12 :: Christ Covenant Church

Today I worshiped at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, right on the edge of Charlotte. This is a Presbyterian Church, of the PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) denomination. This is distinct from the PCUSA, which is the denomination of the church I have been going to for twenty-five years. The taxonomy of Presbyterian denominations is rightly of little interest to those on the outside, but I do know a thing or two about it from the inside. The denominations arise from different schisms over things like the Civil War and desegregation - in short, things that one would not think would be sufficient grounds for fracturing the Body of Christ.

Alas, such is history.

The PCA as a denomination has ended up on my radar screen often. My colleague at Bank of America is a guy named John S., who is a member at Christ Covenant. His father, Jack, works with a former swimming teammate from Denison named Steve who works at Hope Publishing, a company that publishes hymns. Also, a young woman named Ellen that I met at Brookwoods two weeks ago was raised at Christ Covenant here in Matthews. And another friend of mine at Brookwoods mentioned a podcast related to the PCA's Redeemer Church in NYC, where the pastor Tim Keller is known for being a bright mind. It is an excellent podcast and I have been enjoying it heartily for two weeks.

Put simply, the PCA has been one of those things that has shown up in my life often as of late - and visiting Christ Covenant occurred to me as an excellent way to get some direct exposure.

As I drove up, I was reminded about the massive scale of the church. The inside of the church reiterated that this is a very large congregation. As I often do, I decided to visit the rest room prior to entering service, which took me down huge halls and past sections of empty chairs where people may have sat and talked in times past. 

Here are some pictures:

The worship service was excellent. The music was a combination of older hymns and more modern songs. The contemporary fare was upbeat and nice, and not rock. While I have gotten used to hearing a band jam out at church, this was a nice respite from that. 

And the sermon was meaningful. It was about maintaining hope at a time such as this. The New Testament reading was from The Book of Revelations, so I was wondering if I was going to encounter a sermon about eschatology. I find those to be fascinating. But the sermon did not engage directly the idea of the New Creation... instead, it was about having faith like a tiny mustard seed and being ready for it to grow into something profound.

Like at Calvary, one of the pastors was Scottish. That was interesting to encounter for a second time in as many weeks.

Here are some pics from the sermon itself:

One thing I took note of during the service is that this is a healthy church, meaning it had a solid age distribution of congregants from newborns to senior citizens. This vitality is really an encouraging sign for a church. I have attended some services where everyone seems to be younger than thirty and others where the average age looked to be well above sixty. Being in a place that was clearly multi-generational felt comfortable and familiar to me.

In some ways, this was a bit of a homecoming for me. I have spent nearly my whole life in churches that have a similar feel and format to Christ Covenant and that was a great feeling. This is my tribe. I enjoyed being back with them.

In addition to the church, Christ Covenant has Christ Covenant Day School on its campus, which I wandered around after the service. I believe I found that one of their building was used for a Mandarin church service for the local Chinese population (bottom pic). Here are some pictures of the Day School:

Christ Covenant did make me ponder something on a personal level. The number of seemingly perfect young families at a church like this is very noteworthy. Great looking children that are dressed well, attractive mothers in nice dresses and fathers who look to be at a peak performance level, personally and professionally. Christ Covenant can reasonably be described as an upper-middle class congregation and in the South that means that the families appear to be highly optimized, at least from the outside. 

Alas, that reality is sometimes illusory. My belief is that there is no such thing as a perfect family. Humans all have foibles, insecurities, anxieties, areas of incompleteness and even deep dysfunction. There can be no reasonable debate on this point... people are flawed. And that idea doesn't run counter to the idea of a Biblical family. 

One verse that I often come back to is 1 Corinthians 13:12 -  "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." To me it is a reminder that we dwell in a world that is by definition a place where our very realities are fragmented and reduced in grandeur by the state of our hearts that is called sin. Too often people think of "sin" as a word for things you are not supposed to do. In reality, it is a word for the condition of our hearts.

As I looked at the droves of beautiful, seemingly perfect families wandering out of the church, I felt some compassion for them. Not in a condescending way, but in the sense that they may face things in their future that will test them to the very core of their being. 

Unless this is a very statistically unusual group, some of these families will very likely be configured differently in the future. The loss of a child. Divorce. An aching alienation within an intact marriage. Mental illness. Physical illness. Who knows? 

Hypothetically, some of these young, strong dads may find themselves on a solo spiritual journey someday where they blog the act of visiting 100-churches when they are over fifty! You just never can tell.

