Twisted Christian

So today was a Double Church day. We went to check out The Meeting Place,and then went to our regular church. It was a pretty good morning, and I really enjoyed going to two services and two churches; especially such different churches.

The Meeting Place is a great, little church in downtown Winnipeg. Well, not so little as it apparently has 2000 regular attenders, but it doesn't have the same attitude that seem to go hand-in-hand with larger churches. A lot of these big churches have these fancy-ass new buildings so that when you walk in you can't tell it if is a mall or a church.

The Meeting Place is a downtown church, and they seem to get a fair number of homeless and transient people, but the majority of the congregation seem to be folks driving in from outside of downtown.

When you walk into The Meeting Place, it feels comfortable. We didn't have anyone really talk to us, but then I don't think we give off the attitude that we want people to come up and talk to us. They have 2 services on Sunday mornings, 9 and 11. We went to the first one, which was a good mix of young and old people. Most churches I've gone to tend to have a mostly older congregation at their first service, so it was nice to see a mix of young and old. I figure there was about 200 people at the first service, though I couldn't see how many people were on the balcony.

Things I noted:
- There is an ASL interpreter, and a deaf guy in the congregation was signing the worship during the singing.
- There is a band playing or rehearsing elsewhere in the building and it was a little distracting.
- The band is pretty tight, but the drummer plays off music paper, and has a habit of rushing. The worship leader plays guitar left-handed, but instead of restringing it, he just has it flipped over. It's pretty awesome.
- Their order of service is 3 songs, announcements/video/prayer, a song with offering, a sermon, then a sort of reflective song with just the band, then a final worship song and the benediction. (but it isn't a sitdown-following-the-benediction church, it's more of a leave-your-seats-right-away church.
- It is very much a Mennonite Brethren church at its base, but they have it all gussied up to look like an emergent church. They almost seem like they are trying to hard to be relevant. They use too many buzzwords for my liking, but they seem to get their message across, and have a growing, dynamic congregation. And any church that is bringing people closer to God and creating spiritual growth, and helping to foster a deeper relationship with Christ, I can't complain.

Today's message was interesting, they had the local director of Living Waters come and speak about Sexual Brokenness. Living Waters was originally introduced to me as a program that "fixes" homosexuals, but today I learned they do a whole lot more. They help people suffering from brokenness. They help people struggling with addiction, sexual abuse, homosexuality and the like. He gave a pretty cool sermon on brokenness, and he also subscribes to the vertical vs. horizontal relationship model which I liked.

All in all a great service with a good sermon and awesome music.