A First Impression

Since first impressions are everything in such matters, I’ll tell you what mine were when my wife, Lynn, and I first visited Monroe Community Church in 2006.

My very first impression was of a big room with a small group of people – 40 or so on the Sunday we first came. The big room was the gymnasium at Barclay Brook School, about as un-churchlike a scene as I could imagine.

My second impression was that those people interacted with each other. They were not 40 individuals or even 10 or 15 families who had gotten themselves scrubbed and holy looking to spend a reverential few hours under the direct gaze of the Almighty. They were obviously involved with each other, however imperfectly. There were lots of conversations going on before the service, and these were not the polite exchanges of people who only think about each other one morning a week, but conversations about school and health and work, discussions about things that matter to us all week. I’ve since been in a lot of those conversations, and for me they are a very important anchor for the week ahead.

The service starts with music, and the music usually does not consist of century-old hymns. Sometimes, the lyrics of an old hymn will be fit into a melody of blues, or country, or rock. But always, it’s accompanied by the congregation with various degrees of participation, from standing and mumbling to swaying and clapping and finger-snapping. The service is something we do, not something we attend.

We’re a young congregation, and there are lots of kids. There is Sunday School for them, and they can sit with their parents and worship if they wish, but there is a special table in the back for them, supervised by volunteers, where they can draw and do crafts. They’re not disruptive, but they’re kids, and they’re not quiet. The atmosphere is joyful, worshipful, but very informal.

And that leads me to my final first impression.

I’ve attended all kinds of church services in all kinds of places – Protestant and Catholic, in languages I could understand and languages I couldn’t, in Gothic church buildings and nightclub basements. I’ve felt the Holy Spirit settle, or not, on all sorts of Christian congregations. My final first impression of Monroe Community Church was that the Holy Spirit was there. I still feel that.

Ken Branson