Saturday, September 18, 2004
Hero
Today was spent working. Yeah, working. Roommate says, "You going to be using that thing a lot, huh?" Um, yeah.

Say, I forgot to mention yesterday that I had my first piano lesson. Just on a whim. I don't really know how it got in my head. Everybody plays guitar. Heck, I do. Sort of. I just want to be able to take the stuff I listen to and sit down on a pinaner and pluck it out. So the private lessons bring me up to a lucky 13 hours on the semester. I figure you can never have too many creative outlets. Teacher gives me a short booklet of about 7 simple songs to work out some of the 10-year-old rust and also work on hymn #127. I forget which one it is right off the top of my head, but I insisted on learning how to learn improvisational stuff.

This evening I and a couple other guys on the floor met up with a group of folks at Applebees who are youth volunteers and staff at Southland Christian Church. It was my fourth contact with Southland this week. John, Grace and I visited both their Sunday morning and evening services. Just let me say they put the "mega" in megachurch. Driving past their premises, I've heard those who refer to it as "Six Flags Over Jesus" and "Ft. God." After going out to see Hero last week, I wanted to tag it "Our Land."

I've seen shopping malls that could fit in that building. Asbury's seminary campus could fit in their parking lot alone. It's just overwhelmingly humungous. On the one hand, it struck me awfully like a rock concert. On the other, the leadership impressed me with his sincerity, and there are oodles of opportunities to serve. I was wrestling with the whole "mega" issue when the guest speaker read out of Acts 2, about the community of the early church. And then my eyes wandered a couple of verses earlier, and it hit me: the church of Jerusalem was a megachurch. They started with a community of 3000. That's no rural country parish, nor intimate house church. That's a load of people. How do you organize and serve a group like that?

There's nothing inherently evil with being a big church. Whether large or small, what matters is that the gospel is preached and Christ is lifted high. What matters was that in two services I witnessed five baby Christians get baptized, and that was exciting and inspiring. And something must be said about the experience of worship music amongst 1000 strangers, all the Body of Christ.

Last night, Ben and Jason and I checked out their ministry to post-college folks. While I didn't find the teaching all that meaty, and couldn't shake the feeling of a youth group that didn't grow up, it was refreshing to meet other non-Asbury Christians.

posted by Peter at 1:56 AM
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