This morning my family went to attend the Central Jersey Church of Christ's Sunday service. I was worried we'd be late, since the meeting started at 10am. The church currently meets at the North Brunswick High School, a fair distance from where we live. We got there just after 10, but worship hadn't started yet. We had been told that the congregation had a worship team, but didn't expect the band we saw there practicing. The name outside the door didn't mention "Church of Christ," and then we noticed that the bulletin talked about the wife of the "pastor" as also being a pastor. Something wasn't right here. Turns out, we took a wrong turn at the door.
The service began around 10:30. I leaned over and said to my wife, "I think we're at the wrong church. I'll bet the Church of Christ meets in a different part of the building." We waited a few minutes, and then as discretely as a family of four can make it's way out of a worship service, we left.
Walking around the building we found another door. This one read, in part, "Central Jersey Church of Christ." Sigh. Two very different congregations meeting at roughly the same time in the same building. Even their websites use the same color scheme and general design (compare this and this).
Once we were in the Church of Christ's gathering (we missed most of the singing and the Lord's supper but not the sermon) it took me all of five minutes to figure out that this was a congregation of the International Church of Christ (ICOC). Still, I was pleasantly surprised. The sermon was good, what we saw of the worship was uplifting, and when the service ended several people came up to introduce themselves and talk.
Speaking with the evangelist afterwards I gathered that things have changed for much of the ICOC. It sounds as though they've moved away from most of the heavy-handed top-down approach, and I can only hope they've toned-down the authoritative, intrusive way they practiced "discipleship" in the past. Most of all, I plan to find out if they have stopped re-baptizing people from "mainline" Churches of Christ who seek to place membership with them.
Going just on what I experienced this morning, the Central Jersey congregation seems really nice. We are thinking about making a return visit, this time without wrong turns, next week.
