I Never Thought I’d Go to a Worship Service at 1:00 on a Sunday Afternoon!

It’s hard not to feel like a movie or restaurant reviewer, when you know that in the next 6 weeks you’ll be attending 9 different churches, writing down your impressions and “rating” the experience. I guess there’s no way to completely avoid that, but hopefully the lessons learned will outweigh the temptation to become cynical, judgmental, and an observer, rather than a fellow worshipper with people who will all love their church.

With the disclaimer out of the way, let me tell you about our experience today. BAF is a 10 year old church (nominally affiliated with Southern Baptists) in Corpus Christi, Texas. Did I mention Corpus is a long way from NC? Finding information about the location and staff turned out to be more difficult than it should have been. It makes me want to really take a look at our website and see if a person who knew nothing about the geography of Harnett County could find our church by checking out the website.

We were given a great, extended personal tour of the brand new facility by Cathy Harwick. What a great lady! She is the Children’s Pastor at Bay Area, and they have an awesome place for kids to come and learn and worship. By the way, while Vanessa and I both heard and saw some things that we need to incorporate back at Crossroads, we both commented about how Autumn and the Crossroads Kid’s Ministry does some things at an equal or even superior level to some of what we saw.

We also got to slip into a Youth Worship/Teaching time. They have a great Youth Pastor who knows how to teach the Word to youth, but Mikaela commented that Crosswalk is a far superior youth facility compared to this church of 6,000 attenders!

We also had a good, extended conversation with John Atkinson, who is a Pastor over their small groups and discipleship ministries. He is familiar with all the churches we’re visiting this summer and was very helpful and honest. He acknowledged they have made some huge mistakes, but noted that through the mistakes they have learned the greatest lessons and even see God’s blessings when they are willing to acknowledge the mistakes. He laughed when I said, “It’s good to know that even the “big boys” are confused sometimes.”

As we sat and talked about the morning (and afternoon), we made a list of positives and negatives. I’ll post those next time. Why did we go to a service at 1:00 in the afternoon? Because we got to Corpus too late to attend the Saturday night service – yesterday was not a shorter drive day – it was another 12 hours into Corpus. We left in time to attend the 10:00 am service, but took so long in locating the church, that we were late for that service. Cathy’s tour lasted into the 11:30 service, so we were left with the 1:00 pm service. It’s a long time from breakfast to 2:30 pm, when we got out of church.

I hope everything went great at Crossroads today. I’m sure Kevin Davidson was used by God as he shared his heart with you.

Love,
Ken