What Went Right in the Rock

A post by a friend of mine recently reminded me that there were many good things at Summitview and the Rock.  While I maintain my criticisms, I don't want to forget the good things as well, things I hope the Rock continues to hold on to and things I wish to hold on to as I go to a new church.  I also have to admit that my experiences and perhaps my perfectionist side tends to bias me toward negative criticism.  I want to correct that by listing some of the positives.

1. Sound Teachings: It may seem odd to mention this as a major strength of a church whose teachings I disagree with.  To be clear, though, I disagree with what is taught privately through "council" and how those teachings are put into practice.  In the church and college ministry's public teachings, one would be very hard pressed to find fault (many at the Decommissioned Forum have tried, and the mental gymnastics required to do so is one of the reasons I am no longer with that forum).  Public teaching was very sound and Biblical.  It was also balanced and emphasized a desire to connect with other churches (something that GCC churches and the Rock have historically struggled with).  I would very much like to see this kind of teaching continue and, in fact, hope it manages one day to suffuse the entire organization's beliefs and practices, public and private.  Many of my negative experiences would have been quite different if the public teachings had been applied privately (for example, the unity of believers was a common topic during the time when the rift between me and the young woman was being allowed to expand into our other relationships; also the week I left because the leaders told me to follow others over direct leading from God, the sermon was on praying to God for guidance and listening to Him).
2. Apologetics: While this could be considered a subset of sound teaching, it deserves special mention.  I had never before been in a group of Christians which so specialized in sound apologetics.  Here, the Rock contrasts very favorably with the Navs.  In the Navs I would run into members and even leaders who thought that Neo-Darwinian evolution was perfectly compatible with the Bible and Christianity or (as one of them confessed) simply tried not to think about the apparent contradictions as they believed both.  There were other areas as well where Navs were content to live a not-well-thought-out faith.  This was a weakness.  In the Rock, though, even casual members could probably give you three reasons why a literal interpretation of Genesis was a better fit with the scientific evidence, just from listening to a few of John Meyer's sermons.  Apologetics didn't come just from sermons, though.  There were additional "classes" students could take in the Rock which would give a more in-depth look, and the church seems to have hosted at least one speaker on apologetics each year, generally on Creation or some other hot-button topic in the world of a college student (this past semester they hosted a speaker on responding to homosexuality Biblically--I regret that I was unable to attend that conference).  There was even one year where the small groups in the Rock spent their Bible study time watching and discussing The Truth Project, a video series designed to give a comprehensive grasp of apologetics.  Critical thinking was (and no doubt still is) a required course at the Rock, which is perhaps why it surprises me so much that so little of it is applied to the private teachings and practices there, many of which would collapse under a fraction of the scrutiny Rockers automatically bring to bear on outside heresies.
3. Evangelism: While the Rock and Summitview are officially non-denominational, their teaching and practice puts them firmly in the realm of Evangelical Protestant Christianity.  Evangelism is a big deal around the Rock, bigger even than in the Navs.  The Navs had an "evangelism team" that went out cold-turkey sharing every week, but in the Rock every small group meeting or activity (and there was generally one every night of the week, whether everybody could make it or not) has the potential to be used as outreach and many are for that express purpose.  The Rock is very good at evangelism and focuses very strongly on it.  Several of my friends owe their salvation to the outreach efforts of the Rock, which is more than I can say for any other Christian group I've been involved with before or since.  It makes sense that the Rock and Summitview would be strong evangelically, too.  After all, they're part of the Great Commission Church movement.  I may never have had any concrete idea on what that movement was and where it came from until after I left and looked up its history myself (the history given to members joining the church--unless it's been updated--is extraordinarily vague), but I was clear about one thing: the great commission and its call to evangelize was one of (if not the) main focus of the group (this was why it was so shocking to me when a leader let emotional purity override the great commission).  I think the Rock needs to keep an evangelistic focus, and would only caution that some balance is necessary.  Evangelism has become such a focus in the group that it is sometimes difficult for a member to imagine any other purpose in being a Christian, or any other role for a Christian to take in the church (though according to Ephesians 4:11 this is only one of several important roles in the Church, and, as the Navs have it "to know Christ" comes before "to make Him known" in importance and order).  In my own time at the Rock, evangelism became the defining mark of Christianity to me, and it took me a lot of studying and caused me a lot of shock to find out that, Biblically, the real mark of Christians and the true highest commandment of Christ isn't the great commission but the New Commandment to "Love one another" (John 13:34).
