The Highway Community

Our place of worship on this Sunday was just around at the other end of our town, Palo Alto. The venue was at one of the local high school's auditorium which happens to be just across the Stanford University's campus. Palo Alto has two public high schools -- Gunn and Palo Alto High (a.k.a., Paly) -- and The Highway utilizes Paly's auditorium and some of the calssrooms as their sanctuary on Sundays. Quite a task to have a setup and tear-down volunteers on every Sunday for the community to gather to worship God. I've heard much about this ministry and I was a bit excited just to visit there on this Sunday. When we were there about 15 minutes before the worship time, we quickly noticed coffee and donuts awaiting us in front of the main entrace. Well, we didn't want to dive in right away but were quite pleased to see them. :-) Upon entering the sanctuary we could sense the high-level of energy as the crew were finalizing on all fronts -- sound, lighting, ushers, instruments, and multimedia.
One of the privilege of being there early is we could pick any seat we wanted, so we settled ourselves about midway down, right in the middle of the middle aisle. We had a good view for sure ... but hey we weren't there to watch a school play, so what's big deal? Well, wanted to let you know what type of an ambience we walked into. It felt quite comfortable even though we were the only group in a not-so-small auditorium.

The children program starts after the praise portion of the worship service; they would excuse all the children at that time and I took my children out to the lobby where they were met with the teach to be led the classroom. I followed them there to sign the registration cards and then later return to pick them up from there again.

It so happened that the teacher had the same first and last name as my daughter's 5th grade teacher. Not sure why, but that made it a special event to start with for me and my children. The teacher very warmly took care of my children and later found out that she was quite nice during the class as well. I suspect that there aren't many elementary school kids here and so they were all combined into a single classroom. Later, our kids told us that they told the teacher that we are currently visiting other churches after leaving our previous church which was my kids' only home church; and the teacher told them she will pray for our family as we are in search of our next home church. This was the second special moment at this church because it made us to know that all the local churches are indeed One Church under God where regardless of which church we would end up, how wonderful it is for each other to pray so God would lead us to a place He had planned for us.

A few weeks later, this teacher had sent a "hello" card to our kids saying that it was great to see our kids excited about waiting for God to show our next home church and that she would pray for us. You know, it really was a touch of blessing for us.

The adult worship was followed by the message from the pastor and then some announcements along with a financial report (for the members) especially with respect to the recent church merge with another church in Mountain View. This church was planted in year 2000 but had a vision to spread its scope in a couple of ways over the years. First was its branching of the Highway Video which is a standalone for-profit video production company; and second was this merger with another church. The latter had put some additional financial burdens since January of 2006, but they were poised to step forward with the conviction of God's expansion of their ministry.

After the service, we picked up our kids who were quite excited with the study and other activities they were involved in. After saying our farewells to the teacher, we made a "quick" pitstop by the donuts and coffee as we made our way back home. We had run into a friend who also gave us some background information about the church and that not only made us feel at home but also gave us good insights about this church.

On our way out, we noticed a big trailer parked in a corner of the parking lot. I suppose that's where all the nomadic equipments go back in afterwards. Again, that's a huge commitment to do this every week. We also noticed many gray-colored crates/cabinets where various things are stored in and they had label, "Portable Church". I didn't realize there actually is a company dedicated to assist churches like these.

Website: www.highway.org
Worship Times: 9:30am for both Paly and Mountain View locations. Please visit their website for children program information.