I attended this church for years. We started in 2020 after they reopened their kids church…read morefollowing the pandemic. I was a newly born again Christian and we were looking for a community for myself, my husband and 5 children. At first, it seemed perfect. I got a lot out of the messages but I never really connected deeply with anyone. Any friendships I made were very superficial. It took about 2 years to find another family to really connect with, but they were also a newer family and also didn't have any deep connections there. In Dec of 2022, we decided to leave due to several things. One of them was the gap between the leaders and the congregation. The lead pastors don't seem like they really embrace the role of pastor. He says he cant possibly pastor that many people, which is true, but he uses that as an excuse to not talk to anyone outside his circle or get to know anyone else in the congregation. He makes jokes about the fact that he can't council people, but that's a huge part if being a pastor. IMO that would make one more of a preacher than an actual pastor. But I digress.
I returned to this church in April of 2023 after my husband passed away. I craved to be around the few people I had grown close to, so I returned. It should have been a red flag from the beginning, but neither one of the lead pastors attended the service, or so much as called me to express their condolences. It took two months for them to say anything, and it's only because they passed by me in the hallway. At that point it was "oh I've been meaning to tell you how sorry I am..." yeah right.
The sting of losing my husband was a blinder to the dysfunction of this church. In early 2024, I was struggling with addiction and I reached out to the church leadership for help. They had just started "Recovery church" which was a 12 step program being run by people who never actually worked the 12 steps.
Needless to say, I didn't get the help I needed there. I managed to get a small amount of clean time, but when I relapsed again after 5 or 6 weeks, the entire church knew with 24 hours and most people stopped talking to me. "I was being given over to my sin," was the claim from leadership. There I was, a struggling widow begging for their help, and that was their approach. In reality, they had no idea how to help me. This church runs on behavior modification vs true transformation in Christ, and addiction treatment requires actual transformation in order for recovery to take place. The level of gossip that went on that led to everyone knowing overnight was sickening.
It should have been another red flag when the lead pastor called the whole congregation "cowards" because everyone felt the same way but no one would confront him (that he was unapproachable and out of touch with his congregation). Yes, he really said that. Please ask him.
There is so much more dysfunction that I observed here, I could probably write a small pamphlet. Ultimately I will say this: if you're looking for a beginner church where you're fed a watered down milk of a gospel, a place where you can run in and out and hide and never really have to get involved, where you'll never be progressed to actual meat of the Bible, if you don't take your walk that seriously and you have no desire to progress and find true transformation in Christ, then this place is for you.
But if you're after the Gospel, the unfiltered, unadulterated Gospel of Jesus, if you want a community who will accept your brokenness just as you are, who will love you until you can learn how to properly love yourself, who will stand by you while they usher you into the presence of God for the healing you need, then you may want to try the church down the street.