I went along to two churches today (among other things.. went to this little place called Time Square – have you heard of it?).
Redeemer Presbyterian this morning at Hunter College was unlike any church service I’ve been to before. It was a large lecture hall and the music was classical and they used traditional liturgy… but it all worked! They managed to do traditional in a way that felt contemporary and very new york. The music was beautiful and sensitive and all the hymns and benedictions were artfully explained and served to carry you on a kind of theological journey. The gathering was filled with mainly upper class New York types who seemed overall mainly in their late twenties/early thirties and very clean cut. It was done well.
Tim Keller is on Sabbatical so another guy, Rev. Scott Sauls preached. His influences were so strong that if you closed your eyes you would think Keller was there.
Tonight we went into Brooklyn. We got lost on the subway and spent 2 hours longer than we needed to going to Trinity Grace church plant in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is really different to Manhattan in that it has that village feel you get about New York from shows like Sesame street (kids playing hopscotch in the streets, monsters in garbage bins.. you know the vibe). Trinity Grace Brooklyn picked lots of that up. It was casual, friendly, relaxed. Just the kind of place that you could always feel at home. One interesting thing about Trinity Grace Brooklyn is that it has been going for two years in September and has maybe 150-70 people in it. Speaking with Caleb the pastor there about the last two years he described the ebbs and flows and the hardships through the time. There was a lot in what he described that resonated with guys planting in Australia. While there seems to be a lot of scoffing at America and noting how their context is wildly different to Australia, I don’t wonder if its worth paying attention to stuff happening in New York in terms of a similar spiritual context. Rapidly increasing in secularism, hedonism and pluralism. Christianity is not the mainstream in the minds of most New Yorkers in the way it may be in other parts of the country. It was exciting to hear about Trinity Grace and I’m looking forward to meeting with Jon Tyson (an aussie) who founded the Trinity Grace churches on Thursday morning.
anyway. That’s a couple of stories from today.
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