My wife and I have been at The Bridge for several months and we're not going to keep coming. I'll say up front - the teaching is solid and the staff clearly love the Lord. There are real believers there. This isn't about doctrine.
It's about a church that is slowly turning into a MONUMENT instead of a MOVEMENT.
The biggest thing is the photography. Every single service, across all three Sundays, there is a guy walking the rows with a large long lens while people are standing in worship. Eyes closed, hands raised, some people in tears. He gets within inches of peoples faces. Row by row, pew by pew. Not a wide shot from the back. Not a couple of candids. Inches from your face while you're trying to have a moment with God.
The congregation is visibly uncomfortable. Visitors stiffen up and look around like is this normal? Members shift in their seats. And then the next week the answer is somehow more of it. More rows, more close ups, more "intimate moments" captured from 4 inches away while someone is trying to worship.
Here's where I keep landing - Jesus does not care about marketing. Jesus could not care less about a high res photo of a women crying in row 12 chair 4E so the church can put it in a reel. He cares about the women. He cares whether she met Him in that moment, not whether it got documented in 4K. The whole point of an intimate moment in worship is that it's intimate. A lens 4 inches from someones face doesn't capture intimacy, it ends it.
And this isn't one weird Sunday. It isn't Easter, it isn't a baptism service where extra cameras would make sense. It's every. single. service. Every service requires row by row intrusive photography of people in worship. What on earth is so important about all that footage that it's worth doing this to the people in the room?
The final straw for us was the blanket text that went out to the congregation asking everyone to write Google reviews for the church. That's what tipped it. Jesus does not need us to market for Him. If the Word is solid, and the worship is solid, and lives are actually being changed, people will come. That's how it has always worked. The early church didn't grow because they ran a review push, it grew because something real was happening and people couldn't stop talking about it. When a church has to ask its people to do its marketing, something has already gone sideways.
Then on top of all that there's the merch, the constant marketing reminders, the polish. None of those things on their own is a big deal. A church can have a t-shirt, a church can have a brand. But you stack the merch table, the marketing cadence, the production, the in-your-face photography during worship, and a text blast asking the congregation to go write 5 star reviews on top of each other, and the whole thing starts to tip. It stops feeling like a worship service and starts feeling like a content production with the congregation as the cast.
That's the part that finally pushed us out. You can't photograph the thing a church is actually supposed to be doing. You can only photograph the staging of it. The more energy goes into the staging, the less is left for the real thing underneath.
There are good people at The Bridge and the preaching is real. We are grateful for the season we had there and we genuinely hope the leadership reconsiders some of this. But until the lens backs up during worship, the marketing eases off, and the people in the rows are treated like worshippers instead of content, we can't keep coming. read more
