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... ;-)
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