For the first time in 15 years, I’ve been looking for a new church home. I prefer to find a church, stick with it, and dig in, becoming obnoxiously involved. The reason I’m looking now is because I have moved to a new city.
Unlike other areas of our world, I have numerous choices of where to worship. Churches large and small and of every stripe dot the landscape for miles around like fireflies on a summer’s eve.
With all these options, where is God wanting me to be planted?
Till now I’ve been church window-gazing. Window gazing is when you look in without signing anything, just checking it out. In recent months, I’ve visited a dozen congregations, checked out their online presence, joined in worship, listened to sermons, watched how people relate to each other – and to me. Or not.
Good preaching, good worship, good human connectivity, those are all basics. As is a keen sense of mission, both global and local, both eternal and temporal.
Preaching style and content, given my own training, matter greatly. When someone up front is preaching, does my heresy gyrometer go crazy? Does the preaching feel manipulative? Or head pounding? Does it flow out of the scriptures without being yanked out like a bad tooth? Does it engage me, get me thinking, cause me to examine my own life? Draw me closer to God and to God’s mission?
Worship is more than just music – the whole service is an act of worship, as is serving outside the church building. But in this context, I am talking about the elements of the gathering where we sing, read Scripture, pray, sit, or kneel in silence, and draw our attention to God.
In this window gazing season, I’ve seen all sorts of worship styles. I could give them names, but my terms might conjure up something quite different from what is in your head. So let me break it down a bit. I love the old hymns and choruses, hum them all day long, know many of the verses by heart. Again, my version of old may not be yours. I grew up with a wide variety of worship styles actually – old stained-glass hymns, old (Black-influenced) gospel, turn-of-the-last-century Pentecostal, mid-century gospel, country, bluegrass, Jesus movement music, Scripture songs, praise choruses – and that was all before the contemporary Christian music scene.
But I also love a new song. And there are some amazing ones being written these days. Not all will become classics, but then many of the old songs didn’t hang around either.
In the end, it is not the style that appeals as much as the content (solid) and intent (devoted). Is it a routine? Is it a pep rally? Is it manipulative? Or is it thoughtful (whether loud or soft), a drawing near to God? Do I sense that those up front are themselves really worshipping God and inviting us (not forcing us) to join them?
Generally, I come to church ready to worship. I get that others are not necessarily in the same space – and that is all right with me. God takes us where we are. But because I am ready, I don’t want to be cajoled into joining in. Guilt trips don’t belong in church. I just want to get on with it and let others catch a ride when they are ready. And they’ll be more ready if an inviting scene has already been set.
As far as human connectivity is concerned, I can pass the peace with the best of the Catholics and Lutherans or gab with the loosest of low church folk, though I don’t like the “shake a hundred hands in two minutes” schtick. Most important is whether I sense that the congregation is open to having new people join in, that these newcomers are treated as people with value, not to win as a prize or to avoid as germ ridden. Real human connectivity takes time, but I’ve noticed in my window shopping that some churches do it much better than others.
In each visit, I’ve looked for signs that mission is part and parcel to the congregation’s life. Mission is life! I remember one pastor years ago telling me, “I’ve built this church; now I’m going to build it into a missions church.” Too late. If it is not baked into the DNA, it won’t happen. Mission, missions, missional, however you want to say it, is all about being outwardly focused, both locally and globally. It starts with how we greet visitors, and extends to total engagement, both to the guy sleeping outside the church door and to the woman struggling to make life work on the far side of the globe.
But there are other things that matter to me as well.
Character is even more important than all the visible indicators, something hard to sniff out via mere window gazing. How do people relate to and treat each other? Is the platform diverse? Does the head pastor share or hog the limelight? Are people used or empowered? Does the church exude healthy transparency?
I have devoted my life to focusing on how we are to live out our faith. I’m looking for a church home that is prophetic about ethnic diversity in the body of Christ and in church leadership; affirms both male and female leadership; thoughtfully addresses how church and society are to interact, and how church, society, and government are to treat the most vulnerable in our midst. I certainly want a church that sees that the life of faith matters now – and a thousand years from now.
Okay, maybe I won’t find my ideal. Does it even exist? At least as something to strive for, as much as we are all – individually and corporately – works of grace, continually being made into the image of Christ. I am discovering there are numerous churches within my reach that are hungry for God and for growing in grace.
So where do I settle? (By settle, I mean, not settle for less but settle for God’s best for me at this time in my life.) Where does God want me to lean in, to shine through me? This is the question that is driving my search for a new church home.
Stay tuned for a follow-up post. Subscribe here so you can be notified when it comes out.