This morning we got up off our behinds and visited the next church on our short list: Maranatha Bible Church. Maranatha has been around for nearly 30 years in Cedar Rapids, sitting on 25th Street near Mount Mercy College. We were familiar with some of the people before we visited; we’ve known Pastor Aaron Telecky and his family for several years, Youth Pastor Thad Joyce and his family live just a few blocks up from us here in Hiawatha, and several other faces in the church were familiar from many years of church league softball. It’s a bit interesting giving my update on Maranatha this afternoon since I know Aaron reads this blog. Aaron, feel free to comment if you want to.

First Impressions

• Maranatha is in an older church building in the middle of a residential neighborhood. There were several cars parked on the street, but we found a spot in the parking lot.
• A couple people greeted us with “good morning!” as we walked in and found the foyer. An usher handed us bulletins and we hung up our coats. After we had stood there for another ten seconds or so, obviously looking around, the usher asked if we were visiting. When we said yes he introduced himself and welcomed us, but didn’t volunteer any info about children’s ministries even though we had both girls in tow.
• About that time Pastor Aaron walked into the foyer, welcomed us, and introduced us to one of the men who was helping teach one of the girls' classes this morning. That guy (whose name escapes me now) took us downstairs and helped us find the girls classes.
• We had just time enough to sign our girls in, get back upstairs, find a seat, and just start looking at the bulletin before the service started.

Music

• They had a six-member worship team this morning: piano, two female vocalists, leader w/ acoustic guitar, bass player, and drummer.
• Six songs were sung throughout the service; four were relatively new songs, two were old hymns. Four of the six songs were familiar to me; Becky said she was familiar with all of them.
• The guy running the overhead had a little trouble keeping up with the music on the first song, which was a fast one. Otherwise, everything ran quite smoothly and the group sounded pretty good. Overall the congregational singing was strong.
• We were told afterwards that this wasn’t their usual music leader, and that things could sound quite different when she was present. I don’t know whether that’ll be good or bad, I guess we’ll find out another week.

Children’s Ministries

• Maranatha has Sunday School at 9:00 - we didn’t make it to that this morning. Then they have age-segregated nurseries for children up through 4 years old during the service, and kids from 5 - 9 or so are dismissed to a Children’s Church during the sermon time.
• Laura and Addie both seemed to enjoy their mornings. The rooms were big and there were several kids in each room. Haven’t heard much else from either of them about it.

Message

• Pastor Aaron is on a sermon series through the book of Isaiah. This week was chapter 32. At a chapter a week he has another 7 or so months to go.
• The sermon was maybe 40 - 45 minutes long, but good, solid stuff. Pastor Aaron seems to pretty much have one speed, but it’s energetic and not hard to listen to.
• The Gospel was clearly present in the message, as was a reminder of the hope that we have in God’s kingdom that will be established for eternity.
• After avoiding one church on our list because of their strident insistence on a particular sort of end-times views, it was good to hear from the pulpit (and I paraphrase here) that ‘a lot of Bible-believing people have come up with a lot of Bible-believing ideas about how the end times will happen, but in reality we don’t really know for certain.

People

• The congregation was a fairly mixed age there at Maranatha; there were lots of families with young children, but there were also a bunch of teenagers and a fair number of older folks. Good to see the variety.
• On the whole, people weren’t unfriendly, but weren’t perhaps as purposefully outgoing as the folks at Stonebridge were when we visited there. Outside of the folks we already knew (and the few people that they introduced us to), no one specifically came up to greet and welcome us. If it hadn’t been for Pastor Aaron finding us and shepherding us around, I got the feeling we would’ve had to ask a bunch of questions and more or less find our own way around to get the girls down to the children’s ministries.

Observations

• The church sanctuary is interesting; they have adapted what was obviously once a rather long, narrow sanctuary and turned the whole thing sideways. This makes the sanctuary very wide (4 rows of pews wide or so) but only about 6 rows deep. It works pretty well.
• In general, the church feels like they’ve outgrown their building but don’t have a solution for what to do next. The sanctuary wasn’t overly full this morning, but I can see where it could be. The stage felt somewhat cramped with the whole worship team up there. The basement has temporary walls set up to make the children’s classrooms, and the doors are short - like 6-foot-high short. Their website tells me that they had a baptismal service last week at a church several miles away, since they don’t have the facilities at their own building.
• It looks like there’s a lot of good stuff going on at Maranatha. There’s an emphasis on small groups, an apparent focus on missions, and a seeming dedication to qualified leadership.

As with Stonebridge a few weeks ago, it’s just impossible to get a full impression and make any sort of decision based on only attending for one Sunday. Next week we’ll be out of town, but I expect that the following week we’ll be back at Maranatha to give it another shot. Thanks to Aaron and the whole group there at Maranatha for a good Sunday morning.