Posted on February 18, 2008 - by Stephen Murray

On a Journey – Part II

It started snowing a few minutes ago! I was watching the weather this morning and it looks like its going to be a pretty chilly week. Yesterday I did the church rounds. We changed the original plan because we’d already heard Darrin Patrick preach the same sermon twice and even though Darrin rocks we decided to check out the ‘other’ side of American Christianity. So last night I went to Twin Oaks Presbyterian Church (PCA). Twin Oaks has fairly strong ties to the Bible Institute of South Africa and so because I knew of it I went along to visit a service. So here are my thoughts…

First off I’m still trying to get used to these massive church buildings everywhere – it creates a serious ‘religious’ feel to the whole place. The service was a really formal service reading pslams and singing from the hymnbook – although they did have a Matt Redman song and a Chris Tomlin song, but they sang them a bit like hymns anyway. Now I’ve attended my fair share of formal and conservative churches (especially a number of prayerbook services in the Church of England in South Africa) but this just seemed way more formal than anything I’d ever been to before. The roof of the place was almost in the heavens, everything seemed to have these ‘gold’ furnishings, the pulpit look like the bridge on the Starship Enterprise and the pastor sat in an elaborate red chair on the stage through most of the service. Now I don’t want to knock Twin Oaks – in fact I have a number of friends who’ve been members there plus they give an absolute ton to foreign mission – but it just hit home to me how different church is in America to South Africa. It also made me understand the emerging conversation with fresh perspective – in fact I came away wondering why there are any emerging people in South Africa at all, in some ways we’ve got a whole lot less to emerge out of than they do over here.

It was a night and day distinction with the Journey service that I attended in the morning where everything was relaxed, fresh and engaging – basically very non-religious and informal. I suddenly felt quite good about where a number of our CESA (Church of England in South Africa) churches are at.

Today I’m off to have a drink with Chris Gensheer who is a regular visitor to this blog and has his own blog over at Intersection. I’m also going to tag along with Chris tonight to some lectures at Covenant Seminary – should be interesting.

Sun has come out now – the snow is already melting. I’ll have to wait a bit longer to make my snow angel!