Ranting to /dev/null

Redeemer or redeemer?

Let's just say that the former is most certainly not the latter. Right.

I went to Redeemer Pres. yesterday. So that happened. I made it to church about ten minutes late, which I thought was a Bad Thing. I needn't have worried. As I got off the subway, I realized I didn't know exactly where I was going, only that Redeemer meets somewhere at Hunter College. Then I realized that the two dozen nicely dressed people leaving the subway with me were almost certainly headed the same place, so I just followed them. Up to 25% of the congregation arrived after I did, some of them up to 20 minutes late. Now granted, exerting rigid control over commute duration is almost impossible on the subway, but that's a bit much, I thought. I couldn't tell if people were okay with it because it's New York, and getting around is tough, or because they were so casual about the whole thing that they didn't care. That's the adjective I'd use to describe the whole service: casual.

Tim Keller, the senior pastor, wasn't there. Apparently he's on sabbatical or something for the summer. The sermon was delivered by one John Lin, a young, Chinese-American pastor whose association with Redeemer was not immediately discernable to me (I still don't know the specifics of the relationship). As he is fairly obviously new to the preaching thing, I was willing to overlook the fact that he took about 10 minutes of introduction before touching on the text. But the fact that he only alluded one other passage of Scripture (without references, I might add) but quoted The New York Times, The Shawshank Redemption, The Silmarillion, and academic psychologist Kenneth J. Gergen of Swarthmore College was a little harder to swallow. I want to hear about Bread, Water, Light, and Blood, not the "social saturation of the self". Oh, and for the record, having people who are obviously wannabe professional actors read your Scripture selection does not, I repeat, does not win you any points. Refined and mellow is not the vibe we're looking for here.

Still, I'm not going to make any decisions until I hear Keller preach. That seems only fair. But as I was sitting there, I was thinking that if this is what passes for solid teaching in New York City, all of a sudden the Cathedral of St. John the Divine isn't looking all that bad. Sure, the preaching will be awful, but they've got liturgy and architecture, which I understand even if they don't. This will take some thinking through.

I do have other options. Redeemer has a daughter church on Riverside Drive which is a lot more conveniently located than Redeemer proper. They also have a West Side worship service here. So we'll spend some time looking around. And if I do decide to stick with the PCA, I can still attend Vespers at the Cathedral, plus Eucharist every morning.

Still, as big a city as New York is, you'd think that there would not only be solid preaching but options to choose from. As it is, I'm making the best of a bad situation, not moving from strength to strength. So it goes, I guess.