One Day, Two Services

So far the move hasn’t been real difficult physically, because until you get a place to live, you can’t do a whole lot. But you can look for a church, and we have been. Someone told me that the Dallas area has 65,000 churches, and so I doubt we’ll visit them all. Though if even half of them bought the Pictorial Library of Bible Lands, making our budget wouldn’t be a problem.

Today we visited two churches, one morning service and one evening. Both were Christian churches, and both were evangelical. They are located within a few miles of each other and each service lasted about one hour. I think both have solid theology and I think we could be members of both happily. Even so, there were some radical differences.

• For one, I wore blue jeans, an old polo shirt, and hiking boots. For the other, I wore new dockers, a new polo, and dress shoes.
• For one, I was overdressed. For the other, I was underdressed.
• For one, if I had been dropped in from the sky, I would have thought I was at a rock concert with special lighting and all.
• For the other, there was singing, but no instruments.
• For one, they met in a high school auditorium. For the other, they met in a distinguished chapel building.
• One is pastored by a guy I’ve never heard of. The other was led for many years by a well-known and very good Bible teacher.
• One had an attendance at the first service of a couple thousand. The other had about 50.
• One had about 8 treadmills on the stage. In the other, no one got on the stage or stood up front the entire service.
• One had 3 classes for each year of age of the child, based on month of birth, with loaner beepers and security tags. For the other, the kids went to the adult service.
• One did not have hymnbooks. The other had three hymnbooks in the pews and we sang from all three.
• One appeared to be perfectly scripted. The other had not one thing planned other than observance of the Lord’s supper.
• One was quite comfortable in every way. The other had me confused (and potentially embarrassed) in something I’ve done in church for 30 years.
• One had a biblical, but non-expository, message. The other had a couple of brief exhortations from Scripture.
• One had a message delivered by the executive pastor (usually they’re “executive” because they can’t preach) and from a communication standpoint, it was excellent. The other doesn’t have a pastor.

I thought that I was going to be able to say that at neither church did someone initiate greeting us. That was true at the first church. I think it would have been true at the second church except that we went with friends who introduced us to others (and to the entire congregation). Everyone who has ever mentioned the second church to me has commented on its unfriendly nature. It should be noted that our experiences with being greeted is not a regional factor, as might be the case in an area like New England. In two previous churches we visited, people were very friendly and initiated a lot.

Very interesting. In case you didn’t figure it out, all of the comments above listed first were of the morning service and all of the “other” were from the evening service. Some in the DTS world may know which churches we visited, but my preference is that you not name them in the comments. If we choose to go to one or the other, I may delete this post.