Big Heaping Helping of Southern Hospitality

With our designated church visiting period coming to a close we decided our last mission was to try Grace Baptist Church, I mean we've had pretty good luck with "Grace" named churches. When we showed up I quickly realized that their web-site is much more metropolitan than the actual church and I was expecting a slightly larger setting. They did have a young married's Sunday School class which runs on Grace Standard time, so our timeliness just placed us in the awkward only ones here position for about 10 minutes. The class is made up of mostly couples with several children and some newly married but not young. So the lesson was taught about how we should spend time in the Bible, however the lesson is from a book, to include "which passage from the Book did you like and how did it effect you...?"; we found the paradox funny. It was a nice lesson: it had application, if not substance. We were not the only visitors to the class there were two other couples from out of town, which made the class 50% visitors. I mention this because they asked us to introduce ourselves with personal information including a short testimony. McKay felt this was very unfriendly because they just assumed that all visitors were believers, lucky we were. In the main service we bumped into a friend from F-15 school and he sat with us which was nice because we could talk amongst ourselves, oh wait not true. We were interrupted at every instant by another person welcoming us to the church and pulling a short autobiography from each of us. Now I don't want anyone to think that I am unappreciative of friendly folks but just a short breather from time to time would have been nice. The worship is very very conservative back to the choir and the piano, but with an organ and a small string section. All the songs were either from the hymnal or a song book that might as well have been a hymnal written by really boring dudes in the last 10 to 15 years (like modern praise songs rejects). The sermon was very nice and straight shooting at the level we like. However, the trend of increasingly invasive newcomer presentations also continued. At first it was very low key, "new folk just stay seated and the rest of you stand and greet one another." We were thinking that there is no way that the preacher can pick us out from the pulpit. But when the dust cleared one of the ushers who had pooled all our information in an earlier conversation was standing near us and then the preacher gets up and asks someone to introduce the visitors. Our usher proceeded to tell all he knew of our friend, McKay, and me with all eyes focused on us; ending our intro with "...and he is lucky enough to be married to her. Ha ha ha." The preacher then asked about our friend, "Who're you with?...oh you're single....would all the single ladies in the congregation stand up?" It was a good joke, but holy put us on the spot Batman. Our Sunday School teacher did elude to Barack Obama being the anti-christ: +7 points