Church Review - St. Andrew's United Methodist Church

St. Andrew's United Methodist Church
2045 SE Green Oaks Blvd.
Arlington, TX 76018
(817) 465-3043
www.sa-umc.org

St. Andrew's UMC is a church that I have driven past many times both going to and from work. This last week I was looking at some church websites that were close to my house, and I cruised over to SAUMC's website. I must say, it impresses me. It's up to date, provides a lot of good info, and has a dedicated site for its singles group.

SAUMC has three services each Sunday and one on Saturday. I went to the first service this morning. The church has a nice architecture. It has a main foyer that is circular and leads into two buildings: one for classrooms and the sanctuary.

The sanctuary has a nice pyramidical thing going on. The stage had a bunch of modern instruments: guitars, basses, drums, keyboards, etc. There were two projectors, and there were a few hymnals in the seats. The seats are the link-together types that are becoming increasingly popular.

Something that would be popular with me is the bulletin. To call it complete would be underselling it by a considerable stretch. The bulletin that was handed to me was twelve pages long. The bulletin for the service was the "centerfold." Everything else was announcements, calendars, events, articles and spaces for notes. It's a combination workbook/newsletter. Another thing I noticed was the paper. This was printed on very heavy paper that verged on card stock. It's all saddle stapled together. I am impressed.

Two other things impressed me. When I came in there were signs that said that the food pantry was empty. The signs were in English and Spanish. I'm absolutely thrilled that churches are actually running food pantries. The last church I attended collected food, but it always referred the needy to the organization for which it collected.

The other thing that impressed me was the church website. As I said before, it is complete, up to date, informative, modern looking and slightly understated. But more importantly, it fit the church, which is to say it wasn't some flashy contrivance that the church paid for. It looks to be developed by the church itself, and there is some real talent going into it. I highly recommend checking it out.

After ten minutes of checking out the foyer and the sanctuary, the service started. As anticipated, there was no choir. Worship is done by a worship team. All the songs were modern. Nothing came out of the hymnals that I noticed. As I was looking around, I counted about 70 or so bodies in the early service. The sanctuary could comfortably seat 300.

Going forward with the service, at one point there were acolytes that came forward to light the candles. I'm familiar with this practice, but I wasn't expecting it at this church. It seems anachronistic given the setting, but I like the statement it makes. There was another statement made during the offertory. After the plates had been collected and marched down the center aisle, they were given to the pastor, and the pastor raised and held them before the stained glass window in front of the altar. I'm not sure what the statement was meant to convey, but I had visions of some pagan ritual from Indiana Jones (or something like that) running through my mind. I'm not saying it's bad; I'm just saying it was different.

As to the sermon, it was interesting. There were a couple of times that the pastor editorialized a little, and I was prepared to write it off until he invoked Jonah. I gotta say, I thought he was nuts by some of the things he was saying about Jonah, but I flipped to that book and quickly read through it. All I can say is WOW! When I read through Jonah, I totally didn't get the perspective he had. His perspective was foreign to me, and in the words of one of my former ministers, it "offended my sensibilities" because I wasn't used to hearing it. But he was absolutely right in what he said. My mental model definitely needed adjusting, and it reinforces my need to go through the Bible again.

The end of the service had the typical altar call. The only thing that I thought was slightly atypical was the amount of time they waited during the altar call. The worship team sang one stanza of the song, and that was it! A few announcements later, and we were done. I thought my old church had a hair trigger on altar calls (just one song, but all stanzas), but just singing once through a single stanza? That seems really short to me, but maybe it was because it was the early service.

After the service I went upstairs in their education building to their singles group. It was held in a parlor-like setting with sofas, easy chairs, and other chairs that had been brought in from somewhere else (maybe the choir room). There were 19 bodies that ultimately showed up for the class. The ages ranged from late twenties to probably late 50s (and maybe one or two in the early 60s range). There was no teacher--instead various members of the class take turns delivering the lesson.

Concerning the lesson, it appeared to come from some sort of book. Whether or not it is a formal curriculum or a devotional I couldn't tell. It concerned persistent praying. I kept silence most of the time. Most people had been there for some time, and there was a lot of sharing of experiences, so being the new guy, I felt that silence was the better part of valor.

Once the class was over, I asked a couple of bookkeeping questions. Apparently this was an abnormally large group today. Most of the time there are fewer people. I noticed that, with one or two exceptions, I was definitely on the young end of the spectrum. There were two other men in my age range, and two women. One woman appeared to have a ring. I couldn't tell what the age of the other was. When I had all my notes, I beat it for home.

I'm not really sure how I feel about SAUMC. I loathe editorializing on the Bible, but I'm finding that it's a standard thing to do for most ministers, and I can sort out the differences. The singles group, on the other hand, is something that I don't exactly feel comfortable with. At present it feels that most subjects covered in there will be shallower than what I'm looking for, and the deep conversations I desire would probably scare some people or brand me a heretic. Long story short, I'm not excluding SAUMC from my list of possible candidates, but right now it's at the bottom.