Church Musings

it is 10 am on sunday morning and i am struggling with the concept of church.  jason has been working a lot of overtime and worked all day yesterday, so he is exhausted and in bed.  ari and jessi have been sick all week which has required me to stay home from work for four days and not go anywhere this weekend.  

when i heard the clock chime, i wished i was at church.  but even the thought of leaving the girls with jason and going by myself has it's own negative feelings.  so i am going to simply put my thoughts down here and let it go for now.

as a child this picture, although fancier than the churches i attended, was a lot of what i understood as church.  church was a building with big wooden benches (pews) where we would spend most of the day sunday singing songs, learning about God, and talking with other christians.  most of these memories are positive ones, except for the occasional choir rehearsal that seemed to take forever, but overall, i had friends there and felt like church was a happy place.  keyword... happy place

then i went to bible college.  the first weekend my roommate and i decided we were going to find a church to go to on sunday.  it was saturday night and we opened the phone book yellow pages to churches, thinking that we could easily find a baptist church (where i went as a child) or a bible church (where my roommate went as a child).  we became very shocked to find that the yellow pages in grand rapids, mi, devote several pages to churches and we were overwhelmed.  there were churches we had never even heard of.  over the course of the years we attended many churches.  some by recommendations of school friends and some by pure curiosity.  in the two years i went to that school, i never did find a church where i felt comfortable.  there was one church downtown that i liked, but i could only go there when i was able to get a ride and i never really felt invested completely.

then i went to college of the ozarks by branson, missouri and i went to the baptist church there in branson.  it was a pretty positive experience, but again, i was not invested.  then jason and i got married and he found a job as a youth pastor in nixa, missouri.  the youth group kids were great to work with, but the church felt like a giant obstacle to the faith.  i hit my limit when i realized that a girl i was working with at the ymca was sharing with me her attempts to find a church and the judgement she received everywhere she went.  i realized that i couldn't invite her to the church where jason and i were going because she would definitely be judged their too.

so then jason and i started attending a charismatic church for the first time.  we really enjoyed this and even got to the point where i joined the choir and was having fun, when we felt a tug to another church.  along this entire journey, jason and i always saw eye to eye and had very little difficulty making the church jumps together.  it was like we were totally in sync with where we should be.  this next church was probably the most fulfilling as far as the level of service that we found there.  we loved it and were there at least two if not four days a week.  that church hurt the most.  when we first came, many people told jason that they felt that God was calling him to be the youth pastor at their church.  they prayed over him and we had confirmations all around. yet, when it came time to hire someone, they hired another person.  a person that only stayed for a couple of years and then became a pastor elsewhere.  we just stopped going to church for a while and it wasn't long before we moved to kansas city, missouri.

it took us over a year to find a place that we thought was right for us.  and again, once we found it, we wanted to be there all the time.  we would even go on vacation and when we came back sunday evening, we would stop by the church to see people on the way home.  we had our first girls and felt all of the love and support and we really felt those wounds heal from the previous hurts.  and we learned that church is not a place, it is people.  God's people carrying his message of love everywhere.  we knew this in our hearts, but it was here that we were finally able to meet with other people that were trying to use the meetings with God's people as the fuel for what they do every day.  we never heard...come to church...we are important...it's friends sunday.  we heard, now let's apply the Word to monday morning. and it was refreshing and exciting.

then...as seems to be the trend.  troubles in the water overturned our vessel and we were again fighting to stay afloat.  we quit for a while, but this time we decided to go back and try again.

so after all the history, here i am at the struggle in my heart and mind.  jason and i are in a dry spell.  we blame circumstances (working on my master's degree, bus inspection, gone for the weekend) but we have not been to church as a family since october.  i have taken the girls by myself a couple of times, but we have not gone as a family.  and this is the first time in our marriage that jason and i do not sense the same direction.

i think that jason is ready to move on and i am not sure i am ready to let go.  at this point i am wondering what i am holding on to... a memory for what was and what i wish to be?  friends that i care about?  the excitement of attending a growing church that agrees with my ideologies and theology?  will worshiping in a different place mean that i will lose the connections with the special friends i have found?  i think that is my biggest fear, but when i look at it here in print it seems that i have already lost the weekly connections, yet i will still get together with the friends i have made and will always love them.

how do you know when to leave a church?  at what point is it time? and since it took us a year to find this one in the first place, how long will our family be unconnected to a community of believers?  will we ever find a place that fits us?  or is that not the point?  have we drifted so far that we need to mold ourselves back to the right place?  i know so many people of our generation that have just stopped going to church... are these the same reasons?  i know that i need to worship and meet with other christians and i long for my children to experience that consistent connectedness to a church body.  i just pray that we can find enough answers to these questions that we can all come together with the right church family and i hope it happens soon.