4. Community: The Rock was very effective at building communities of believers out of widely dissimilar individuals.  Small groups became very close-knit and viewed one another like families.  In explaining my attempts to get onto a small group (called a "D-Team" or a "House Church" currently) to those outside of the Rock and Summitview, I ran into a language barrier.  I had chosen to call them "Bible study groups" to avoid having to explain what I meant by "D-Team" all the time and since the small groups' major meeting is a midweek Bible study.  But the term turned out to be misleading.  In the Navs and in other groups, Bible studies are temporary arrangements which meet together only for actual Bible studies.  In the Rock, a D-Team is far more than a Bible study.  For all intents and purposes, when you join a D-Team, you automatically gain anywhere from a half-dozen to twenty new friends, some of whom may be quite close.  There is only one official meeting of each Team every week, but there are many unofficial meetings as well.  Teams sit together during the Rock's worship service and during church on Sunday.  After both, they will almost always go out together for a meal or fun group activity (or both).  If you go to a conference or retreat, you can expect to go with and spend the entire time with your Team (I went once without a Team, and it was very difficult with several periods of time where I was in limbo because the activities planned to fill that time were all Team-based).  Additionally, any discipleship relationships that are formed will (with the exception of leaders, who are discipled by other leaders higher up) be formed within the Team.  Given that you already hang out with the members of your Team frequently, Teams tend to fulfill many unofficial functions as well.  Transportation arrangements are almost invariably made within the Team.  Housing arrangements often come out this way, too.  Study groups and gaming groups spring up within them as well.  In this way, it is fairly typical for a member of the Rock to be hanging out or doing something with at least one member of their Team every day of the week.  Your Team is your friends and your friends, the Team.  This arrangement has the benefits of creating a closely-knit small community of believers, and I cherish the memories of the fellowship I had in that community.  At the same time, the arrangement does have some drawbacks.  Since one's own Team consumes so much time and social energy, some may find it hard to form or maintain friendships outside of their Team, much less outside of the Rock.  This also explains why many ex-members like myself have found that to leave a Team or the church is to lose all of their friends.  It is not, as I discovered when I returned, that the friendships formed in the Rock are all fair-weather friends, highly dependent on one's organizational loyalty.  Instead, the most likely explanation is that Teams are such all-consuming social structures that they leave little room for relationships outside their confines.  If there were some way to balance the community-building property's of the Team with a greater openness and availability toward outside friendships, that would be ideal.  There are some indications that the Rock is moving in this direction.
5. Gender Roles: This is a very odd praise, considering how much I've spoken against the state of gender relations in the Rock.  While I stand by my criticism, there is something to be said for the Rock's approach to gender.  The teachings of the Rock and Summitview do present elements of a solid framework for approaching gender Biblically and traditionally.  Biblically, they have maintained male-only leaderships positions over mixed groups and provided some good apologetic defense of that.  They also have a good emphasis on Biblical marriage relations (not long before I left, there was a sermon that touched on Ephesians 5 and was very Biblically sound).  The church is also excellent for setting up and training for traditional family gender roles of the husband as a the breadwinner and the wife as the homemaker and child-rearer.  The danger comes in confusing the traditional with the Biblical: the traditional roles have roots in our culture, but not necessarily in the Bible.  This distinction does not seem to have been made very clear in the Rock or the church at large, leading to several of the "Myths of Summitview" blog posts on the church site becoming necessary (the misconception that homeschooling is the only right choice, that larger families are inherently more "faithful," that working mothers are unbiblical, and the whole dogma around emotional purity).  Additionally, while there is no problem with any of the traditional roles or values in isolation (even emotional purity can be a good thing if practiced as a private conviction--though I have never seen or heard of it being so used), these roles and values are often applied too broadly and accepted with too little examination.  For example, a common report among women is the huge emphasis on marriage and family, but this is not appropriate for all women, as the Bible says that some Christians (including members of both sexes) are called to celibacy (something which is, from a Biblical perspective, severely undervalued by most Protestants).  So while teachings on gender relations need to continue, I do feel they need to be balanced by a firm delineation between what is traditional and what is scriptural and a refusal to insist that everyone conform to values, practices, or roles that lack firm Biblical support.
6. Cookies: Snacks after the service make everyone happy.  Enough said!

This list is not comprehensive.  There are probably some things I left out, but I think this hits the highlights.  There are still some mixed blessings out there, of course, like the emphasis on seeking council (which is good, but should not be the be-all-end-all of decision making) or not gossiping.  On the one hand, gossip is a sin and is given very little attention by most Christian groups.  On the other hand, the emphasis on gossip caused no noticeable drop in negative comments about other Christians in or outside the Rock compared to other groups (I actually heard a lot more negative talk about other Christians while in the Rock, from members and leaders in good standing--let alone those like me who weren't--than I ever did in the Navs) and was/is commonly used to deflect valid criticism which might otherwise be used constructively to help the group grow.  There are also a number of aspects of the church I never got to witness, like the children's ministry or the other life-stage ministries like Symbio.  Still, it does show where some of the group's strengths lie, and some of the things I'll be looking for as I move on.