Church Experience #43 – November 13, 2011

Signal Mountain Bible Church – Signal Mountain, TN

Dun, dun, duhhhhhh……….the In-Laws

It is nearing the end of my year of “churfing” (a.k.a. church-surfing) and there was still one particularly important church that I had not included in my ChurchSurfer visits.  I think you will all agree that it probably would not be fair to visit my parents’ church (for Father’s Day) and leave out my in-laws’ church.  My wife’s parents, Speight and Trudee Overman, and her sister Karen, live on Signal Mountain and are members of Signal Mountain Bible Church.  I have visited there before (of course…gosh!), so this experience was not entirely new to me, but a “must” on my ever-shrinking list of church visits left for 2011 (can you believe it’s almost over?).  Laura and I did not tell them we were showing up…like all the other Sundays this year, we just sort of decided to go and went.  No special preparations or staged theatrics, we just pick a church and go and see what the Lord shows us through our experience.  One of the great things about the church experiences that I have had this year is that I never have expectations.  I may have suppositions about what or how things might happen at certain churches, but I never expect anything to happen a certain way…how could I?  I do not go to these churches regularly and therefore cannot make any presumptuous conclusions.  Why would I do that anyway?  Would that not be saying that God is predictable?  Or even worse, that He is not present and we have become predictable in our churches?  Think about this for a moment…if we are trying to be imitators of Christ, would we honestly be predictable about how we do anything?  It seems to me like the twelve who were closest to Jesus never knew what to expect.  That is why Jesus was always explaining His actions to them.  With unpredictability comes unexpected events, and with unexpected events comes misunderstanding.  If you were not expecting something and it takes you “off guard”, you usually get details wrong and miss the point completely.  Jesus made sure His disciples did not miss the details or the point of anything.  Can you say the same about your church?  Do you go to church each week expecting certain things?  Would you be open to the unexpected?  Do we purposefully create predictable churches out of fear of the unknown or the desire to keep everything “under control”?  Just some good introspective questions that popped into my mind…but now back to the point of this article – Signal Mountain Bible Church.  Read more...