-trib dispensational end-times viewpoint. And while I’m OK with them believing that (heck, Noelridge, Imago, and Stonebridge all have the word “premillennial” in their doctrinal statements), I’m not really OK with a church being dogmatic about it. That just won’t work for me.

Becky and I had a good talk about end-times stuff last night and why I feel this way about it. I don’t know that we’ve decided anything yet, but I’m really leaning toward taking Cedar Valley off our list.

[N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope at wtsbooks.com] [Kim Riddlebarger’s A Case for Amillennialism at wtsbooks.com] [Kim Riddlebarger’s The Man of Sin: Uncovering the Truth about the Antichrist at wtsbooks.com]

The Church Search, Week 2

Week 2 of the Church Search took us back to Stonebridge Church for the second week in a row. (We kinda figure it’ll take at least a few weeks at any given place to really be able to make some sort of reasonable judgment on things.) We got out the door five minutes earlier this morning, leaving at 8:30 for a 9:00 service. We were there in 15 minutes, but the child check-in desk was quite a bit crazy this morning, so we still ended up not getting in to the sanctuary until the worship band had just about finished the opening song. Hopefully they’ll get the check-in stuff figured out soon.

Some continued/revised impressions carrying on from last week:

  • The folks seem quite friendly, and I’m enthusiastic about the age range I see. There is a good spread of old, young, teenagers, and children.
  • A lot of the music is unfamiliar, but it’s pretty solid stuff. During each song I’d be wondering “man, where did this song come from?” and then the last slide would have the author’s name and I’d recognize it. The last song of the service was written by Bebo Norman and Mitch Dane and I thought hey, I’ve met Mitch, even had lunch with him. Kinda cool.
  • The worship team was a little bit scant this week - fewer vocalists, no keyboard player at all. Makes me wonder how many folks the worship pastor actually has signed up, if he’s struggling to get people. If we were there I’d like to participate, just not be leading the team.
  • Jeff Holland’s doppelganger of a young adult pastor was supposed to be preaching, but apparently came down with a nasty cold yesterday. So, the senior pastor got to wing it, but still gave us a good sermon on Psalm 23. Enjoyed it.
  • The one thing I’ll gripe about the sermon, and I hassled Richard at Noelridge for the same thing: pastors that somehow refuse to use contractions when preaching. So far as I know, there’s nothing particularly unholy about ‘couldn’t’, ‘won’t’, ‘don’t’, and the like, but Pastor Richard at Noelridge and Pastor Randy at Stonebridge both seem to banish them from their vocabulary as soon as they get behind the pulpit. Anybody else get that from their pastors?

Next week Stonebridge is doing their official dedication of the new building, and they’re expecting a LOT of folks. They’ve actually gone door-to-door to everyone within a one-mile radius of the church dropping off small gift bags and inviting folks to visit. If it’s gonna be that crazy, we’ll probably take next week to visit the next church on our list. Not exactly sure yet which church that’ll be, but I’m kinda guessing Cedar Valley Bible.

It may be a little early to come to conclusions about Stonebridge after only two weeks, but my interim conclusion is that I like it, a lot. There’s a lot of good things going on there, a lot of good attitudes about things I think are important, and good teaching coming from the pulpit. If all the churches we visit are this good, it’s gonna be a difficult decision.