I went to the 11AM service at Warm Springs Baptist Church with Daniel. There are a lot of things about the church that I liked. For one, they had an actual visitor outreach table and there was a greeter who was on top of giving us new information.
The worship service started right on time. How did I know? They had a video running that had a countdown clock in the bottom corner. That's a good accountability tool. They seem to have a lot of small groups going on and they have classes offering discipleship and fellowship. Lots of good stuff. The worship service was okay. Musical worship is one of those things where "okay" is really broad in my mind because the style of music isn't the central part of worship. So with a lot of good things and a tolerable thing, I was getting interested in the church, right up to the start of the sermon.
Apparently, the church is in the second chapter of Nehemiah. That's fine. The pastor started off by talking about doing "the wave" as a sort of representation of some key ideas found in Nehemiah. The first is that everyone should participate. I buy that. And the second is perseverance... What? Then he said something like, "let's stand and worship the Lord." Doing the wave to represent perseverance and it is a worship to the Lord?
The sermon was pretty bad. He read some verses and then rambled for a while on some tangential topic, then read some more verses, and rambled some more. I had a notebook out to take notes, but within 10 minutes I put the pen down without having written a thing because it was so disjointed and unclear.
But in the middle of the sermon, the pastor revealed something that started to make pieces click together. Let me take a step backward, first. I had noticed earlier when thumbing through the stuff from the Visitor Booth that the pastor was the "Intermin Executive Pastor" which means that they are between pastors. Now back to the sermon, the pastor mentioned that they were 7 months into the search process and that there was a bit of a shakeup going on.
So here's where I'm at: I think it's a good church. I can see that they have a large campus and some history behind them. There are some questions as to where it will be in a year or two. There's some baggage surrounding the departure of the former pastor that seems to need some work. I don't mind finding out more and even sitting down with the pastor to ask him about things (Daniel is interested, too). But the thing that is standing out is the sermon. This is kind of sad to me. On the other hand, I feel nothing bad about going to a small group with them and skipping out on the Sunday morning sermons until they find a new pastor (or at least find a preaching pastor instead).
I spent the rest of the day hanging out with Daniel. We didn't have much to do, so we bought a game called "Dread Pirate." Interesting game, but it doesn't have quite so much strategic content as a two player game. There's some good/interesting aspects which give it hope as a 3-4 player game, but we'll have to wait and see.
