Tag Archives: Nicene Creed

Church Experiences

ChurchSurfer @ Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church: Succession Without Division

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Church Experience #46 – December 4, 2011

Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church – Chattanooga, TN

Bucket List

Everyone has things about themselves that they are disappointed in.  Things that you know you should have done, places you should have gone, subjects you should have studied, books you should have read, actions you should have taken, opportunities you may have missed…the list goes on and on.  We are all afraid (maybe to different extents) of coming to the end of our lives and saying the words “I should have ______, but I never did.  I wish I could go back and do things differently”.  Some of the things may seem small and insignificant to us in the present moment, so we keep putting them off thinking that we will have time to take care of them later.  The problem is, none of us knows how much time we actually have left before we move on to the next realm.  Today could be our last day here.  So how do we prioritize and get the things done that we actually want to do?  How do we even identify the things that could be those “Bucket List” type regrets?  I believe that I need to weigh things out by testing them against the Bible and the life that Jesus lived.  What would be a more likely thing for me to say with my last breath…”I should have gone skydiving,” or “I should have spent more time with my family”?  I personally believe the latter is more likely (for me at least).  That is an extreme example, but take a moment and scale that back to situations that are actually a part of your everyday routine.  What would you be more disappointed in missing out on…the latest episode of “CSI:  Miami” or an hour of time praying for the needs of friends and family who you know have major issues going on in their lives that could be healed or solved through God’s intervention?  I think about these things often, and feel pretty guilty about the way I use my time.  Time is one of the resources that we are given by our Creator that we are expected to be good stewards of…just like our physical strength, talents, wealth, etc.  So how can I use the ChurchSurfer blog project (which I believe is a pretty good use of time) to also help me do some other things that are important to me?  I have always had a desire to learn more history, specifically the history of the Christian faith and churches over the years since our Savior’s life, death, and resurrection.  Protestantism and Catholicism are two pieces of modern Christianity that I have already experienced first hand, but there is another that I have left out up to this point.  It’s time to fix that, so I decided to visit Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church and begin to explore Orthodoxy.  Here’s how it went…  Read more...

Church Experiences

ChurchSurfer @ Signal Mountain Bible Church: Sunday Morning with the In-Laws

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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...