But what is beyond contention is that the best place to bring whatever is broken and yearning for wholeness within us is into a healthy, full church. This is because of what was promised in the verse from The Book of Revelations that was read during today's service at Christ Covenant. There will be a time when a New Heaven and a New Earth come to fruition. And those places of newness will be knit together into One forever. 

And there, in that place, we will indeed see true perfection.

Thanks to Christ Covenant for a wonderful service this morning. I truly loved every minute of it.

11 :: Calvary Church

Today I worshiped at Calvary Church in Charlotte. Any exploration of a large range of churches in Charlotte, Calvary Church is a mandatory stop. This is in large part due to the fact that it is massive and extremely visible structure. Tens of thousands of people drive by Calvary Church on a daily basis, as it sits in a huge lawn on Pineville-Matthews Road. 

The sanctuary holds five thousand people. And Calvary has two services every Sunday. This means that during a normal period of time, ten thousand people attend this church on a given Sunday. This being the COVID-19 epoch, the service felt sparsely attended, although there were hundreds of people there. 

As I walked up to Calvary Church, I was reminded that this is definitively a mega-church.

I entered the church through the Child Development Center. The walls were covered in murals. It was of note that their Jesus was a dark-skinned man. 

Here are some pics:

Soon, I eventually found my way into the sanctuary. Its scale was astounding. Although I have been here a handful of times over the last 25 years, I have never attended while the sanctuary had so few people in it. This video captures some of the scale of the sanctuary, but misses everything behind me, which includes two tiers of balconies that span the entire width of the building. 

Simply massive.

The music - it was good. It was interesting, actually. It wasn't quite hymnal fare, nor was it a rock concert. It was somewhere in between and I enjoyed it. There was fiddling of the sort unique to the South, which was the highlight. Like so many places, the pipes from the organ seemed to have achieved the status of an interesting backdrop for the purple lights that are cast onto the stage at some many churches these days. They are now silent during the church service.

Then the sermon commenced. John Munro is one of Calvary's pastors. He's from Scotland and I enjoyed hearing his lilt throughout his sermon - which was a sermon on wisdom versus folly. The exact same subject matter that I heard last week at Camp Brookwoods! I conferred with a friend to see if this qualifies as a divinely inspired coincidence. She and I agreed in a roundabout way to accept that this could reasonably be seen as the hand of God at work. 

At the very least, it was quite a notable synchronicity. 

Once his sermon was done, we were dismissed by rows and we departed. 

Perhaps the most interesting thing happened out in the parking lot. 

As I am wont to do, I couldn't remember where my car was parked. I walked around the massive parking lots (plural) for about a half hour. A woman eventually felt sorry for me and picked me up. She helped me find my car. While she was driving me around, she explained that Calvary Church has translators who offer Mandarin, Russian and Spanish translations of the service to people who don't speak English. She also explained that Calvary has seven pastors and all of them but one are immigrants to the US. 

It was helpful to learn about the different kinds of outreach that are done at Calvary, which has historically been a suburban church that largely has had a white congregation for most of its existence. I did not know any of that extra information.

What else is there to say? Perhaps not a great deal more. 

Honestly, it was nice and enjoyable and interesting and impressive. But this was largely an obligatory visit and for me to develop deeper sentiments about Calvary Church would require multiple visits, which won't happen.

Overall, I enjoyed this service. And I am apparently being prodded to think about wisdom versus folly in a very serious way!

And that I will do, all week long. If God calls it out twice in a week, I take that seriously. 

Now, about that wisdom thing... ;-)

10 :: Camp Brookwoods

This weekend I worshiped at Camp Brookwoods and Deer Run in New Hampshire. It is a deeply unusual summer for all of us, and that includes this camp. I attended Camp Brookwoods for one summer long ago, in 1979 to be exact. It has been an important place to me ever since, as well as to our sons. I'll share more details of how this place has made a positive difference for our sons and for me in this post.

Camp Brookwoods is a boys' camp and is the counterpart to Deer Run, a girls' camp. In addition to these two camps, Moose River Outpost is a camp in Maine. There is also a Conference Center affiliated with the camp during the non-summer months. In short, it's a multi-faceted organization.

As a result of COVID-19, virtually all of this has ground to a halt. One small exception is what Aidan and I are attending now - "Winnipesaukee Weekends." Camp Brookwoods has opened their facilities for a family weekend with masks and social distancing in place.

Liam and Jonah also expressed a desire to come but later canceled due to other obligations. For Aidan and for me, this Winnipesaukee Weekend has been uplifting in many ways.

