So today I checked out the church that I mentioned before. (Mountain View Community Church)
I really like it. I found it online, and you can’t usually tell much about a church on the web, except for their doctrinal statements and service times. But they had an MP3 or two of sermons posted online, and I gave them a listen. I liked what I heard, so I gave it a try this morning.
The church is fairly young; it’s only been around since 1993. They’re into church planting, rather than growing into a gigantic church themselves, so it’s a fairly small group. I went in to the earlier service, so naturally there were less people, and even less my age (not to say that it was all old people…. I’d say that the average age in there was probably somewhere around 30 or even late 20s.) There were probably only 70 or so people in there (which is VERY small compared to my old church, which sometimes broke 1,000 people in a service (and they had three services!).
The building itself is a small church built by German immigrants in 1904. The sanctuary is very small on the floorspace, but has a balcony on the second level for more seating. The building’s definitely been renovated on the inside, so it’s pretty modern, but they’ve kept the old pews and stained glass (which is on the east side, meaning that it shines directly in as the main source of light on Sunday morning!)
The two main pastors are both fairly young… The guy speaking today started his freshman year at CSU 15 years ago.
They’ve been going through the book of Romans verse-for-verse, and have been spending the last few weeks on Romans 9. What a coincidence…. that’s exactly what I’ve been focusing on for a while now.
They’re very into a literal interpretation of the bible and quote Scripture a lot. No “this is kind of our ‘inspiring verse’ for the day, and we’re going to talk about a lot of stuff that kind of has to do with that verse” crap going on. The pastor dropped more scriptures than I can remember.
The church uses the NASB translation, too, which is known for being a rather accurate literal translation (I myself use the English Standard Version- same idea, but a little bit newer and it reproduces a lot of ancient grammar structures, especially in the old testament).
Overall, I have a really good feeling about this church. I have yet to spend time with the people there, so I still don’t have the full picture of the place, so I’m not making a final decision that this is my new church. That relies on being around it a little bit more.
In slightly less holy matters, I also found a new coffee shop- I think. (I go about choosing my coffeeshop haunt with almost as much care as choosing a new church.) It’s called “The Bean Cycle” – it’s in Old Town Fort Collins, which means that it’s in an older building… Has a beautiful old tin ceiling with all kinds of cool designs.
All of their coffee is 100% Organic and Fair Trade, so my inner hippie is happy. My drink (Tall, hot soy vanilla latté) was well made… Cozy interior (more spacious than gold bar) and a little non-profit bookstore in back run by volunteers (full of used books on weird hippie crap like metaphysics and creating your own reality and stuff.) A couple of people with foreign accents came in and sat down.
Oh, and they have WiFi.
Both places (MVCC and The Bean Cycle) are within about a 10-minute bike ride of my dorm.
Praise God for how he has a plan laid out for me (both in this immediate future, and for a long time from now) even while I’m uncomfortable knowing what will happen tomorrow!
