Bullet Points for a Thursday Morning #2

It’s been a crazy week so I’m reduced to one of these play-by-play lists. Sorry.

  • Note to self: eating at Texas Roadhouse only two hours before playing a rec league basketball game: not such a good idea.
  • Looking forward to getting out of town this weekend.
  • There is pretty much nothing cuter than a four-year-old excited about being invited to a friend’s birthday party.
  • Is Thanksgiving really only two weeks away? Where has the year gone?
  • I’m getting a kick out of Fake Geof Morris this morning.
  • It’s been far too long since I’ve listened to Mel Brooks’ The Producers soundtrack. Hilariously clever lyrics.
  • I’m with Kari - it’s too early for Christmas music.

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.

Happy Birthday, Mom (2008 edition)!

It’s my mother’s birthday today, and out of respect for her (a respect that I wasn’t prone to show in my younger years, but that’s another story) I won’t mention her age.

However, I will mention that she has accomplished much in her years, raising and schooling five children, serving and caring for friends and family, consistently modeling Christ-likeness to those around her, tireless for nearly 37 years as a wife and nearly 32 as a mother.

Today, this son rises to call her blessed.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

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.

Post-Election Thoughts

So much has been said by so many this morning that I don’t really have anything brilliant to add. Still, I’ll consolidate a few thoughts here.

  • The scene at Grant Park in Chicago last night was amazing. Just amazing.
  • It’s good to have an election decided decisively. No nightmare like the month of November 2000 this time.
  • To those of you who supported Obama: his presidency won’t be as awesome as most of you think.
  • To those of you who opposed Obama: his presidency won’t be as terrible as most of you think.
  • As Christians, it is our responsibility to pray for, respect, honor, and obey our leaders.
  • We owe it to President-elect Obama to put aside our cynicism for a while, to assume the best instead of the worst.
  • The kingdom we wait expectantly for is not an earthly kingdom.

Culture Warrior or Disciple?

The Internet Monk’s latest post deserves more than just a bullet in my overnight links.

Michael Spencer describes “Bob”, a man he met this past summer. Bob is “a very dedicated conservative evangelical, and a pleasant enough fellow….when he [isn’t] angry.”

Bob was your stereotypical culture war evangelical. He was a Jesus follower, but his passion was what was going on in America, particularly the issues we broadly call the culture war: atheistic advances in the public schools, restrictions on Christian practice in the public square, the aggressive agenda of homosexual rights advocates.

Bob was obviously devoted to Christian and conservative media, particularly radio. He believed what he heard. Dobson. Point of View. 700 Club.

We all know people like this. We all get multitudinous email forwards from people like this. Some of us are people like this, or have those tendencies. And here’s iMonk’s word for us:

Go live like a disciple.

It’s hard to say this, but Bob isn’t seeing the big picture. Our American culture war is not worth the demise of authentic discipleship. Trading following Christ in love, even in post-Christian times, for fighting and defensiveness, is a bad trade. Bob is frightened. Our faith says “Fear not.” Bob says prepare to fight. Our faith says prepare to love.

I am particularly impressed that these days should call us together in real community, not separate us according to Christian media audience niche. There are some helpful voices out there in the culture war, but I’d like to suggest that it’s time to listen to your pastor- assuming he’s showing you how to follow Jesus- more than James Dobson or some angrier, more paranoid manipulator of fear.

You should really go read the whole article. Good, good stuff. Amen.

Election 2008: I voted

Reports of long lines at many polling places had me wondering if I would be in for a wait to vote this morning. But, at least at my polling place at the neighborhood church in Hiawatha, there was very little line. I signed the register, then signed the book next to my name, then filled in our lovely two-sided scantron form.

The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than 10 minutes. There were contested races for several local positions and I found myself voting for candidates of both parties. I voted to retain a few of the local judges I’m familiar with. When I deposited my ballot into the scanner, the readout showed that I was ballot #548 for the day so far. I can remember voting in previous elections where my ballot number was only in the 200’s late in the day… so yeah, we’re seeing high voter turnout.

Tonight I have my first work league basketball game of the season, at 7:50 pm. I’m betting that by the time I get home and watch the election coverage, it’ll be all over.

I will not fear

On an internal discussion board at my workplace today, a co-worker (who is a Christian, though a bit of the far-right cynical type) posted this:

Full up your gas tank today. And any other necessary purchases. Once the elections are over, anything that they’ve been holding off on can now be done. I expect that the repercussions of this economic meltdown have been held at bay and international moves that will make us unpopular have been tabled until after the election.

To which I have (and posted) this response:

I refuse to live in fear.

Political parties, bloggers, cynics, and conspiracy theorists of all stripes use fearmongering as a motivator to try to get us to do what they want. If you’re on one side, it’s fear of gays, liberals, taxes, big government, and athiests. If you’re on the other side, it’s fear of theocracy, invasion of personal privacy, neocons, and big oil.

No more.

-–

A reminder from Romans 13: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.”

Election Eve

It seems like this election cycle started a LONG time ago. We had our caucuses in Iowa back in January, and even at that point it seemed like the campaign was getting long. By tomorrow night, though, (Lord willing,) it’ll all be over except for the mopping up.

We’ve managed to avoid most of the pre-election harassment that comes in the form of door-knockers and phone calls; either Iowa is polling too strongly Democrat to make it worth canvassing or our party affiliation makes us unappealing targets for last-minute solicitation. Whatever the reason, I won’t complain.

Tomorrow we’ll walk over to our neighborhood polling place (at a church only three blocks away) and cast our ballots. I’ll cast the most mixed ballot I’ve ever cast, supporting Obama at the top of the ticket and a mixture of Democrats and Republicans further down.

I’m mildly optimistic that our local House race might go Republican; the incumbent, Dave Loebsack, took the seat two years ago by running out the political equivalent of a check-swing ground ball, and making it in safely as the voters kicked out long-time nominal Republican Jim Leach in a fit of anti-Bush pique. I heard the Republican candidate speak back at the caucus in January, and she’s a fireball. While Dr. Marianette Miller-Meeks has a name that might (unfortunately, for a politician) suggest that she has strings to be pulled, she would be a fine representative for Iowa in Washington.

That’s the end of Chris’s endorsements for the election. Now, just because it’s more fun this way, a prediction or two.

  • Obama will win the election handily, with massive voter turnout making the difference.
  • The Democrats won’t quite hit 60 seats in the Senate, driving them to woo Joe Lieberman back to the Democratic caucus in spite of the fact he endorsed McCain.

In the end, regardless of who wins, I will pray that God grant our new leaders wisdom and integrity. There is peace to be found in knowing that God is sovereign.

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.