Church Update #3- Gospel Church

This week we went to the City on the Hill Gospel Church.

Oh man, I loved it, especially coming from Episcopalian. It was really fun to just stand up and sing and clap, to songs that were meant to be sung (unlike the hymns, which are either way too high or way too low.) Everyone there seemed to be really enjoying themselves. It also seemed like there were more young people there. At the other churches, I didn’t see hardly anyone even remotely close to my age, but at the Gospel Church there were tons of them.

The sermon was about free will, and how God fits into that. It was really fascinating, and parts of it actually made a lot of sense to me. The pastor was talking about how he doesn’t believe that God controls everything that we do. He believes that God granted us free will, so that we’re not puppets, so that we can choose whether or not to love him. He pointed out how there was nothing impressive when someone loves you because they’re forced to, and what makes it really great, really special, really LOVE, is when they do it because they choose to. The thing about free choice, though, (according to pastor Steve) is that it can’t be revoked. Like, if you want to grant free will, you have to grant it all-out. The second someone tries to make a bad decision, you can’t tell them not to, you just have to let them go ahead and do it, and take the consequences. I guess there’s no such thing as boundaries…?

Also, they seemed really interested in converting people, not through coersion, but through persuasion. They think that by loving people, they can convince them that God loves them too, I think, or something like that. I guess that’s a bit weird, not that I mind love or anything, but if anything seems just a bit off to me about them, that’s probably it.

I really liked the singing, though. I wish they did that more places. And pastor Steve is pretty awesome, he tells stories about blowing up someones perfect lawn with M-80’s.

I want to go back to that one next week, but Sydney says we have to try new ones every week, and we can only go back to that one every other week.