TMC Journal Fall 07 – Part 3

Thank you to all of you who have responded to my previous post. I’d still like to hear from more of you so drop me an e-mail.

So one of the things we get to do here as students is participate in 2 church services a week. In the morning I am at Copperhill Community Church doing work study and in the evenings I like to go to Grace Community Church where the illustrious John MacArthur is the Senior Pastor. There are things I like about both churches and there are things about each that bug me.

What bugs me about Copperhill is the people are just so darn friendly. I can’t find a mean person in the bunch. Not a one. It’s funny. Ever since I started going there a year ago I’ve been trying to find something wrong with this church. They teach from God’s word, the worship Jesus, they treat communion with respect and they baptize people. I suppose you could say I, knowing that churches are made up of broken messy people, am waiting for the honeymoon to be over. I don’t think it will be any time soon.

Grace Community on the other hand is everything that Copperhill is not. They are a large mega-church that has been around for a long time and are steeped in tradition. You can’t walk into Grace Community and not know that you are in a conservative church. The ushers wear suits and ties. Even the band looks very professional. They take everything that they do there seriously. Sometimes too seriously. So here is my one complaint about Grace Community. At their Sunday night service this past week they started with a song called “Holy Is The Lord” by Chris Tomlin. The opening words to the original song are “We stand and lift up our hands.” However at Grace Community, someone lifting up their hands in worship is a very foreign concept. I understand that there are those that would probably be distracted by the raising of hands in their church, but Grace Community has gone so far as to change the lyrics of the song, so as not to encourage such an outburst. “We stand and offer our praise” is the new lyric that they abide by and frankly I think that’s a mistake. If a church thinks that a lyric in a song isn’t fitting with their style of worship then don’t sing the song! Why go through the hassle of changing a lyric and throwing off others who know the true and original lyric? What does that say about what you think about an artist that created that lyric for God’s glory? Drop the song from your repertoire but don’t change it. Even more distressing is the fact that the lyric wasn’t even theologically questionable. For a place that places so much authority in Scripture for everything they do I know they’d be hard pressed to find a verse or a passage that commands Christians to not raise their hands in worship!

All this is to say, Sundays are very interesting for me. In the morning I go to a church that has no tradition except that there is no tradition. And in the evening I go to a church that has tradition for the sake of tradition.

Don’t even get me started on my home church!;-)*

*Just so there is no misunderstanding, I love my home church and have been going there for 16+ years and will continue to go there and be a part of that family for as long as God wills.