Canyons Church - Cottonwood Heights, UT - March 2nd, 2014

      After my visit to Mountain Springs Community Church, I made my way down the street to Canyons Church. Canyons is a Southern Baptist Church. Baptist Churches are the Churches I usually end up seeing besides Mormon Churches in the suburbs of Utah, so they are pretty widespread here.

     My experience at Canyons Church was mixed. First, I want to describe what the interior was like. The Church is very polished and fancy versus the Zen simplicity of Mountain Creek Community Church. The windows are stained glass and once your inside it is like crossing into a place where a concert venue meets a seminar. The music is also very much like a concert, the plus being that there is a lot of passion.

    When I arrived my first thought was the Gospel of Wealth - Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace was being discussed and to buy the book and DVDs...when I think the problems of religion I think selfishness and money...so that wasn't the best impression coming in, seeing that a decent amount of time had been put apart for that seminar.

    After the invitation for the congregation to take part in Financial Peace - Surprise! Time for collections. Need I say more.

   You're probably thinking it was negative experience from here on, but it wasn't. The actual sermon itself had merit to it. It was about working out spiritual muscles which ended up being live how God wants you to live by serving others. Your saved, now live it! That was something I could get behind and was a contrast to the focus on the self that had been talked about before. The sermon used many props - a cleaner the preacher had bought from a traveling salesman, a golf club, and water weights...and that were used to illustrate different points during the sermon on the lead up of the point to have a relationship to God by serving others.

    After there was the call to accept to be "Saved," and the last song. It was a mixed experience overall, revealing both the positive (service) and negative (Gospel of Wealth) that religion so often brings. I don't see myself coming here again but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.

Mountain Springs Community Church - Cottonwood Heights, UT - March 2nd, 2014

 

  Mountain Springs Community Church was an amazing experience, and a good reminder of how to live in general and virtue behind what I admire about Christianity when it is at its best. The service began with an early fellowship where there was coffee and I met a few of the people there. The church is small and made up of about 5 to 7 families that I could see. They were kind and open when I said I was just exploring communities in the area.

   Next the service began with opening music. The music was christian rock meets jazz, since one of the musicians was playing the Clarinet which added a calm organic feel to the songs and gave them a slightly different feel than most churches where I have heard Christian Rock played.

     Mountain Springs Community Church is a Reformed Christian Church, which arose out of John Calvin and strictly following the Bible. This in my opinion is mixed when meeting some old Testament passages and New Testament passages which aren't based in virtue or love (see people being condemned to Hell, tribes being annihilated in the name of God, etc.) but today I saw the good that is in the Bible (as their is in most religious texts).

     The sermon was about Isaiah 58:6-9, which is about how God calls us to do more than just follow the rules, that there is no point. That God calls us to justice and to serve the poor and save the oppressed. It was powerful and outside of God being a factor of why it should it be done, something I believe is just and virtuous. The pastor described the work the youth are doing with IMPACT in South Dakota serving the poor and how it is so easy for Christians and people to follow in to checklisting all they need to be good:

1. Go to church.
2. Serve my church.
3. Accept God into my life.
4. Give to the church.

    The pastor described how that misses the point though, that Isaiah was calling people out on doing that but that God wants more. He than tied it into Jesus's words of "What you did for the least of these, you did for me." (Matthew 25: 31-46).

    It is these words and action that are religion at its best. It is so easy for us in general to be unable to see beyond ourselves and ourselves can include our friends, family, partner and even community we consider ourselves a part of. Religion and in this instance, Christianity at its best is the call to be more, the call to see that who we are is a part of everyone else and it is in that action that we become our best.

   Afterword I discussed the sermon a little bit with the pastor and one of the middle aged guys there, it was a great experience and I plan to visit again and bring that action that was described in the sermon in to my life.