The Search for a Church

Every new Christian, and especially those who come to faith after a certain mature age, comes to a point where they question why we worship communally if this Christian life is supposed to be about an individual's personal relationship with God. If in the end, this Christian walk is about me and God, then why the integral role of other people? What can I gain from going to church, when in this information age, I can access sermons and hymns and concordance references instantaneously from my own living room? We preach that God pursues our hearts, that He abhors legalism and that at the end of days, He won't be touting the statistics of our church attendance or whether we wore a tie on Sundays. And if we really believe that, shouldn't zero church attendance be a legitimate option?

We certainly can't spend life in a vacuum. Our growth will be stunted. We will not have the opportunity to love and be loved, and all that Scripture and its truth will remain an abstract and a nice set of ideas if we don't spend our lives around people, dealing with the messiness and vulnerability and beauty of life in Christ. That's why most of the commandments and guidance we get from the Bible is about how to deal with other people. Spending our lives studying Scripture by ourselves is about as safe, confining, and lonely as it sounds. So much for the living room Christian community of one.

By and large, I didn't go to church throughout my undergraduate years. My rationale was that I had everything a church could offer with my campus ministry. I was being fed spiritually, and I had a role where I was feeding others. I had strong fellowship with other believers, in a Christ-centered community of college students. I had a weekly opportunity to worship and pray corporately, and different ministry opportunities that more or less encompassed what I could've done at a church. I connected with my brothers and sisters in Christ: they encouraged me to grow in the Lord, and I did the same, and I think that's what church is all about.

People kept telling me I needed to join an actual church, but I never saw the reason why, and I still really don't see that I should have. But it might've made it easier for the hereafter.

I've been church-shopping for several months now without finding one that I've really liked. And it's made me stop and wonder whether I just haven't found it yet or whether I need to revise my search criteria. What church really is supposed to be.

I've never liked people who put a lot of meaningless criteria on what makes an acceptable church. "I can't go to a church that plays that contemporary Christian music." "Oh, I really don't like large churches. They're so impersonal and they don't care about you at all." "I don't like the way they elect their deacons." "Why don't they have a homeless ministry?" In the end, I like to think that what I'm looking for is a first: a good, strong, loving, encouraging community who is in love with Christ and who love other people well, and second: solid, challenging, relevant Biblical teaching. I like to think that I'm not picky or partial about the other trivialities of whether they make you wear a tie or whether they prefer King James to NIV.

It's hard to tell whether the places I've found have fallen short of those criteria or whether I've inadvertently appended other criteria to my list of two.

I haven't found a place where I've felt the teaching is intelligent, challenging, and solidly Biblically based. I suspect that the Baptist churches I've mostly been attending have strong roots in storytelling rhetoric in sermons, and a lot of their stories have made no sense or don't really follow from the passages at hand. I think I really just want a pastor whom I think is smarter than me. It might relate to why I skipped so many classes in college.

I haven't found a place where most of the congregants are under the age of sixty. Is this concern legitimate because I haven't found people I can really relate to or is it trivial because I'm concerned with the comfort zone of people in their 20's?

I haven't found a place where everyone didn't love the acting of Kirk Cameron, especially in Fireproof. I saw Left Behind. As much as I would love to root for evangelical film, it was excruciatingly bad. I know it's a picky little thing, but I really want to find people who agree with the obvious reality that he is not a good actor.

I'm sure in some respects, it's like a relationship, where after a certain point, you have to grow to love something for its beauty in spite of some misgivings and flaws. "The church is a whore, but she's my mother," right, Augustine?

In short, I haven't found a place I want to return to, and I'm wondering if I'm looking in the wrong places or if I'm looking wrongly at places.

I think back to the books in the New Testament, of the early days of church-founding, where former fishermen and tax collectors traveled itinerant from community to community founding congregations that were hungry for Jesus and struggling to come up with some sort of order and discipline for their corporate faith. I imagine that a believer back then would have had to settle for his local Christian community, made up of widows and orphans and beggars and scholars and masons and carpenters. I imagine that they rejoiced in the love of the Father and in each other.

And only in America today do I have this vast array of churches from which to choose. It wouldn't even be an issue in Zimbabwe or Myanmar. But I do live here and now. I do have a vast array of options before me, and that means I should take the decision seriously. The very phrase "church-shopping" makes the holy Bride of Christ sound like an automobile with various features I can choose by preference. I hate the caprice and irreverence of my approach. My search may change direction, and it continues.

Further bulletins as events warrant.