Living in a new town brings newness to every aspect of life. The places you frequent, the places you shop, the people you live next to, it all changes. So one thing Alex and I have been doing the past few weeks has been looking at churches.
I, Arthur, am a little more, shall we say, adventurous when it comes to church visiting. Spending my entire life in the prototypical Baptist/Nondenominational fold of churches, I have enjoyed seeing how different denominations worship God, and it has been a very enlightening experience.
I started living in the place we now share about a month before Alex and I got married, and one of the first churches I went to when Alex wasn't here was an Episcopal church. I don't know how many of you have had the experience, but I would highly recommend it. The service is based highly around ritual, so much so that it would be difficult to follow without a friendly Episcopalian walking you through it. Fortunately, my experience has been that Episcopalians are quite friendly and no less than three asked me if I needed any help following on.
The next weekend I (Alex) was in town on Sunday and was talked into attending a Presbyterian service. I am somewhat unadventurous when it comes to searching for churches. I grew up attending a simple country Baptist church. We arrived at the church 10 minutes before the service was slated to start and there were three cars in the parking lot. After roaming the church for a few minutes we finally saw someone who realized we were visitors and lead us to where the service was held. Now it was probably pretty easy to tell we were visitors since the rest of the attendees all get senior citizen discounts so we din't blend in so well. We also didn't blend in so well when Arthur, with his full and hard-to-miss voice, chimed in with the wrong words to the Lord's Prayer (this gang of Presbies are debtors, not trespassers). I was also taken aback when they sang the Doxology to a melody that sounded more like a show tune. You just can't mess with the Doxology.
One thing that I think shocked both of us was just how welcoming and inviting every church was. We both are coming from a college town where everyone is just kind of transitioning, with college students being around for a short time and even for the time they are a part of the community going home for breaks and other events. People would come and go from church services so often that it simply is too much for a member of a church in that setting to know if someone is new or if they have been attending for multiple years, and so people just tended to leave you alone.
Here, my goodness! Everyone knows everyone, and if you're not part of the known everyone then everyone wants to make you part of their everyone. It has been such a welcoming atmosphere, it truly has made this a gratifying process. Its too bad that we need to settle on a single congregation, and that could be hard considering we've got a baptist lady wanting to give us fresh produce from her garden!
What I, Arthur, have really taken away from this process has is a deep appreciation for strengths of all types of worship. Growing up as I have, a common criticism I have heard about the more ritual based churches is the 'canned' worship; that its too difficult to be sincere when you're reading something off a page. However, I think we can all appreciate how we do things in ritual for a memorial day service, or how in the most meaningful of occasions we default to a tradition. Ritual when practiced rightly can instill a sense of the holiness of the God we worship, it can connect us to previous generations who worshiped in much the same way, and it can move our focus away from ourselves and how edified we are by what's going on and towards God; and when our focus is thus rightly aligned, we cannot help but be edified.
That it not to say that this method is in any way superior to how I grew up going to church. If I were to draw a distinction, I would say it is between coming to God as an individual versus corporately. It is important to have a personal connection to God and our worship should achieve this. It is also important to come before God as part of a collective body that comprises the bride of Christ, and our worship should achieve this too. However that it best achieved for a certain body of believers, they should recognize the legitimacy of the worship of others looking to serve, and in this, once again, love will conquer all. Omnia vincit amor!
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