un Jan 13 23:23:23 PST 2002

Attended a different church today. Vally Hope, or something like that. We mostly picked it since it had ‘hope’ in the title and had a close address. Turned out to not be such a good idea. Nice building, well equipped (they even had bars for hanging theater lights). The service was a bit awkward in some respects. They were trying to have a more modern worship time, but were playing the music for the modern songs off of tape/CD, and the few hymn songs they had both a piano and an organ for. The preacher was an elderly man (the bulk of the congreation was elderly as well) and seemed to be well in tune with the needs of his congreation. But their needs and ours seem to differ substantially.

Also, he claimed to be preaching from a specific passage in 2 Cor., but he used NLT (New Living Translation, I presume) and we kept double checking and it was way off from NKJV and doesn’t quite match the intent that is in NASB either. And what he was preaching didn’t really come from the scripture anyway. He spent the bulk of the time on ‘Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh’ (2 Cor, 5:16a NASB) and talking about how we shouldn’t complain about our physical condition or compare our bodies to those of others. I’m not saying that isn’t supported by scripture, but I strongly believe that’s not what Paul was talking about here.

Paul is talking about the old self and the new self (see verse 17) a theme common in his writings and that as a Christian, a new person, we need to not look upon people with the eyes of the world, or fleshly eyes, but with our new eyes, our spiritual eyes.

The church overall seemed a little underattended for the space available. I got the impression that this church had been much stronger 5-10 years ago and was currently slipping due to member loss due to older members passing on. There were a few younger families, but I would guess about 40% or more of those in attendance were over 55. There were some signs that there was action to turn the church around. The worship leader appeared to be pushing forward with the songs, and was also very friendly and encouraged us to return. I got the strange feeling that they don’t get too many visitors, and probably even less return visitors.

So the lesson to take away from this is that we should investigate these churches a bit more before showing up on Sunday morning and spending 90 minutes. I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy some parts of it, but it’s not the right place for us in so many ways.

I’m thinking that maybe we can call them and ask for average attendance numbers and if they tape their sermons, if they could send us a sample or maybe we could drop by and pick one up. That would enable us to get a rough feel without having to spend a Sunday morning at a church that we could have otherwise filtered out. I’m growing impatient with wanting to find a new church home. Hope Community Church was a very good church for us despite it’s location, and replacing it is going to be very difficult. I now know why I was so hesitant to go. Finding a good church home is not a easy or short task, and it’s going to take a lot more effort than I orignally thought.

In other news, I got some more info about requirements for the ATI video stuff. Turns out that you need to have the ati.2 drivers in place along with km and drm-kernel to get it all working without crashing everything. I’m a bit nervous about applying the ati.2 drivers over my perfectly good copy of /usr/X11R6, but it should be OK if I make a .tgz backup of the directory beforehand as a safety precaution.