The Church Hopper

It has been a crazy few weeks, but I am back and ready to dish on my latest church hopping experience. On Sunday, October 9, 2022, I visited North Main Baptist Church for their early service at 9am.

When I pulled into their parking lot, I was pleased to see that their side door was clearly marked with a sign to know where to enter. (Biggest pet peeve in visiting church is not knowing which door to enter) They also had a greeter in the doorway plus another one just a few steps further in. The bulletins were already laid on the pew waiting for us, which was nice. 

A few notes on their bulletin… 

The actual “Order of Worship” was a very small portion of the bulletin, with just enough information to know what was coming next. The rest of the space was filled with text boxes of advertisements for upcoming events, weekly schedule, and sermon notes. One thing that I noticed, that I LOVED, was their welcome section at the bottom of the worship page. It reads, “Welcome! We would love to get to know you! Please text FIRST to 434-280-4080 as a step toward us making a connection. Restrooms are located at the back of the sanctuary to the right as you exit. Please join us for 9am or 11:15am worship and 10:10am for small group bible study. For more information, please visit the welcome desk in the commons area or text OPTIONS to 434-280-4080.” So… The text option for more information is awesome, definitely keeping with the times. Noting the location of the bathroom was PERFECT and should be on all printed bulletins! I might also add information about the nursery, in that section, to make it even more visitor friendly. 

The worship team was fantastic! This was a very contemporary service for an older Baptist church, which I loved. The worship leader had challenged members of the team to each write a worship song and their bass player introduced his song before the team sang it. Such a unique task and shows that this team is acting as a ministry in itself because they are challenging their members to go beyond just performing. 

The sermon was about the conversations of Nicodemus and Jesus. The pastor started off the message by giving everyone the fill in the blank answers to the sermon notes. This would normally seem odd, but he did this so – as the scriptures were read, we could rate the statements on whether they were statements from the pastor, from the Bible, not true at all, or something that you need to think about.  I liked this way of using sermon notes to help the congregation dive deeper into what is being said, AND to recognize what is the word of God and what is not.