Posted on February 17, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

On a Journey – Part I

Excuse the terrible pun in the title. Its almost 9am in St Louis on Sunday morning as I write this. I arrived yesterday, late morning after a marathon series of flights (Cape Town to Joburg to Dakar to Atlanta to St Louis). There was no time to rest yesterday as I had lunch with my hosts at Covenant Seminary before heading off to a new Saturday evening service the Journey has started at Tower Grove. So I shrugged off the sleep and went along – and I’m so glad I did.

The service was great it had a really simple, informal and authentic feel to it. As can be expected it was a fairly young congregation. They made really good use of multimedia so that it wasn’t overpowering but it was really well done. The music was simple – one guy playing a guitar and singing, another guy singing and a third guy playing a bongo drum of sorts. Darrin Patrick preached for about 40 minutes on the life of Jacob in Genesis in a really low-key, relaxed but engaging and entertaining manner. It was really refreshing. Today I’m going to two/three more Journey services.

Its easy to see why so many younger people appreciate what the Journey is doing here because the place is completely full of massive churches – baptist, lutheran, mormon, assemblies of God – they’re just everywhere and I can imagine they create something of a very ‘churchy’ culture. But along comes the Journey with its real authentic and relaxed feel to refresh to local church scene.

Other than that I had pizza at one of those Elvis type diners last night – real American!

So here ends part I – stayed tuned for some intermittent blogging…