Brookside

An article by Don Quixote    No Comments

Saturday afternoon after Michelle and dropped off the boys from ROBOTS, we decided to take a drive up Maplecrest. As we were driving we passed by a church under construction and we decided to stop over and take a look.

It seemed friendly enough, on the back of all their parking lot signs it says, “Have a great day!” But we didn’t think a whole lot about it, but Michelle noticed as we drove back out that they had a website address on their sign: http://www.brookside.org

Intrigued, we looked it up on the internet and decided that we should give it a try.

We choose one of their contemporary services since that was most likely the style of worship we were looking and heading on out.

Of all the churches that we’ve been to thus far, we felt the most “in-place” so far. The building was warm, the people seemed friendly and wouldn’t you know it, folks know how to sing.

Worship was great, well paced, (though they stood the whole 30 minutes), and you could actually hear people singing around you. Heck, I was singing myself (most likely much to the dismay of Michelle).

The worship minister reminded me a little of Chad Faust, so that was a welcome bonus.

As an added surprise, we actually recognized some faces. One was a manager that Michelle used to work with, and the other was a guy I work with at the newspaper (small world huh?).

The let down was the sermon.

It wasn’t that the guy was a bad speaker (though how many times you can repeat yourself I don’t know), but there was no substance. A lot of his quoting came for Billy Hybles and Rick Warren.

He is currently preaching a series called, “Check your gages,” and this week was check your service gage. Okay, I’m cool with that. Very slick power point support, but the meat was just gone. The sermon came from Acts 9:32 and following about the story of Dorcaus. And pulled 5 points of what it means to serve from that. It was lacking in practical application and something that you could take home with you.

In short, I could have preached that sermon more passionately than he did on the fly. I kept thinking, “Listen buddy, if you’re not sold on the idea of service, then you’re not going to sell me.”

All that having been said, everyone has a bad sermon, but there was enough good there that we want to go back (and we will), but we are moving on to the Cavalry Chapel (I think that’s what its called) this Sunday.

We’ll keep you posted. On a side note, Brookside has the best website of all the churches we’ve visited thus far, however, they are sadly lacking in the posting their beliefs department.