church visit #11 Church of all Nations

So once again I visited Church of All nations ( CAN) as this week my friend Moses actually gave his Triennium testimony, after it got pushed back two times before. Upon entering the church I noticed that many of the members congregate just inside of the doors by sanctuary, but there were no greeters till you get to the ushers. I wonder what needing to navagiate around church members and no greeters says to visitors in terms of being a welcoming church? While the people all seem very friendly during passing the peace and they "welcome?" visitors by having them stand and introduce themselves near the end of the service, at times it seems this is a close knit congregation that might be tough for visitors to feel welcomed. I think my shyness when I am in a new place and a large group probably means it is tougher for me to connect with new people and feel welcome but I wonder if churches could do more in welcoming visitors. For the first time in my visits to CAN during the welcoming time it was mentioned that there are cards in the pews to fill out if you are interested in memebership info.

On Saturday at Presbyfest I talked with Pastor Joo about CAN and realised they are trying not to follow some of the traditional ways of doing church that seem to be institutionalised. I wonder if greeting visitors and fellowship pads fall into this and why they do not do these things. I am all for not doing things just because all other churches do them or they have always been done, but I think you should find alterative ways to do some of these things that welcome visitors.

Again CAN seems to have a number of visitors, the question I have is what is their retention rate of visitors? Of the visitors that introduced themselves yesterday I think most will not be back often or potential new members. A large group of visitors was a small congregation that once a month visits other chruches for worship, what a neat idea, but I wonder how much many churches would want to do the same thing. A group of students in front and behind me were there to fulfill a class requirement of attending a multi-cultural church. at least two visitors where there because of thier girlfriends.

A couple of notes about worship, the praise band seems good, but too small ( two singers) to effectively lead the congregation in some unfamilar songs. the sermon ( which I will write about later in this post) seems to drasticly outweight the rest of the service in terms of time. Moses did a fine job giving his testimony which was more about his overall faith journey than his time at Triennium while he did talk about how Triennium was piviotal in refocusing his faith and involment at CAN. After Moses spoke and the welcoming, announcement time there was a young man who did a spoken word peace called "community" it was a good piece about social justice.

The sermon- Pastor Jin is a very effective speaker, he started by talking about the paradigm of sacrity and how we can never have enough. As the sermon went on it appeared to be a stewardship sermon about how greedy we are and the need to give back more which was given to us by God. it is amazing to hear that80% of the members pledged last year at CAN and that 70% of those tithe. Pastor Jin also said that the average giving in mainline churches per member is 2.3% and evagelical churches is 2.7% and that Presbyterians are per member the richest Christians. While I think the stewardship( giving part of the sermon) was powerful, I have spent a lot of timee thinking about the paradigm of scarity. I think this is something we all need to think about when do we have enough? What do we need to make us happy? I think the signs of a great sermon are that they speak to us and give us something to ponder for some time. After the sermon, a woman in front of me said, wow what a powerful sermon.

I think I probably will be back at CAN eventually, but I will not go as far as my friend Thao wanted me to and say that this was the best worship serivce I have been to in this journey.