Centreville Presbyterian Church

Today we worshiped at Centreville Presbyterian Church, 15450 Lee Highway, Centreville, VA 20120, 703.830.0098, www.centrevillepres.com, Rev. J. Robin Bromhead, Senior Pastor.


Bob’s thoughts:

We always enjoy visiting Centreville in Virginia, and I will admit up front being distracted by my children and grandchildren.

The sermon was well presented; it was based on the parable of the tares growing among the wheat planted by the farmer. I have realized there is another thing lacking in not having an Order of Worship – no record of the Scripture that was used.

A major improvement in the praise worship was some younger female voices. I found with the additional worship service fewer people realized we were visitors, or they have seen us enough to think we were members. I was surprised that Jan and I were about the only ones wearing red to celebrate Pentecost.

I was very pleased to learn from the newsletter that the pastor will be taking a sabbatical after 30 years of ordained ministry.


Jan’s thoughts:

We often have visited Centreville since we began traveling to Manassas to see our daughter and son-in-law, Jill and Scott, seven years ago, so we’ve been privileged to watch from a distance, so to speak, as this church evolved over that period. We got to know the Senior Pastor, Rob, and the Associate Pastor, Neil, who has since moved on. Our entire family worshiped here with our late son Dan on our way back from Parris Island just over four years ago, another daughter did her internship here, and now all three of Jill and Scott’s children have been baptized here.

Centreville has grown a great deal and recently established a third worship service. Yesterday we arrived early for the middle (9:45) service, and a woman approached me to chat. In the course of the conversation she explained that her way of making sure she sees her friends from all three services is to attend the middle service so she can see her friends who attend the first service on her way in and their way out and see her friends from the third service on her way out and their way in. I couldn’t help admiring her thought process and her commitment to not allowing change to cause distance between her and her friends.

Obviously, with this sort of history, I can’t comment on Centreville as a first-time visitor. However, I can comment as a long-term repeat visitor, and I like this church very much. It has a lot going for it in terms of the people who worship there, their local, national, and international mission outreach efforts, and their pastor.

Pastor Rob’s sermon was entitled “Future Realities of the Kingdom” and it is part of a series on “The Kingdom of God.” (By the way, you can listen to this or many other sermons on the church website or, like me, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes.) Rob is an enthusiastic, passionate preacher. Usually I focus more on the theology of a sermon than on any stories that are told, but this time what I heard most loudly was a story which was credited to Rev. Bruce Thielemann, who served as pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh.

The story (to the best of my recollection) centered around a grub that lived on the ocean floor, who noticed that some of his friends would climb a leaf to the surface, but they never returned. So he and his other friends made a pact that if one of them climbed the leaf, they would return and tell the others all about where it led. Soon it came time for this grub to climb the leaf, and when he emerged from the water he morphed into a beautiful dragonfly (an oxymoron, in my opinion). He briefly considered going back to honor his pact, but knew that in this new form his friends would not recognize him, and besides it was so beautiful in this new world, and he could now fly, so he decided to wait for his friends to join him.

Although I still don’t love dragonflies, I do love this story. It depicts the transition as such an easy thing, and somehow visualizing the difference between a grub and a dragonfly is easier than visualizing the difference between my son as I knew him in this world and as he is now. It’s a story of hope, and sometimes that’s the best thing there is.