Today I went to church with Karen and Tonya (my hosts here in Scottsboro.) That was a pretty interesting experience. The church was a really, really small church (there were 30 people present including the pastor, but not including me.)
I'm not really into old, small churches anymore. To me they smack of an unhealthiness of some type. Almost all healthy things grow until they are mature. This church seems to have ended its growth under the leader that I met, and it seems to be content with that. That leads me to believe that it is experiencing a church health problem.
The church service was informal, played loud prerecorded music, and was semi-charismatic in that they waved their hands and spoke in tongues a times. The message was short and it was one of these messages in which the leader would quickly jump from passage to passage taking just one or two sentences from disparate books of the Bible and then putting it together to have a semi-unified message. At times that can get under my skin, because it makes it all too easy to take things out of context and present a warped message.
I seem to often be skeptical of churches and their leaders at first. I want to feel them out and see if they check out with what the Bibles says and what I believe.
Another thing that had an impact on me was the fact that a good number of the people in the congregation had weight issues. There were even women who were stereotypically popping candies throughout the service, which was funny because it was so true to type. Now, I know that Christians are never perfect and rarely even close, but to see that even the leaders were grossly, grossly overweight was a warning signal to me. That speaks to me about a lack of self-control, spiritual immaturity and the like. Leaders are supposed to hold themselves to a higher standard.
The final things that struck me as a bit immature were the eagerness that the congragation had when they prayed for good things and a few misconceptions about God. They didn't seem to want any bad thing to come their way -- save martyrdom. That seems to be far from what a life of submission to God and following Christ looks like to me. The leader even felt that Hurricane Charley was from the devil, which I find to be almost laughable. God creates. God creates hurricanes. It is not evil to have destruction enter our lives. Satan just misleads -- this guy seemed to have been grossly misled by a number of things.
Well, that's pretty much the end of my thoughts on all that.
Posted by David at August 15, 2004 02:30 PM