We're getting some great bonding time. He's an incredible young man for whom I have the highest admiration. 

The weather was a mix of clear and rainy, reflected in the below pictures. I didn't ask permission to include pictures of individuals, so these are mostly human-free pictures. But a large and friendly group of families came up to Brookwoods this weekend, make no mistake about it.

Here are some pictures to give you a sense of the beauty of the place:

Welcome sign

Moose Hall

Elk

Adirondack chair on front lawn

Chapel

Occasionally rainy

Frequently sunny

Moose Hall

Dining Hall

Weathervane

Boathouse

Water flume

Porcupine cabin, my cabin years ago

The waterfront

Canoes

I made an effort to connect directly with as many people as possible this weekend. Interestingly, there are multiple French families, which provided a fun opportunity to speak that language. 

Everyone was just great and very friendly. A smart and accomplished group, as well. Additionally, each person seemed to have their own story about coming to faith in Christ. This is a less common phenomenon in New England, but certainly one I am familiar with. 

What is the nature of modern American evangelicalism in the 21st century in New England, one of the US's pockets of secularism? Well, it is clearly a different thing than I see in the South. And it's definitely vibrant. I sense it's also numerically much smaller, when compared to the South or Midwest. 

As I reflect back on the first half of my life in New England and the most recent half of my life in North Carolina, I know well the difference between New England and the South in terms of the spiritual landscape. The question of how God and culture interplay (or don't) with one another is one of those main differences.

Being a New Englander by birth who has also spent most of his adult life in the South, as well as being a person committed to life in Christ... I feel very much at home at Camp Brookwoods.

And as I pondered these things, it was such a gift to be presented with vistas like those below, which I found astoundingly beautiful.

Explaining why Brookwoods is important to me involves recounting a few stories. 

When I was a camper here, I had a unique experience. I remember sitting in the dining hall and I felt a very profound movement within me. Something at the heart level. That's really the only way I can describe it. A very strong sense of peace came over me for a few moments. It was brief, and also pretty powerful.

There's not really an easy way to describe what happened in those few moments. What I can say for sure is that I had never felt anything like that before.

Days later, at the end of the two-week session, the Brookwoods campers all sat around a camp fire to mark the end of our time together. I remember some of that night. A few counselors stood up and recommended a new movie that had just come out, it was named Caddyshack. 

Funny.

I remember a few kids standing up and talking about not being excited to leave camp and return to their schools. A few seemed to be having a really tough time with the idea.

Poignant.

I also remember one camper who stood up and spoke in a passionate way about how his life had been altered when he had asked Jesus into it. I had never heard of such a thing before. A completely new concept.

Impactful.

Then I stood up to the edge of the fire and spoke. This was extremely unusual for me to do something like this as an 11-year-old. 

I recall that I said something about how I had a hard time understanding how outer space could just go on forever. I explained that I also had so many questions that I didn't know how to answer. How could God have existed before the world? I think I said that it was really cool to think about how to light from stars was actually really old and it was sometimes getting to Earth thousands of years after it had left the stars. 

I sat down when I was done and I recall a counselor leaned over to me and whispered, "That was awesome." 

Maybe it was awesome. Maybe he was just being kind. I am not sure. What I can say without a doubt is that I felt enough courage to stand up and talk in front of a group about some of life's big questions... that was a huge deal for me at the time.

Later that summer, I was with my family at Compo Beach in my hometown of Westport. I recall that we were enjoying some time with friends at a beach picnic.

A bunch of us were swimming in Long Island Sound that evening. I ceased participating in the game of Marco Polo and dried off with a towel. I then walked to the back of our family station wagon, bowed my head and accepted Christ. 

Then I went back to playing Marco Polo.

And that is how I recall that it all went down that summer many years ago. It was a summer of deeply consequential small moments on which the entirety of my worldview pivoted into something new. A newness that continues to expand and grow right up to this very moment, in fact.

This morning, we held service out on the front lawn, to enable social distancing. The pastor spoke about wisdom versus folly. It served as a great time to pause everything and enjoy song, fellowship and some food for thought.

Wisdom versus folly

Song sheet

After church, we started to wrap up this fantastic weekend. As Aidan and I walked back to our cabin to start packing, I noticed  the stream that flows through the grounds of Brookwoods and was reminded of Psalm 42:1:

As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God.

Of the "church visits" that are part of this spiritual pivot, this has been an especially meaningful one because the backstory that is woven into it is my own story. 

Great time this past weekend with great people.

Thanks, Camp Brookwoods. Until we meet again!