University Presbyterian Church - Seattle, WA - August 7th, 2011

     In my experience with looking for Churches and faith communities to visit, one thing I have noticed is among many of the Protestant Denominations...there don't tend to be that many church worship services. Most churches usually meet once for worship on Sunday and that's the extent of the community all together honoring God as a congregation. This has lead to me sadly missing a lot of churches. I haven't been good at waking up early at all, which means I'd only be able to catch evening services. This in turn has limited my visits to a few faith communities in the Seattle and Issaquah areas.

     I found out today that University Presbyterian has evening services though! This was nice considering the only other Church besides the Newman Center near the University of Washington, Generation Church, and the U-District Mars Hill...I was lacking in places to visit for the first time.

     The first thing I noticed about University Presbyterian was it's size. The outside architecture was like a Cathedral and this carried into the worship hall which had stained glass windows telling the story of the life of Jesus.

      The Church was alive and had more then just youth and old people (in the U-District most churches are either people 40 years old and plus (with 1 or 2 families) or full of people in their 20's and younger (Generation Church and Mars Hill). This Church had the happy medium between that age divide that makes up the U-District churches.

       The service itself was a mixture of christian rock for devotional (the music sounded Coldplayish and the female lead sounded like the lead singer from Pomplamoose). It was great and again I noticed the similarity between romantic verse religious music in relationship to love songs, a person letting go everything for the one they love.

      The sermon was good, it was general and could pretty much be tied to any sort of goal or journey in life, in which the journey matters as much as the destination...and that in the suffering of the journey happiness can be found. Psalm 126 was used as the example. During the service a woman talked about serving people in South Africa and service to AIDS victims in the organization she helped found that has been growing. Jesus was used as the inspiration in both in how the senior pastor posed his questions, "How has God through Jesus changed your life in unexpected ways?" as an example.

     I think we as people do get so lost trying to get the destination or goal that we can lose sight of everything learned upon the way. We can miss out on living and being whole right now, as we work towards growth and goals. This was actually something College taught me really well, and I have experienced it in other ways upon my journey and have seen it in other people's lives whether it's a faith journey or any other goal in life.

    After I was invited to a dinner that's thrown after every evening service and was treated to a delicious salad and pizza. The church certianly knows how to look after it's community, and after seeing the different organizations they're connected to saw how they were involved with helping the mentally ill, sick or homeless here in Washington.

     It was a rewarding experience, and I must say, I'm quite grateful for the evening church service of past days and today.