A "Cutting-Edge" Church Trend?

A couple of months ago, I had to do a bit of traveling. As I was driving through several small towns, I stopped from time to time to take pictures of things that caught my interest. This picture was especially arresting. It seems that there is a church whose pastor is trying something radical, and who in doing so is breaking away from the rest of the pack.

This pastor is preaching a sermon series, yet his sources are not taken from the usual suspects. No series on books like Wild at Heart, The Shack, The Purpose-Driven Life, The Power of a Man, or Joyce Meyer's Never Give Up. Instead, this guy has chosen to preach on a relatively obscure book titled, The Gospel of Mark. Who ever heard of doing something like that?!

I've come to expect that when I visit a modern garden-variety evangelical church, I'll have to sit through cheesy music from a pop-music “praise band,” followed by a sappy, emotive sermon full of cute “heartwarming” stories centering on sports or lost pets. I wonder if that's what this guy did. I sort of doubt it – having gotten my hands on a copy of the Gospel of Mark, I have concluded that it doesn't really lend itself to that kind of sermonizing. Anyway, I guess I'll never know how this guy's sermon series went, as I had miles to go to reach my destination, and I couldn't stop. Maybe this “Gospel of Mark” thing will catch on in evangelical churches. There seem to be a lot of good books where the Gospel of Mark came from – books with titles like Matthew, Genesis, Luke, Isaiah, and so on.