Random Thoughts

Just Visiting

Today’s blog is personal, because something’s been on my mind since this morning. I’ve been reading Beyond the Pale’s musings about her own church travails, and thinking about the parallels between her apparently dissimilar situation and mine.

I’ve been attending a very large local church for over a year now. It’s a church that, two years ago, I would never have considered attending. Three years ago I would have laughed in the face of anyone who’d said “You’ll become a regular visitor here.”

It’s the first time in my adult life I’ve been a perpetual church visitor; I’ve always been a member. I like belonging to things, whether they are message boards, school associations, political parties, or churches. I like to contribute, to be a part of things. I don’t like being an outsider.

I’ve been a church outsider since May of 2008. That’s when the elders of the small church I’d belonged to for nearly a decade decided that 50 families just weren’t enough, and that–even though the church’s accounts weren’t in the red (I would know, my husband was a treasurer) the church wasn’t accomplishing its mission. So the logical thing–to them–was to disband.

It hurt. A lot. It felt like I was being handed divorce papers without cause. A “what did I do wrong, can’t we work this out, please don’t do this” feeling.

But so it went. And I and my family spent months visiting other churches. Small, medium, big, mainstream denominational, non-denominational, whacked out fringe denominational (that one was an accident) and at one point I swear I considered Catholicism just to be somewhere. Somewhere solid where I could say “This is home.”

It didn’t happen. Some of the places that might have worked for me didn’t work for MrRandomThoughts (one in particular we visited for over four months). Some didn’t work for Youngest Son. Eventually we ended up at The Mothership — at my former church we called this place “The Mothership” because it’s the largest church in our community. And it kind of looks like it landed on the big grassy lawn it’s perched upon.

Prior to our arrival, this church had gone through hell with a promiscuous pastor, a year of interim pastors, and only now, just as we began attending, had they hired a permanent pastor. He’s a fellow who is the complete opposite of the scoundrel who formerly filled their pulpit–a fresh faced preppy forty something fellow straight out of the Midwest by way of a small town with a big church in Virginia. Three kids, a great wife, and as doctrinally solid as granite rock. It looks like this time the elders got it right.

I do not trust church elders though. They took away my last church, and they screwed over this one when they hired the current pastor’s philandering surfer boy predecessor. But I figure this church is predisastered. It’s safe now, it’s already had the spiritual equivalent of an airplane through the roof.

Still, I just can’t bring myself to consider joining this church.There’s something about it that annoys me. The artificial fog that is pumped onto the stage during the worship songs, the not-quite-hitting-it attempt at a rock band, the dozens of Hummers, Mercedes and Lexus automobiles that fill the parking lot, the auditorium that seats over 2800 people…it’s all so affluent and so theatrically driven…

This Sunday, when they showed a media presentation about the Elders (a new one just was elected) I found myself actually getting angry. I’m still not sure why, except that I don’t want to hear about the middle aged affluent white men who can directly influence my ability to worship at a given place.

Yep, I’ve definitely got issues with elder boards.

And I really don’t fit in here.

I tried; two months after we began visiting, I went to the annual all-church women’s luncheon. The guest speaker happened to be someone I know personally from Youngest Son’s grade school. She’s also a minor celebrity, which is why she was the guest speaker (she happens to be a very authentic, deeply spiritual woman too). I did not get to say hello to her. There were too many women talking to her, too many who wanted her attention, and I felt frankly odd about working my way through the crowd of them. I sat at a table where I knew no one. The other women knew each other. Beyond greeting me with a smile or a nod, they ignored me. I am a rather sociable person, but there has to be some reciprocal effort, and on their part, there wasn’t.

They began the event without prayer. Someone figured out that it might be nice to pray as we started to eat, so they threw that in. For the most part, it seemed to be a chance for the women who knew each other to gossip about their daily lives. There was a psuedo-cooking demonstration, and a sort-of-craft demonstration, and music by the couple who regularly lead Sunday worship. As a duet they’re good, better than they are on Sunday morning when not-quite-hitting-it band surrounds them. And then there was my friend, who gave a very moving and challenging talk. People at my table left during it.

I won’t go to another women’s luncheon at this church. I wish I could have gotten the cost of the ticket back too.

Other events, family things held outside on the massive lawn, can be somewhat better. I can wander around with a cup of coffee in my hand smile and say hello to strangers, and not feel too uncomfortable at being ignored. Mostly I just show up on Sundays and try to get my head and heart into some kind of worship, despite the theatrical staging, and hang on until the sermon.

The pastor’s sermons are always good. He cares a lot about ministry and missions, he’s willing to address the tough stuff too about faith and sin. I wonder if he and his family are happy here. I hope they are, but they’re so different from everyone else in the building, myself included. They remind me of what I was like when I first came to California from Illinois. They aren’t jaded. I hope this place and the faint Hollywood vibe it puts out doesn’t suck the joy out of their lives.

The youth group at The Mothership is really kicking it for Youngest Son though, and MrRandomThoughts is happy in obscurity, his involvement limited to sitting in the fifth row, left center section every Sunday. So I guess we’ll just keep visiting.

I miss my old church so darned much.