Church Shopping: The Austin Stone

We visited another church today. It's called The Austin Stone Community Church, and it really reminded me of The Grove. There's a lot of things in Austin that remind me of bigger versions of things in Fayetteville. Bull McCabe's is like a bigger Crown Pub. Lamar Ave. is like a bigger 71B. I-35 is like a bigger I-540. 6th Street is like a bigger Dickson. In a way, Austin really is like a bigger Northwest Arkansas. For the most part, it's a Fayetteville. But, there's Round Rock and Pflugerville that are like your Rogers and Bentonville. My point is this: The Stone is like a bigger Grove.

There's a few more people with a couple more services. Nonetheless, it seems like a really similar church. The style of worship is similar. The age range is similar. The style of the sermon is really similar. They have a ton of community groups all over town, which is good. Community=good.

Here's the "pros": similar to Grove in many respects, downtown Austin, meets in a high school gymnasium (not a super-fancy building), sermon was intellectually challenging, worship was sincere, they support Austin's version of Church Under the Bridge (at the I-35 overpass of 7th Street), and they support missions (had 2 short-term teams just return).

Here's the "cons": Chris Tomlin is on staff and leads once a month (meaning, I have to pretend to like Chris Tomlin and there's a lot of people just there to hear him), the service seemed hierarchical--I didn't feel like you'd ever see someone like a Mike Harper giving the sermon or have a lot of participation from members in the band (I could be wrong about this), and it's kind of big for my taste as far as number of people.

Here's the thing. The Chris Tomlin con isn't entirely serious. He is a great worship leader, and he has to work somewhere. I am turned off by the fact that there will be a lot of church hoppers. I could be wrong about the separation of body and staff thing. I might have to get over the numbers thing, because this town has a lot of people like me who want to go to the types of churches I want to go to.

There's one thing that is a question for me: the prayer culture of the church. However, I hear that they have a Wednesday night prayer meeting that I'd want to check out. I would also like to see a community group to experience the prayer culture of the church.

I like that they have a 5:00 and 7:00 night service to offset a 10:45 (soon to be 9:00 and 11:00) morning service. This would allow me to go to the Church Under the Bridge here in Austin, where I could worship with the homeless and the poor. That's very appealing.

We're about to re-visit Mosaic (the hippies and hipsters church) tonight. They have a new building (small and in a shopping center), and it should be a normal service (i.e., Blake Mycoskie from TOMS won't be speaking). I'm interested to see what it's like. Adios.