Churches We Visited

As I’ve mentioned before, we’re visiting churches.  Finding a church home has not gone as quickly as I had originally envisioned because first we thought we were going to live in one city and thus visited churches there, and then we realized we weren’t but were staying in a house in another part of the Metroplex and so decided to visit good (and renowned) churches in that area.  And now that we’re “here,” there are a couple of churches that we’ve heard good things about and want to visit, but for one reason or another we don’t anticipate that we’ll make one of these our church home.  That is true for the church we visited last week and the one we visited today.

I’ve always thought of myself as a “Baptist,” even though I haven’t been a member of a Baptist church in 15 years.  Probably the last place I would expect to go is to an Anglican church.  But last week, at a Baptist church, my feeling was that I had been to heaven but Jesus wasn’t there.  I realize that that statement demands more of an explanation than I am going to give it, but suffice it for now to say that the service was spectacularly produced but entirely self-focused, and the pastor seemed to love himself above all.  But they had an amazing facility, with everything but streets paved with gold.

This week we went to a “non-Baptist” church.  We were about ten minutes late getting into the service (yes, the church maze when dropping off four kids in classrooms can be tricky), and I may have missed something before we arrived.  But for the first half of the service that we were there, I felt right at home.  The singing was beautiful, and the songs were ones I am familiar with.  The pastor (actually not a pastor but a “rector”) preached a very solid, biblical message (and so was the one he preached last week, which I listened to last night on the internet before we visited).  I think we are on the same page as far as our spiritual pursuit.  Thus I was seriously questioning my denominational categories midway through the service.

The second part of the service, however, removed some of my hope that I could actually belong to this church.  While described to us by a couple of people we met in recent weeks who attend there (we actually met them both when they were hosting garage sales!) as “liturgical,” it wasn’t the “liturgy” that bothered me.  Reading prepared prayers has a certain value.  Having the congregation recite those prayers is also of value.  Kneeling at different points was different from my experience, but no problem here either.  What I struggled with was the feeling, towards the end of the service, and particularly in connection with the “Eucharist” (Lord’s supper) that I was in a Catholic church.  I’m going to offend with this next statement, but this is my blog and I have no reluctance in stating how I feel.  To me, Catholic = pagan.  I do not say this from reading many books about their theology (I haven’t).  I don’t say this from what someone has taught me (they haven’t).  I say this from my own experience in living in Israel and visiting other countries, including Italy and the Vatican.  Those rituals, including the priests’ offering of the “sacrament,” seem entirely out of touch with New Testament teaching.  I realize that the things I associate those rituals with are not necessarily part of what I saw today.  But it is hard for me to disassociate them.  The distinction made between the “priesthood” and the “laity” was also troubling.  And so I left the service feeling that I had just been to a schizophrenic church.  From one perspective though, the “schizophrenia” is a good thing, in that solid, biblical teaching is largely absent from churches like this.

The next time you find yourself without a church home, you might take a few weeks to go and visit some churches outside your regular orbit.  You might find it very instructive.