Really, I should let Michael write this post, seeing as he's been the one talking to all the pastors and church secretaries and elders and what not. But since he's on the phone right now, and I'm the one with the inspiration to blog about it, I'm gonna go ahead and write this one.
Finding a good church has been harder than I thought. I often hear a lot of missions mobilizations people talk about how in places like America, people can wander into churches and hear the gospel. They use this to contrast the need for evangelical Christians to go out into "unreached, unengaged" areas where there are no churches for people to walk into. And I believed that when I left America two years ago, claiming the same ambitions of the apostle Paul.
Don't get me wrong, I still think that's true. I remember a friend telling me that in her husband's hometown in central Iowa there were 40 churches for 10,000. In my city in Big Red, there were 10,000,000 people and 2 churches. And I do think that Americans are able to walk into most churches and hear a solid, complete, and biblical presentation of the gospel message. But beyond that, it's hard to find a place to belong.
Maybe we're too picky. We just got married, so we want to go to a church with young married people. We are convicted by Scriptures and the Holy Spirit that missions are our life calling, so we want to go to a church that gets excited about that stuff. We like punk rock and electric guitars, so we want to go to a church that worships in a contemporary and passionate style. And we believe that the Word of God is infallible and the ultimate authority on what it means to be a Christian, so we want to go to a church that delights in the meditation of the Word and teaches it with authority.
Oh, and we're Calvinist.
I don't bring that up to start debates or sit on a high horse or stand on a soap box or whatever. I say that because, well, that might be the part that makes us too picky.
Anyway, so first we started going to churches we knew, churches I grew up in or my family grew up in, and it was nice except for the fact that there aren't young married people, or they don't sing contemporary music, or they aren't yet to the point of being mission-minded.
So we branched out a little, and we started going elsewhere. We went to one church where the preacher didn't open the Bible not a single time. Another time, we asked to talk to an elder about doctrinal views and when we told him we were Calvinist, he told us we needed to study the Scriptures and not be guided by things we'd heard. (That bothered me because he assumed I hadn't, that I'd been blown around on this Calvinist-Armenian debate as if it's something many blow-around people get involved in...)
Then Michael started calling churches out of the phone book, to get some of these questions answered beforehand. He called 10 or 12 churches and most had phone numbers that were out of service, or answering machines with old messages. Only two actually answered and talked to him. And over the last week, a few have called back and talked to him, sometimes at length, about who they are, what they believe, what's happened in their churches, and what we should believe.
Sometimes it's good, but not quite there. Old preachers who are Bible-believing and true to their very souls but hang on to the King James Version as the only trust-worthy translation. Friendly, welcoming people who claim to be reformed but ordain women. Once, Michael has a really good, promising conversation with a preacher at a Baptist church in the next town over. Well, it was good until Michael asked, "Where on the Calvinist-Armeneist (Poor West Texan Michael who doesn't always get his word ending right...) spectrum would your church fall?" And the man began going through each of Calvinism's five points explaining where he stood on each of them. Then he got to Limited Atonement and said, "That's just plain heresy."
I was, at the time, standing in front of the mirror doing my hair when I just about flipped out. I was remembering Paul saying something to the Romans about don't let people call unholy what you regard as holy, throwing bobby pins and mouthing vehemently to Michael, "We are not going to a church where they think we're heretics!"
But that's not the point. We should know better than to expect Calvinist churches to paint their doctrinal stances on their church signs. And we should expect that there are a lot of churches with organs and hymns. The saddest part of this whole experience has been that (1) nearly every church we've called recently experienced a split, and (2) that there are so many churches but so few that are relevant to people who already believe in Jesus, let alone to people who don't.
As we drove home from church today, I told Michael, "I miss Sunday mornings in Big Red. Everybody looked at the word and had something to say and we learned and we grew and we encouraged each other." Why is it that in America, the land of abundance, it's so hard to walk out of church and say the same thing?
