Church Review - Ridglea Christian Church

Ridglea Christian Church
6720 W. Elizabeth Ln
Fort Worth, TX 76116
(817) 738-0612
www.ridgleachristian.org

Ok, I’m going to cheat in two ways tonight. First, I normally do church reviews on Sundays. I went to RCC this Sunday, but I had better things to write about until tonight. Second, this is the church that I attended for two years until February of this year, so I have intimate knowledge of the church. I’m going to try to limit my observations, but forgive me if a little bias slips in.

RCC is an old church and a small church. It’s old in that most of the people that attend are age 50 or older, and it’s old in the way it conducts itself. More about that later. It’s small in that each Sunday it has about 100ish people show up for the service and about 60ish for Sunday school. This is all published in RCC’s weekly newsletter.

RCC is small. The sanctuary is designed to fit about 400-500 bodies, but only about 80-90 show up each Sunday for the service. It has a choir, and the choir as well as the church staff are included in the attendance numbers. RCC used to be a lot larger than it is, even offering weekday school classes at one point. But time, a church split, and neglect have decimated both the church and the congregation.

RCC is old in the way it conducts itself. Everything about the church is traditional. The music is traditional, straight out of the hymnal. There are no instruments in the sanctuary other than the piano and the organ, although occasionally (read once or twice a year) there will be some more modern music done by people who bring their own instruments. The service follows a set pattern: A liturgist reads the announcements and starts the service. There is music, a choral introit, then the choir, minister and elders process into the sanctuary. The liturgist then does a responsive reading with the audience. There is another hymn followed by the children’s moment. The minister then does prayer requests and praises followed by the ministerial prayer. This is followed by a stewardship meditation, tithing, singing the doxology, having communion, saying the Lord’s prayer, more music, the sermon, the altar call (which is a standard call), one last hymn then the recessional. There is little or no variation whatsoever in the service.

The sanctuary itself has no projector or screen. It has the liturgist’s lectern on the right side, the pulpit on the left, both raised off the stage. The elders sit behind the altar doing the offering and communion. Each pew (yes, there are pews and not chairs) has six hymnals and two Bibles in the racks on the back of them. It is in all respects the stereotypical traditional church.

Unfortunately this tradition is carried over to the singles group, which is to say RCC doesn’t have a singles group. But here’s the kicker—they claim that they DO have a singles group. It is composed of anyone who is just out of high school to just out of college. I was placed in it felt absolutely out of place. I was easily the oldest person in that group by five years or more. Everyone in it was still in college or had just graduated and had what I term the “college mindset.” I was the only one started down the career path. This got old, and I left the group for some time until a new minister was hired. I hoped he would put new life in the group, so I started to go for a new more months, but after talking with him several times he made it abundantly clear that he had no intention of trying to start a singles group like I was looking for for several years until everything else was well in hand. That was the start of my break with this church, and over the next few months following this discussion circumstances made it quite easy for me to leave.

Long story short, RCC is not a place you want to go to for a singles group or for anything unless you want to work and be valued for ONLY your work for the church. If you expect anything else, you will be sorely disappointed.

So why did I go back? My friend Yizong was delivering his ultimate sermon at this church, and his friend who I met two Sundays ago was there. He’s trying to set us up, but we’re both dense. More about that later.