⛪ A Sunday at Lee Station Baptist Church: Titus 2, Family, Faith, and a Little Data-Center Repentance
There are Sundays when you sit in a church pew, listen politely, shake a few hands, and head home.
And then there are Sundays when the sermon follows you out the door.
This past Sunday, I had the opportunity to visit Lee Station Baptist Church here in the Dunlap area, where I got to meet members of the church family and spend some time with their new pastor, Chris Lewis, his wife Audria, and their family.
And, much to my surprise, lightning did not strike the building when I walked through the door.
I took that as an encouraging sign. ⚡😇
Now, as the Apostle Paul might have said if he’d ever encountered somebody who spends entirely too much time operating computers, websites, artificial intelligence systems, and assorted electronic contraptions from a mountaintop in Tennessee, I am certainly not the least of sinners.
I have qualifications.
There are probably log files. 💾
📖 Titus Chapter 2 — With the Instructions Left In
Pastor Chris spoke from Titus Chapter 2, but what I especially appreciated was that he didn’t leave the chapter sitting two thousand years away from us.
He brought it home.
The message explored the responsibilities and relationships found within a family — fathers, mothers, children — and then widened that circle to include the larger church family around them.
And that is where the lesson became particularly practical.
Families don’t live their lives inside neat little Sunday-school illustrations.
Real families deal with bills.
Jobs.
Illness.
Children.
Parents getting older.
Schedules.
Cars that mysteriously start making a noise precisely three days after the warranty expires. 🚗🔧
And approximately seventeen other things that somebody forgot to put on the calendar.
Pastor Chris talked about the role of the local church family in helping people carry those ordinary burdens of life.
Not just the dramatic ones.
The everyday ones.
Sometimes helping somebody doesn’t require a committee, a program, or a twelve-page strategic plan.
Sometimes it means noticing that somebody is struggling and saying:
“How can I help?”
And then actually helping.
That’s a pretty powerful idea. ❤️
🤝 Faith Works Better When It Leaves the Building
One of the things I enjoyed most about Chris’s message was the way he mixed Scripture with personal stories and real-life examples.
That makes a difference.
Because I can read Titus Chapter 2 on a screen.
I can ask artificial intelligence to summarize Titus Chapter 2.
I can probably have AI generate a chart explaining Titus Chapter 2, color-code it, cross-reference six translations, build a database around it, and produce a dashboard showing our quarterly progress toward becoming better human beings. 📊🤖
But eventually somebody has to actually live it.
And unfortunately, there is still no software update for that.
That part remains manual.
Pastor Chris kept bringing the lesson back to ordinary life: husbands, wives, parents, children, older members of the church, younger members of the church, and the responsibility each generation has toward the others.
That struck me as particularly important in a small community.
Because in places like Dunlap and Sequatchie County, the people sitting beside you in church may also be the people you see at the grocery store, at a ballgame, at the doctor’s office, in the school pickup line, or standing beside the road wondering why their truck has suddenly decided it no longer believes in transportation.
Community is not an abstract concept here.
You bump into it. 👋
🤖 Apparently AI May Not Be the Road to Sanctification
I should probably confess that I spend a considerable amount of my life surrounded by artificial intelligence.
Depending on whom you ask on Facebook, this means I am either participating in mankind’s greatest technological advancement or personally constructing the infrastructure required for the arrival of the Antichrist.
Opinions vary. 😅
So while Pastor Chris was talking about Christian living, responsibility, family, and setting an example for others, I did briefly wonder whether I needed to go home afterward and cleanse the impure thoughts residing in my data center.
There are GPUs in there that have almost certainly generated questionable paragraphs.
Some of those language models have hallucinated.
I’m reasonably certain the Bible has something to say about bearing false witness. 🤔
I’ve also occasionally asked AI to rewrite something three or four times because I didn’t like its first answer.
I’m not sure whether that qualifies as correcting a brother in love or simply digital wrath.
The theologians can sort that one out.
Still, I came away reasonably confident that artificial intelligence itself wasn’t the main concern of Titus Chapter 2.
The human operating it probably deserves considerably more scrutiny.
Unfortunately, that put the attention right back on me. 😇
🏡 What I Found at Lee Station
Beyond the sermon, I enjoyed meeting members of the church and their families.
There is something valuable about simply walking into another local congregation, meeting people, hearing their stories, and experiencing a little piece of their church family.
Churches aren’t buildings.
They’re collections of people.
People with histories.
People raising children.
People caring for parents.
People celebrating good news.
People carrying things nobody else can see.
And sometimes people just trying to get through Tuesday.
That was really the heart of what I took away from Pastor Chris’s message.
The church family matters because life was never designed to be carried entirely alone.
There are burdens that become lighter simply because somebody else picks up one end. 🙏
🌱 A New Pastor and a New Chapter
Chris Lewis is beginning a new chapter as pastor of Lee Station Baptist Church, alongside his wife Audria and their family.
From my first visit, I appreciated his ability to combine Biblical teaching, personal experience, humor, and practical application in a way that made the lesson easy to follow and easier to remember.
That’s not always easy to do.
It is one thing to explain Scripture.
It is another to help people picture what it looks like Monday morning.
Chris did that well.
And I enjoyed the experience.
🚪 You Might Want to Visit
So here’s my invitation.
If you live around Dunlap or Sequatchie County and you’re looking for a church family — or maybe you’ve simply been meaning to visit a local church and haven’t gotten around to it — consider stopping by Lee Station Baptist Church and meeting Pastor Chris, Audria, their family, and the folks there.
You don’t have to have everything figured out before you walk through the door.
Unless, of course, you’re already perfect.
In that case, you and I should probably compare notes. 😇
I have apparently been doing exceptionally well myself.
The Apostle Paul called himself the chief of sinners.
I hesitate to contradict an Apostle, so I’ll simply say I’ve been competing in a very strong division.
Fortunately, churches were never intended to be museums for perfect people.
They’re families.
And like every good family, sometimes somebody teaches, somebody encourages, somebody listens, somebody cooks something, somebody helps carry a burden — and occasionally somebody politely suggests that the fellow in the back needs to repent for whatever he’s been doing with those artificial-intelligence machines. 🤖🔥
Fair enough.
I enjoyed my Sunday at Lee Station Baptist Church.
I enjoyed the people.
I enjoyed Pastor Chris’s message.
And I especially appreciated being reminded that faith becomes most meaningful when it makes the trip from the church pew into ordinary everyday life.
Even if ordinary everyday life happens to include a data center full of artificial intelligence.
I’ll keep working on that part. 🙏💾
👉 Learn more about Lee Station Baptist Church:
Visit the Lee Station Baptist Church listing on Dunlap.Directory
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