One Church, Two Church

We worshiped today with Tracy’s sister and her husband in Tulsa. They attend what I believe would be called an independent/unaffiliated bible church. This was probably as comfortable as I’ve been worshiping with them. My guess is that this is a function both of today being a less-conservative service than I have shared with them before and of me becoming a little more tolerant of other worship styles.

The service opened with the congregation gathering in the sanctuary, with a song leader an small choir leading praise songs, which must have been pretty familiar because even I knew most of them. After an opening prayer and announcements, a member offered a solo. She had a lovely voice, and was hindered (in my opinion) by a bad backing track. Then we sang some more, both hymns and praise songs. Generally speaking, I don’t mind singing along with words on a screen – however I was distressed that hymnals were in the congregational seats, the choir was singing from these hymnals, but there was no way to determine where in the hymnal the tune was unless you looked it up in the index after it started. It bothered me, but of course, that’s a pet peeve of mine.

Tracy sang a solo, "I Am," off of a Nicole Nordeman album, and did a beautiful job with it (not burdened by a bad backing track). It makes me want to kick her in the can to start marketing herself and to cut a demo.

The preacher did a good job at delivering a message about the selection of Christ’s believers before the world was made. Generally, he dealt well with the questions, contradictions, and paradoxes that are presented by this belief (this truth), by saying that we can only know what the Word gives us, and that our human brains can’t always wrap around it. I’m willing to buy that. The only thing that really stuck in my craw was the statement (my paraphrasing) that it’s alright to have dissonance in these ideas, but we shouldn’t be in a place where we have contradiction. However, earlier in the message, he had stated that God selects us for salvation, but that he doesn’t select non-believers for damnation. It seems to me that if you say God selects a group for salvation, and that those who aren’t selected are damned, but that he doesn’t select a group for damnation, then that’s a contradiction. But, as I wrote, this is a tricky area to preach on, and if ANYONE only made one disturbing statement during 40 minutes of speaking on it, I’d be pretty impressed.

Overall, it was a nice service, and it made me think about visiting more churches sometime. I’m reminded of the main character in John Grisham’s "The Last Juror" who buys a small-town newspaper, then spends several years (I think) visiting each of the local churches once. That might not be a bad plan if I wasn’t already so happy with my home church. Maybe, though, I could consider visiting a new one once a month or so.