Destiny Church, Leith

Destiny Church, Leith  

Morning service, Sunday 28^th July 2013, 11am

Preacher: Graeme Williamson

If you’re looking for the densest concentration of evangelical activity in the Edinburgh area (and why wouldn’t you be?) you might be tempted to pick Holy Corner as an obvious destination, but my vote goes to the more unassuming location of Casselbank Street, Leith, where within a few tens of yards of one another we find South Leith Baptist Church, Leith Free Church, and this morning’s port of call, Destiny Church.

Several people who’ve been following my mission had asked whether I intended to include Destiny, and it’s been on the list for a while, so I decided to pay them a visit today. Their website projects an image of a young, vibrant church with lots going on, and lead pastor Peter Anderson’s YouTube channel is full of enthusiastic hey-it’s-cool-to-be-a-Christian videos in which he “shares what’s in his heart” while standing just a wee bit too close to the camera.

Pastor Pete was not in evidence today. Maybe he was at Destiny’s Gorgie branch, but he left the job of preaching to the 50 folk in Leith to Graeme Williamson, an elder and head of pastoral care, and that’s basically where the whole thing started unravelling.

But before we get to poor Mr Williamson dying on his feet, let’s go back a few steps.

If you google “destiny church edinburgh”, the clever autofill suggestions will immediately bring up “destiny church edinburgh cult”, which is a bit of a worry. They also employ a psychotherapist … which I guess could come in handy if you’re planning to brainwash people. There’s a fairly sinister-sounding Destiny Church in New Zealand, but I haven’t been able to find out if the Scottish Destiny Church is in any way affiliated with its antipodean namesake. (Update 15/08/13: see post-script below)

Anyway, if you like the kind of “worship” that’s popular among three-chord strummers and five-note singers, as heard ad nauseam at Hope!, Elim, Life and Central, then you’ll be right at home at Destiny. Fifteen minutes of that at the beginning to get us all mildly in the mood … strum, strum, yawn!

And here’s another thing I’ve noticed about this kind of church. To them “worship” equals “singing”. I thought that worship included all acts of religious devotion, including prayer, participation in liturgy, reading and meditating on scripture, etc., and outside of church services acts such as charity, good works, evangelism and so on, and that in an even wider sense any act performed by a person who is mindful of God and seeking to recognise and proclaim his worthiness to be praised could be considered as worship. But these trendy churches seem to have shrunk “worship” down to its narrowest musical meaning. They even say things like, “We’ll worship again later”, as if what’s about to happen next (sermon, prayers, etc.) isn’t worship. Am I splitting hairs?

Okay, so back to the hapless Mr Williamson. I don’t know what pastoral care involves, but oratory doesn’t appear to be part of it, and nor does cogent argument. You know something’s going badly wrong when the preacher says things like, “You guys are really not that enthusiastic about your saviour, are you?”, “My, you’re a quiet bunch today!”, and, “Agree with me, please. Act like you’re alive.”

The theme of his message, he said, was “authority”, and he repeatedly invited the congregation to say with him, “I have more power at my disposal than I think I do.” The cruel irony is that despite all his chat about “rising up with new-found confidence” and “standing up in the authority that we have in Christ”, Mr Williamson himself commanded no authority, God-given or otherwise, to inspire his listeners, who responded half-heartedly to his commands to say “rule over”, say “golden rule”, say “destroy”, say “the same”, say “us” … say blah, blah, blah!

The sermon was part of a two-week teaching (Think I’ll be going back for part 2? Think again!) on spiritual warfare, in which context we were reminded of Elisha’s servant in 2 Kings 6, but there was also a detour round “the whole history of the world, starting in Genesis” and round various parts of the new testament, to wit, Colossians 2, Mark 6, Luke 10, Ephesians 1, Ephesians 2 and Acts 19. Snippety, snippety, snip, snip, snip! Chop ’em all up and fling ’em all into the pot, and too many verses spoil the broth.

What an absolute guddle of a sermon. Anyone done any gardening this year? Where is Jesus now? Yes, he’s seated at the right hand of God the father. What would you do if your boss asked you to transfer £100k and you only had permission to transfer amounts up to £10k? If you’re experiencing a demonic attack, come and hide in Jesus. All this and much, much more. He was all over the shop. And then to top it all off he talked about St Paul wanting us to get to the point! And your point, Graeme, was …?

I was relieved when it was all over and Graeme started to pray, but after a minute or so I realised that he was still addressing the congregation, eyes closed, as he urged us to give ourselves to Jesus: “All of you need to respond in some way to God.” Excuse me, Graeme, but I always thought that prayers were supposed to be addressed to God. You appear to be praying … to us!

Call it a false start if you will, because then he started praying again, this time sending his prayers in a more orthodox heavenward direction.

Then there was more “worship”, i.e. singing, although for half of the song they didn’t have the projector on, and the singer’s diction wasn’t the greatest so the uninitiated couldn’t possibly have joined in. And after that the “worship” continued as people drifted out in dribs and drabs.

I didn’t stay for coffee. I stepped out into Casselbank Street and saw the other two churches so close at hand, knowing that I could have chosen better. I even felt a little pang of nostalgia for the Free Church. At least you get psalms and a pukka sermon in there.

Post-script, Thursday 15 August 2013: 
Fittingly, I'm watching "The Social Network" as I write this. In an exchange between Mark Zuckerberg and his ex-girlfriend, she tells him, "The internet isn't written in pencil, it's written in ink." 

Once something's out there, it's out there, and what's out there about the New Zealand Destiny Church is that it's a cult, which is why I got the google autofill results I got (see above). And it seems that the leadership of the Scottish Destiny Church, which isn't affiliated with the New Zealand one, is now fighting a rearguard action to protect its brand identity and distance itself from any association with cults or cultic practices. 

So for what it's worth, here's my take. Destiny Church Leith (and Gorgie, Glasgow, etc) is just an ordinary church. They're evangelical and trendy, they're expanding and excited about it, they're supporting each other in their shared faith, and there's nothing sinister about them. Their style of worship isn't to my taste, but it's unlikely to wash anyone's brain or do any harm. 

I'm not going to change what I wrote about Destiny, because it's a reflection of my experience of the church, both the pre-visit web search and the day of the service. If I removed the comments about the google results, this post-script would make no sense and it wouldn't cure their search engine problem in any case. How you get an internet genie back in its bottle isn't something I can help with, but I hope I can offer an impartial view and maybe put in a friendly word for them.

So good luck to the people at Destiny (the Scottish Destiny, I mean). They seem like nice people, earnest Christians trying to do good ... not a cult.