Tim Stevens, executive pastor of Granger Community Church, wrote a blog post called “A Crowd is Not a Church.” It included this paragraph:
For some reason, people who have attended church for many years will come to a weekend service and believe they have visited our church. I tell people all the time: The weekend is not the church. It is a crowd. We are doing everything we can to draw the biggest crowd we can–and then turn it into a church.
It’s easy to pass quick judgments on a church. I do it when I visit a different church:
- “They weren’t very friendly. Nobody talked to us.”
- “I didn’t get much out of the message. It’s a superficial church.”
I suppose people do that with Anchor. Maybe they have an unusually good experience on that one visit. Or maybe it’s a disappointing (but not typical) experience, and they decide Anchor isn’t for them.
But as Stevens says, what happens on Sunday morning is only a glimpse. It’s a crowd, not the church. I’m glad that Anchor is a whole lot more than a weekly crowd.
