3 Hours Later...

Last week, some of us on the team went to a true Southern Baptist Church, Grace Temple. We were literally the only Caucasian people in the medium to smaller sized church. The service went from 10:15am till about 1pm and people continued to trickle in throughout the entire service. They started the service with about four people standing in the front with cordless mikes. The woman on the far left was the lead singer while the others sang backup. These three or four songs at the beginning were more meant to sing with the backup singers as the lead sounded great but sang as the Spirit lead and her heart desired. After these songs, the Pastor got up to do the welcome, having the newbies stand up and introduce themselves, and then announcements. To my surprise, instead of moving on with the message, we went back into worship songs. This time the songs were a little easier to sing along with and everybody was swayin and clappin. After another half an hour or so, teh message started. He was preaching on if you are going to be a Christian, you need to live like a Christian, different from the world and let your actions and mouth reflect your relationship with Christ. He also really pushed the fact that as a church they need leaders to really step up if they want to take the promises that God has given them and the new location that they are wanting to move into shortly. The great thing about the hour long message was that whenever Pastor Francis got really passionate with what he was saying, he would begin to dance a little bit up there and the keys would chime in with him (if he was really going the drums would come in a little bit too!). This of course encouraged the mmmhmmm's and the Amens, which only encouraged his little jig more! After the message, he stated that he really wanted to get us out of there so that people would come back at 5 for a meeting. Before we were dismissed though, there is a time of open mike for any testimonies to be shared. A lady went up and shared how she was so blessed and proud of her church family in how they surrounded her recently when her mom died and she called the funeral a homecoming. The other woman that went up there gave a mini message about the bad effects of gossip on individuals and on the division of the church body. She then laid out all her dirty laundry before all the congregation about her previous drinking problems and how that had effected her parenting. She called herself a bad mother and shared more stuff about herself, past as well as present. She claimed that now you can talk about her and it doesn't matter cause she knows Christ has redeemed her. Talk about confidence in Christ!! I really enjoyed, it is just too bad that we just don't have three hours to give every week since we have groups coming in the afternoon. I like the church I am at anyway, but it was a neat experience.