I started attending Rockbridge about 5 years ago, when I was first responded to the call of Christ for salvation. I hadn’t been to church in a very long time, so I did not really have a reference point for what to expect. I went to Rockbridge Dalton, mostly because it was convenient and low commitment. I wanted to hear a sermon and worship without having to commit to anything or be pressured. I was just looking to check things out without having to really talk to anybody. In my mind, Church was going to be a place where people were going to pressure me into joining, getting baptized or whatever else. I was not prepared for any of that at the time (at least I thought) so Rock Bridge seemed like a good option. Easy come, easy go.
Shortly after my family started attending, my father-in-law passed away. Directly after that COVID came around. During that time, my family and I opened the Bible at home and started learning more about the Bible and what Christ did for us. We did not attend church during this period. After people started to gather again, we ended up attending and eventually joining a different local church. We became very familiar with the word. We attended this church for a little over year before we decided to leave. We felt that we were being called elsewhere and wanted to visit a few other churches in town. It was important to us to be at a church that had a bigger children’s ministry. Rockbridge fit the bill and, since I had attended Rock Bridge before, I thought it was worth checking out again with the whole family.
We attended Rockbridge off and on for about 6 months (as well as a few other churches in the area). After a listening to few sermons, my wife became uncomfortable with some of the content. She felt like they were feeding us milk and that some (sometimes a lot) of the content of the messages was based on Matt’s own ideas or sources outside of the Bible. I must admit, I missed this at first because Matt cites a lot of scripture to support the points he makes. My wife observed that the sermons were mostly about “me” or “us” and not so much about God. My wife pointed out to me on multiple visits that the points on Matt’s sermon note cards often started with “I” or “we”. The concerns she voiced caused me to start to think more critically about what was being preached at Rockbridge.
I realized that a typical sermon at Rockbridge was more of a self-help talk than an exposition of God’s word. The framework of Matt’s preaching is his own ideas, not biblical precepts. If the premise of a sermon isn’t based on a biblical principle or text with which to begin, sprinkling in a few quick Bible citations doesn’t turn that sermon into sound teaching. Some sermons are worse than others, but my family was not growing or maturing in Christ while we were attended Rock Bridge.
The final straw for us was the sermon on “How We Do Church”. This sermon was about getting as many people as possible in the door and making them feel comfortable. That teaching confirmed our suspicion that Rock Bridge is a seeker sensitive church whose goal is to grow as large as possible, which Rock Bridge obviously has done. Sound doctrine and biblical teaching must be compromised in the seeker sensitive model to get the numbers up. Rockbridge has made such comprises and its number of attendees and campuses has certainly grown.
We believe the Biblical model of a church is to help believers grow and mature in Christ (Colossians 1:28) and not to try and get everyone in the door and make them feel comfortable. Rockbridge does not fit that model.
-David T.