your home church?

[the pyromaniac]

No, I'm not dead, more on that later... I had an idea as I was browsing the forums today... I think we all need to tell a little more about our home churches in one thread so if anybody else is in the area and might want to visit or is looking for a church they'll have somewhere to start. I'll go first...

I attend Convivencia Familiar Cristiana (loosely translates into English as "Fellowship of the Christian Family"). We're a small (about 40) congregation with Charismatic/ Pentecostal tendencies, meeting inside North Roanoke Baptist Church in Roanoke, Virginia. The pastor is Job Marquez, a strong man of faith from Mexico brought here by God to evangelize the Hispanic community in Southwest & Central Virginia. Americans are always welcome, and we'll provide a translator if you need one.

Our desire is similar to the American church that pays Job's salary. We want to make disciples out of previously unconnected people, and go deeper with God.

[Matthew]

I go to a fairly large church. I think we have 3000 members, but usually only about 1000 on Sunday morning service. We have gone through a lot of changes in the past year. We switched to having two Sunday School's in the morning (early and late) and moving the service to 9:30. We also eliminated Wednesday night service to use Wednesday for Youth, Choir, Sunday School planning, etc.

Recently our church has been going through a steady decline. Attendance and tithing are down, and this past Sunday out Pastor preached about the changes that have been made in the past and the changes that will be pursued in the future.

• We are going back to one Sunday School time at 9:30 and moving the Sunday morning service back to 10:30
• We are bringing back Wednesday night service, and it will be a more traditional service (traditional hymns, etc) with preaching. Our Sunday morning service has traditional hymns & contemporary worship songs too. However, a lot of our traditional hymns have been giving contemporary melodies. Wednesday nights for the kiddies will become more like a weekly VBS as well
• Sunday night service will be preached by the Youth Pastor and be focused more on young people and colleged aged kids.

Our church has a pre K through 8th grade school and also on the property is an Assisted Living facility. We are in the process of developing Senior living condos on the property.

We have also changed our slogan to "Chilhowee Hills: A place for every season" (or something like that) to reflect the seasons of one's life. Here is our website
http://chilhoweehills.org/

[Darko]

St. Aloysius Catholic Church (or St. Al's, for short), on the Gonzaga University (...you might know them as the NCAA tournament's former aborted Cinderella story/current "yeah, right." entry) campus. It's a very large church, drawing people not just from the college but all around the city as well. There are services at 8:30am, 11:00am, 7:30pm and (I think) 10:00pm. The morning services are usually the busiest, though the latest mass is the college student mass, so it's fairly packed as well (at least during the school year). We have lots of various Bible studies going on at any given time, as well as our Just Faith program, which is a 30-week intensive program which focuses on spiritual growth and using your faith to benefit the world as a whole. We're a Jesuit church, which makes us technically not subject to the Dioceses of Spokane (which has spared us from much of the fallout from the horrible sex abuse fiasco...not that we haven't been affected, just not as much as the Diocesan churches). Since we're a Jesuit church, we rotate between a stable of priests, most of whom work either at Gonzaga University as professors or as teaching staff at Gonzaga Prep, the high school. The only downside is that Jesuits can only have a certain assignment for a certain number of years, so this leads to a lot of turnover. Our congregation is all over the place, from super-wealthy to living in group homes and everything in between. Fortunately, we have priests who are good at serving people from across the spectrum. Being a Jesuit church, there' s an emphasis on the importance of serving others and the community as a whole, so there are always tons of volunteer/service opportunities.

[Chuck Norris]

I'm a long time member along with Chad Ghost of Sunnyside Baptist church here in Kingsport, TN. In many ways it is a growing Baptist church with strong values and sound Biblical teaching. Perhaps our greatest feature is a Pastor who knows the Word and is not afraid to preach it, he's quite knowledgeable in the Greek and Hebrew. We're really growing right now and is a great place to attend church. I would say that in the future, our worship will grow more contemporaary.

I thank the Lord for my home church, He's blessed me immensely through it,

Also, nice survey idea,

><> Jonathan

[MacGyver]

I've been going to the Bedford Christian and Missionary Alliance Church since 1995. As soon as I walked in, I felt the love of Christ and I've been there ever since. We've had several pastor changes in that time, some for good reasons, some for bad. In the past 5 years we've had a lot of flux due to good and bad things, and we've needed a lot of healing as a body. We're not perfect and we know it. We love the Lord and our pastor preaches the Bible unapologetically. I've noticed over this year that we've become a younger church (tho our pastor was already retired once and came out of retirement to us) with more young families and people in general coming. Our worship is a mix of contemporary and traditional and we're fairly conservative...some hand raising, etc. We're fairly small...I guess maybe 100 or less in a service. We have one service at 9:30 Sunday morning with Sunday School following, classes for all ages. We have Wednesday night men's and women's Bible studies, youth groups, college-age and children's programs. Our new Director of Youth and Outreach is currently seeking his certification to be our youth pastor and he's been a real blessing to our teens. I teach the senior high Sunday School class and assist the youth director. In September we're planning to kick off an AWANA program on Wednesday nights and we're very exited about it. I think our children's programs will be in a flux tho for a while...if you check my prayer request thread you'll see why. As far as what we believe, we sum it up in what A. B. Simpson (the founder of our denomination) called the "Four-fold Gospel." Jesus is our Savior, Sanctifier, Healer and soon-coming King.

