The Awesome God Project™®©

I’m Deanna. Drew asked me to fill in because he’s sick tried to pawn his writing duties off asked me to be a guest blogger after visiting Christ Church of Cranbrook with him. You can find me at Soul Like a Spider or on Twitter.

After waking up late, almost walking out the door without knowing where I was going, having to stop at a gas station to grab some chocolate milk to keep my empty and noisy stomach from taking part of the festivities, and accidentally trying to go in through the out driveway (zing!), my morning at Christ Church Cranbrook was off to a weird start. (This is the Awesome Project, after all. No post here is complete without some strange and seemingly controversial cultural reference in the title. Zeppelin for the win.)

“I’m probably going to be about 5 mins late.” That turned out to be a lie, it was more like 15.
“Okay. I’m on the right side of the church, about 15 rows from the entrance.”

The campus that the church is located on is peaceful. The driveways are strolling, the parking lots are nicely spaced and are scattered throughout a landscape full of trees, large sections of grass, and old architecture. I mean, I like my megachurches sitting in the middle of a plain, industrial parking lots built for a football stadiums as much as the next

Christ Church Cranbrook in springtime

person, but there is something to be said about the serenity that was immediately present from the environment as I was walking in.

Luckily I walked in while there was singing going on so my awkward search to find Drew wasn’t noticed. I must say, he wasn’t lying when he said the church was beautiful enough to make me want to immediately convert. The sanctuary was thin, not quite as wide as the Notre Dame Basilica of Montreal in Quebec, Canada or some of the old European cathedrals in Amsterdam, Netherlands, but it was long. Everything is built of grey stone, and the paintings on the walls are just stunning.

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Throughout most of my life, I’ve attended one church.  Besides for a couple of years, where my family attended Covenant Baptist Church, or followed my Dad around as he subbed in at a variety of churches, I spent my childhood at Shepherd Fellowship Church.  In college (arguably, the more formative years than our formative years), I didn’t attend church.  Not because I hated Jesus, but every Sunday was a seeker service, and every “Grow more with the Lord” group scheduled meetings during my night classes.

And not to be crass, but Science Fiction films is more exciting than listening to you debate whether we should pray to God or Jesus.  Here’s a hint: they live together, and they pass along the phone messages, in fact they’re so close together it’s almost like they’re Father and Son—honestly, they’re pretty much the same guy.

During my time Church-hopping with Dad, we’d usually go back to the church when someone else talked.  I’m not sure if this was intentional—letting my Dad get the feel of the place—or just because when you’re churchless, why not?  But even when we only hit up a place when my Dad showed up, you learned a lot just by the way people reacted at the end.  Their interpretation of the Bible, their view of life, their fashion sense, and what TV shows they watched on Thursday night.  Just by how they reacted to someone different talking about the Bible.  I didn’t realize at 10, 11, 12, 13, or 14 that church-hopping revealed a whole backside of Christianity that shapes the way we see things: interpretation.  Christianity all comes down to how you view a certain passage: do you take into account the social forces at work when the writer’s wrote it, and the social forces at work when you read it?  Or read it as a stoic piece that exists outside of social forces?  The Bible means different things to different people, and you shouldn’t accept what you hear blindly, and the world won’t end when some disagrees with you.

Because God has spoken, and everything else is commentary.

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