Mark Hansford - Church visit #1

Blog title: Mark Hansford - Church visit #1

Church name: Horizon Community Church

Church address: 3950 Newtown Road, Cincinnati, OH, 45244

Date attended: 02.16.14

Church category: Non-denominational Seeker Church

Describe the worship service you attended. How was it similar to or different from your regular context?

Horizon Community Church may technically be my home church while I am in Cincinnati, but it has been three years since I have been in Cincinnati for more than a week or two. In those years, Horizon has moved out of the school auditorium which it used to rent and into its brand new twenty million plus church building. The goal of the Church is to reach out to people who have rejected Christianity previously and have been able to successfully make it on their own. The most common type of regular church attendee is someone who “made it”—multiple homes, luxury cars, their kids go to private school, etc. and after “making it”, they have found that they are not fulfilled. The service is seeker oriented and meant to be warm and inviting to the casual attender. My home church in Wheaton is St. Barnabas Episcopalian Church, which is quite the opposite in its high church style, but it is a style and tradition and congregation that I have come to love. 

What did you find most interesting or appealing about the worship service?

Between attending St. Barnabas and taking Dr. Block’s Theology of Worship class, I find it hard to worship in the contemporary style that Horizon embodies. The service consisted of fifteen minutes of music, forty five minutes of sermon, and concluded with a quick prayer. I suppose the most appealing part of the “worship service” was the great expository teaching. While I generally am not crazy about listening to someone giving their view on a passage for forty five minutes, Horizon does it in a great way. Pastor Chad Hovind is a Moody graduate and, despite that, knows what he is talking about. He took us line by line through the section of Philippians the Church is studying and had in depth word studies coupled with complex metaphors that really unpacked the passage. 

What did you find most disorienting or challenging about the worship service?

The thing that initially drew me to St. Barnabas was the reverence the congregation has. Yet it is not a grey and dying reverence, but a reverence that comes from the life and joy found in the church. I did not know such a thing really existed growing up at Horizon and now coming back years later, there was still no reverence to be had. The focus was almost entire on what they the individual could learn from the teaching rather than on worshipping God.  Something that I found surprisingly challenging was not taking communion. I never thought that not taking communion would be a big deal to me, as I grew up taking it somewhere between once a month and once a quarter, but I now better understand its deep significance and look forward to keeping the feast every Sunday.

What aspects of Scripture or theology did the worship service illuminate for you that you had not perceived as clearly in your regular context?

The sermon was on Philippians 3:12-16 and Pastor Hovind really delved into the Word, but I did not exactly hear anything new. I think part of that is due to everything I have learned while at Wheaton and partly due to the service being designed for people newer to the faith. The thing that stands out to me the most is the intensity that is described in the running the race metaphor, Pastor Hovind incorporated history about running in Greece and bridged into talking about the olympics and I feel that I better understand the intensity that we are called to live our Christian lives with.