Cornerstone Church, Winchendon, MA

January 15, 2012 (Sunday 3)
Cornerstone Church
Pastor Barry Risto
122 Gardner Road
Winchendon, MA 01475
978.297.3125 

Church History: The church in Winchendon was established in 1981.  Until the present building was constructed in 1985, services were held at the United Parish Church in Winchendon. The Church was expanded in 1999 to meet the needs of a growing congregation.

Affiliation: Assemblies of God (64 million members)

For this week, I decided to visit a church representing a denomination with a more fundamentalist view of Christianity than the churches of the previous two weeks. The sanctuary at Cornerstone Church was unusual in its configuration, with the pulpit central along the long wall (the side of the room) rather than at one end. This resulted in fewer rows of seats, which brought everyone relatively close to the altar, but alas, many of the seats were placed at a severe angle to the front of the risers that defined the altar. Flags of many nations were displayed along the back wall, as well as posters of major geographical regions of the world. The “technology dais” for want of a better term, stretched across the back wall of the sanctuary, running sound as well as front of room and back of room powerpoint style slides that provided words for devotional songs and video presentations, etc.

Sunday’s Service: The service kicked off with about forty minutes of devotional music interspersed with a call for letting Jesus take control of all the apsects of our lives. A small horn section, keyboards,  bass, violin and drums, along with four singers, provided the music. At its conclusion, it was time to pause and greet the parishoners sitting nearby. So far this simple greeting has been a consistent part of each service that I have attended. I like it.

At this point the Church’s youth pastor provided some announcements, and then it was time for the collection, which was accompanied by additional music. After the collection the band left the stage and a woman named Jill Poland spoke about an upcoming “School of Healing Prayer” that would begin on the first Monday in March. This is a program that multiple churches in the community participate in.

After that, Pastor Barry Risto took the pulpit, and following an update on a prayer shawl knitting project that the Church is involved in, it was time for the sermon, which was titled “The Beginning: Creation and Existence of God.”

Pastor Risto is quite a force from the pulpit. After a short introductory video, the rhetorical question was posed regarding whether we would really want to believe that we are the product of mindless evolution.

Pastor Risto began with Psalms 19, postulating that it’s purpose is that the author (David, according to the Pastor) is utilizing the creation as irrefutable evidence of the creator. He also indicated that God is truth and therefore the Bible, as the word of God, is irrefutably true. He then wove in Romans 1.19, to drive home Paul’s point that because God’s plan has been made clear to everyone, and because everyone has known God, there is no excuse for those who turn away from God.

He touched also on Psalm 8, and on the account of the creation in Genesis, to help put a foundation under the requirement to have faith in a literal interpretation of Genesis’s account of the creation.

During the bulk of the sermon, Pastor Risto returned again and again to juxtapose faith in a literal interpretation of the books of the bible (and therefore the accuracy of the account of the creation in Genesis), with choosing instead to follow prevailing scientific understanding of the creation of the universe, which, returning to Romans 1.19, one does at one’s own peril.

The other focal point of the sermon, which the pastor mentioned a couple of times and then again at the sermon’s completion, is that the essence of sin is for one to do their own thing, rather than surrender all aspects of their lives to God.

At the completion of the sermon, the musicians returned to stage, and there was an Altar call for anyone who had decided to accept Jesus as their savior.

My Thoughts: As an atheist, it would be expected that I would not be particularly receptive to a more fundamentalist view of Christianity like the one presented at this service. As I mentioned previously, I thought Pastor Risto was a very dynamic speaker. The subject of this service was, from my point of view, perfect, as much of the service was “believer vs. atheist”, “creationism vs. standard cosmological model”, “Mankind descends from Adam, vs. Evolution”.

Believer vs. atheist: Pastor Risto began his story about a trial that occurred where an atheist sued to create a holiday for atheists, and the Judge declined to do so, indicating that such a day (April Fools’ Day) already existed. This apocryphal story has long been proven false by Snopes.com.

Pastor Risto made the claim that scientists, by definition, must be nonbelievers. He went on to attack that view as false, based on his experience with the many scientists who are committed to a study of creationism. Unfortunately, that’s not how science works. If a scientist is first committed to a particular theory without independent supporting evidence, and then goes on to parse out supporting evidence for his theory while ignoring evidence against his theory, that’s not science. It is perhaps advocacy, or theism, or any number of things, but it is not science. I agree that science can coexist with belief in a creator; but the argument from the Pastor has no merit here. As an aside, wealth and fame beyond words would shower down upon the legitimate scientist that proves the existence of a creator. As of 2012, we’re still waiting.

Early in the sermon, Pastor Risto asked of any atheist, to “prove there is no god.” This is a fundamental misstatement of what it means to an atheist to be an atheist. An atheist, in the absence of independent scientific evidence of a creator, simply chooses to not assume that there is one, in exactly the same way that Bertrand Russell would choose to not believe that an undetectable cosmological teapot is orbiting the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars. Russell’s Teapot  illustrates the idea that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims. In other words, it would be Pastor Risto’s job to ultimately prove the existence of his God, not the atheist’s job to prove a negative (that something, such as a creator, does not exist). To better understand atheism, it is useful to review this quote by Stephen Roberts:

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Creationism vs. Standard Cosmological Model (Big Bang Theory): The standard cosmological model of the universe explains the early development of the universe within the framework of scientific observation, meaning that it fulfills the requirement of a scientific model in that it accounts for available observable scientific data. Creationism does not. That’s really all there is to this argument, if the argument is with someone that takes the concept of Biblical Infallibility beyond the conventional limit of Christian faith and practice (i.e., Biblical infallibility argues that the Bible is infallible when it comes to matters of Christian faith and practice, but not, for example, whether God created light two days prior to creating the Sun, which was the source for the light God had previously created). The good news is that much of the Christian world can coexist without difficulty with the Standard Cosmological Model, which doesn’t address, so far as I know, whether the universe has a creator, but rather the initial series of events surrounding the beginning of our universe.

This also isn’t a problem for Jews, as the Jewish faith doesn’t take a literal view of the Hebrew Bible. This is not an unimportant point, Jesus Christ being Jewish.

Mankind descends from Adam, vs. Evolution: The genius of Darwin is that without having any observable evidence of the fundamental underpinnings of biological inheritance, Darwin creates the science of Evolutionary Biology single-handedly, and modern science has no problem observing it occur, and also observing the mechanisms (genetics) the are responsible for its occurrence. As a scientific theory, evolution is more firmly a fact than is gravity. It is scientifically unquestionable.

Pastor Risto’s argument that the complexity of life and the complexity of the universe are sufficient evidence for a creator is a very old argument of creationists called irreducible complexity. Unfortunately, evolutionary biology resolves this argument in spades, and is skillfully addressed in Chapter Four of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion. Dismissing the problem of explaining God’s existence if one chooses to believe in the argument of irreducible complexity (as Pastor Risto does by categorizing his deity as the creator rather than the createe) does not ultimately account for the problem of God’s existence.