What to do with Sundays

Church. I grew up in one. Jath grew up in one. I went to the same one for 22 years (ish). Jath went to a different one every 10 or so years, but the pastor usually stayed the same. Simple summary: before we got married, Jath and I had not done a lot of "church hunting".

Enter grad school on the east coast, where I ended up at a somewhat large Presbyterian (not-Wesleyan, but at least PCA) church primarily because most of my church-going classmates attended that same somewhat large Presbyterian church. When Jath joined me a year later, we continued to go and enjoyed the occasional run in with people we knew, but were otherwise fairly uninvolved. As for the Presbyterian thing, the music was a bit . . . dirge-y (not to mention filled with olde-timey reversed phrasing--e.g., "When into the woods goest I, the Lord methinks upon"). The too-simplistic explanation? Presbyterian = Reformed = low(er) view of man = we are worms = sing as if you were a worm, albeit a saved! worm. Contrast this with my upbringing: Wesleyan = Armenian = lots o' free will = I chose God! = skip the worm stuff = Joy! Joy! Joy! Basically, I'm used to singing in a major key more often than not.

When we moved to northern Ohio after grad school, we quickly found a larger Christian Missionary Alliance church and settled in. By settling in, I mean we went on Sundays and tithed. Both are good things, but we had wanted to get more involved in our church than we had before. Because we knew we would only be there for a year, however, we found a lot of reasons to simply go without doing much more. We enjoyed the music and the preaching (and the rather distracting sign language ministry stage right), but we were excited to move to a more permanent place and find a church we could "really" be involved in.

Which brings us to the last three months. We began our church search as most people of our generation do--Google our neighborhood together with the word "church". The result? A lot of churches that seemed not quite our style, for various reasons. What reasons, you ask? (1) I'm not Episcopalian, (2) I've been conditioned by society to believe that quality website = quality organization and have no reason not to apply this belief to churches, (3) sermon audio can tell you a lot about a pastor.

The next several weeks looked like this:

- moderately sized non-denominational church that opted for the "multi-purpose worship center" design (i.e., gym with a stage)

- small, wealthy non-denominational church currently meeting in small, wealthy elementary school while building a European-style cathedral with what appear to be attached townhomes?

- smaller baptist church that loves being a baptist church, friendly 3-4 people our age

- moderately sized Evangelical Free church with v. passionate worship leader guy, impressive youth pastor, and, at the time, a worship song writing contest

- large (v. large) suburban baptist church with aggressive (but well-organized) volunteer campaign

We went back to the last two several times. As for the E-Free church, we liked the size and the worship music, but it was a bit of a drive, and not in an area we were likely to move to (ask me about the awkwardly-executed conclusion to the worship song writing contest offline). We liked the large baptist church too, but it was also a far drive from home and we were still unsure whether we would find a lot of people attending who were in our "stage" of life (e.g., 7 of the 10 groups that met on Sundays were expressly limited to those 40 and over; the couple at the welcome center seemed completely unsure of what to do when we introduced ourselves and asked for info). Nevertheless, we decided that we could find a niche in a large church, volunteer to help where our skills were needed, and learn from those in a more advanced stage of life.

At least that's what we had decided, until one Saturday evening, when we heard a faint yet familiar olde-timey dirge calling us from not too far away . . .

(to be continued)