Hope Presybterian Church in Grayslake, IL

I was recently at the OPC church directory and was interested to see a link for Hope Presbyterian in Grayslake, IL. Although I'm no longer Presbyterian (largely over baptism, but other issues as well), I remember this Orthodox Presbyterian Church well and it was a blessing to be a part of this fellowship years ago. Pastor Dennis Disselkoen was one of the first pastors I'm familiar with who taught in a very straight-forward exegetical teaching style - even on holidays, if he was working through a particular book, he'd keep going through that book in lieu of a Christmas-themed sermon.  I liked that.

We attended Hope back in the early 00's, as it was the first church we attended when we moved to the north Chicago suburbs. My Dad was formerly with the OPC, so it was a denomination I was very familiar with, including it's fondness for the Trinity hymnal and the Westminster standards. The church was small at that time, and meeting in a high school (shortly after that in a store front location, if I recall.) The attendance was small but the teaching was solid, and I'm glad to see that Pastor Disselkoen has some MP3 audio sermons linked on the church site.  A note, though, is that the page is currently setup so that if you go to the audio page, it starts to load up each message into the cache, so if you have a brutally old computer like I do, this slows things down.  So I suggest going to the page, use DownThemAll! and download the MP3s, then route back to a different page of the site while it runs.

Anyhow, Hope OPC was a very good mission work and the teaching was solid.  Of course, they subscribed to the Westminster Confession of Faith, of which I have a few issues here and there (baptism and other things.)  I've actually been working through G. I. Williamson's study guide to the Confession recently, and while I think he does a good job elaborating on what the Confessions talk about, just like with the Presbyterian views I just have a hard time making some of the doctrine jive with scripture.  Probably more on that in a later post.