[MacLeaper]

Hmm- well, this one is interesting for me to tackle. I'm in between churches. LOL. Yes, I'm going to church every Sunday. But what I meant is that I recently moved and so I've been visiting many churches and trying to find a good one. And there are a lot of good ones in the area. The last church I went to (that I'm technically still a member at) was a pretty huge church with literally thousands coming every Sunday. Seriously, we had like 4 services. It was a great church that was very much into trying to do away with so many of the traditions and get back to basics with following Jesus. It's one of the Community denomination churches. (i.e. It's Baptist-affiliated, but they don't make it obvious in the name. It's not one of those old, boring titles like "Main Street Baptist Church" or something- it's gotta be cool and catchy and one word if possible like Wellspring or something. that's actually close to the actual title- NewSpring Church- newspring.cc online)
Anyway, I liked that church quite well- the sermons were made very relevant to people today and the music was very contemporary. Like contemporary to the point that we occasionally played soul-stirring hymnal classics like "You Are So Beautiful", "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", "Move Along", and "Hell's Bells". (No, I'm not kidding. And no, they didn't sing the words on that last song. And whatever was needed to be edited is edited.)
Don't get me wrong- we also sang lots of great Chris Tomlin and Hillsong United worship songs that I really love. They only used secular music where it fit with the message.
But I'm enjoying the church that I've been currently going to. It's a Baptist Church (this one has Baptist in the name- Brushy Creek Baptist Church- http://www.brushycreek.org) I really like this church. I just drove by it one day and had a good feeling about it that this would be a good church to go to. And it's turned out to be a great church to go to. There's definitely some hundreds of folks going there- I'm not sure if it's up into the thousands yet or not, but it's got a traditional (i.e. hymns) and contemporary (i.e. Praise and Worship music) service and I've been to both and like them. It's also nice that I found out when I went there that the minister of music is an old family friend and the pastor knows my parents too, so that's cool. And they have a really nice library- I like that. And I'm trying to get into the Sunday School program too- once I get that rolling, I'll probably join the church officially. I'm glad God led me to this great church.
And they're very much into reaching out to the community and the world at large with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and I'm definitely all over that!
Of course, it's interesting for me because I've grown up as both a MK and PK and so I'm used to having my father preaching. And my uncle's a pastor too for that matter- so I've grown up with knowing about the workings of some smaller Southern Baptist churches. I've been in churches with 30-50 showing up for service to thousands showing up. But the main thing is that they're all living for Jesus and working to make His name famous and His Gospel known. And where 2 or 3 are gathered in His name, there He is in the midst of them. (Hebrews 10:24-25)

[the pyromaniac]

I also have to give a shoutout to Zion Family Ministries in Wise, VA where I attended from 1998 to early 2007. It's a most excellent charismatic church with about 250-300 on Sunday mornings. Pastor Wayne Hager is a great speaker and not a bad musician. The youth pastor, Kelly Foster, and his wife Amber are old friends of mine and NoRmus's from our college days, and the new associate pastor, Jonathan "Shorty" Short is another old friend who led worship at my wedding. I highly recommend that anybody in the area (chad_ghost, I'm looking in your general direction!) go and check it out.

http://www.zfm.org

[RevSears]

Right now I'm at Calvary fellowship (/calvary chapel) Juneau AK.

The focus is all on teaching and it's basically like having Sunday School and skiping CHurch.

[BigH09]

The focus is all on teaching and it's basically like having Sunday School and skiping CHurch.

We also have a great worship time on Sundays, and a little on Thursday nights. The food is always awesome and I have learned so much from the pastor here at Calvary. This is a really knowledgeable group of people and the women in the group are so inspiring and great examples to me.

"Praise God for putting Sam and I in such a great church/place!"

Pray for Sam and I as we got a teaching position in the church. We are going to teach the little kiddos about God's plan of salvation this summer! I think it will be really fun and I'm excited to be apart of it!

[RevSears]

y'know dear, I don't think i've ever heard you use the word "kiddos" in real life.