“You’re right! How dare he use up my “Me” time talking about God!”

I love that comment. Nathan made it in response to someone complaining to him about how long the sermon was. It's kind of a convicting response, but at the same time, it’s absurdly funny.

Wow… at this rate, I won’t ever have time to post on my blog. It took me three and a half hours to make/eat dinner, make lunch and breakfast for tomorrow, and catch up on my email and blog comments.

I’m debating about what to talk about tonight. I have the following topics upcoming: the church I visited, Vegas, the rides in Vegas, more rides at Knott's Berry farm, work, and random rants.

I think I’ll pick “church” for tonight.

When I learned I was going to be down here in Henderson, Nevada for three months, I decided to look for a church to visit. After some looking around on the Internet, I found that there are a myriad of churches down here. A good number of them seem to be LDS (Mormon), but there were still quite a few candidates. I didn’t really have any interest in going to a church where you are reminded of morals you knew at the age of three every week, so it took me a while to sort though everything. I finally found one that looked promising and headed out to Sunday school.

When I got there, I parked in a Visitor place (after all, I was a visitor :-) and got out of my car. I don’t know how much “church shopping” you all have done, but the first fifteen minutes are always really awkward. You don’t know where to go, you don’t know anyone, everyone stares at you, etc. I decided to bite the bullet, so I walked up to a guy and asked him where to go. He directed me to the adult Sunday school class, so I headed into the building and sat down.

I gathered that a lot of the people were there as part of the “outreach ministry,” so I kind of expected the standard health and wealth gospel of “be good and you will be blessed, have a full life, etc., etc.” My initial hypothesis was quickly discarded when I received the notes for the class and read the title: “The Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689; Of Adoption – Chapter 12.” “Oookay,” I thought to myself. “I shall learn something.”

Throughout the lesson, I was kind of surprised to hear some of the same phrases Pastor Culver frequently uses. Although the lesson wasn’t as in depth as I was used to, I still learned a lot and was glad I went.

After Sunday school, I headed over to the sanctuary for the morning service. On the way from Sunday school to the sanctuary, the congregation more than quadrupled in size. As it turned out, a lot of the people in the Sunday school class had a rather large family to go with them, so there were quite a few people in the church service. I also quickly realized that most, if not all, of the families were home schooled.

The sermon was, surprisingly enough, a week out of their Sermon on the Mount series. They had just started the beatitudes and were studying verse 4 that week. My first thought was, “Ok, now I get the light, “Here’s how to be good” treatment.” I was surprised when some of the first words out of the pastor’s mouth were, “Now as you remember, the beatitudes are characteristics of those who are of the kingdom of God -- a description of those who are of the kingdom.” His treatment of the Sermon on the Mount wasn’t quite as in-depth as Pastor Culver’s “light treatment,” but it was still really good.

After church, they had a potluck to which I was invited. Some new members were joining the church that week, thus the special occasion. I stayed and enjoyed spending some time with the kids. There were times I had a really hard time not laughing. Hearing kids comparing their food allergies and helping each other figure out what desserts they could eat based on their allergies was really funny. Another thing that cracked me up was the response I got when I asked a young girl if they had a big family. “Well… no… There’re only six of us including my mom and my dad.” You don’t expect to hear young kids talking about their diet, schoolwork, etc, but after being quizzed by my youngest brother, Jacob, on how church was, what the sermon was about, and what the overall thesis of the study was, I’m beginning to think kids can think on a lot higher level than most people give them credit for. Jacob can interact with Pastor Culver’s sermons at a deep enough level to ask meaningful questions about another pastor’s sermon that most adults would call, “too deep” and “too long.”

It was quite a pleasant day for me. The people of this church body, much like SGCC, seemed to be united in Christ, not in externals. Consequently, they were a close-knit body, and they all served to build each other up into Him who is the Head. It's always cool to see the body function as it should, and I felt quite blessed to be with the body of Christ even at such a great distance from home.