Church Shopping, Again

Queen Anne silver Communion Service by Francis Garthone, St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Photo by Hantsheroes, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

“The reason why many are still troubled, still seeking, still making little forward progress is because they haven’t yet come to the end of themselves. We’re still trying to give orders, and interfering with God’s work within us. ” A.W. Tozer

I’ve been irregular at best for the last two-plus years about church attendance. When I go, I’ve been increasingly sporadic about where.

Like most people, I had the pandemic and attendant lockdown as an excuse for a year-plus. On the heels of that came a string of health issues, particularly a hip replacement that led to MRSA and an allergic reaction to the first antibiotic prescribed to address it.
My overall vigor level has come back enough for me to be functional, and even robust for periods of a day. So now it’s time to face the question: Where shall I take my place in the bride of Christ?

The journey

I’ve only been what I’d consider an actual Christian for a decade at most. I had to feel my way through a process of sorting out a lifetime of head trips to get there.I was raised in the Presbyterian Church where my father had been a member since 1945. Our family was regular about attendance. I sang in the primary and junior choirs, went to Sunday school after the service, and was confirmed at age 14. My parents, particularly my dad, were comfortable with the approach the congregation took toward a life of faith. The minister was a mix of sociocultural preoccupations – this was the 1960s – and a genuine theological foundation rooted in southern Presbyterian thought. This fit well with our family’s lifestyle. We and our neighbors were typically middle class. There was cocktail hour before dinner, a Republican political affiliation, civic involvement (my father insisted I join the Boy Scouts when I turned 11), and an emphasis on manners and comportment. There was, however, room for the occasional dirty joke told in the company of close friends. My parents slowly and with visible discomfort relented on issues such as hair length, and, by the time I got to college, my drug use.

Let me back up, though.

Shortly after I’d been confirmed, my father took the minister to lunch and announced he was leaving the church. The final straw, he told him, was the PCUSA’s donation to Angela Davis’s defense fund. Fast forward to my college years and early adulthood. I dove with abandon into the full panoply of secular-yet-sporting-the-facade-of-spiritual-earnestness offerings available to a boomer coming of age: beat literature, eastern thought, rock music, and the aforementioned drugs. My ideological conversion experience preceded my religious one by a good three decades.

I’d been attending a Unitarian fellowship, and one Sunday morning, the guest speaker was from the local Peace Fellowship (which met at the Presbyterian church where I’d grown up). He’d just come back from a “fact-finding” trip to El Salvador and Nicaragua and was eager to bad-mouth Reagan policy in the region.I’d just read Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family by Shirley Christian, and knew the speaker was leaving the most important part of the story out. During the Q&A portion of the service, I stood up and said as much, going into arcane detail about the Marxist-Leninist nature of the FMLN and the FSLN. I shocked myself, and the congregation as well. Jaws dropped. From there, I subscribed to National Review and Commentary and pursued a master’s degree in history. I also became a conference junkie.

The most memorable gathering I attended was a spring 1987 event hosted by Midge Decter’s Committee for the Free World in Washington. Among the groups that had people in attendance was the Institute on Religion and Democracy. That group was at the forefront of the effort to keep leftist ideology out of institutional Christianity.I wrote my master’s thesis on mainline Protestantism’s leftward drift as a major cause of its denominations’ bleeding members since the 1960s. It turned out to be a sprawling mess, because it had to pass muster with faculty advisors who were not sympathetic to my take.The years passed, and I focused on levels of life such as career, marriage, my zeal for conservatism, travel and music.I finally started church-shopping a little over ten years.

My longest stay was at a little country Methodist church. I went because the pastor was a friend. He’d been a student in my rock and roll history class at our community college. He was a recovering alcoholic whose sermons drove home the seriousness with which we ought to take the matter of grace.He was also great at fostering a sense of community. Chili suppers were particularly fun. He and I would talk smack about who had the more authentic recipe. He was moved to another church, and my attendance tapered off. I could tell how the next minister leaned on the question of a looming UMC split on the question of gay marriage. The families with children quit coming. The community feel dried up.Then I tried a few other churches, and then the situations recounted above transpired.

Where to go from here?

I am skittish about getting involved anywhere at this point. The pitfalls are myriad and various. There’s the progressive temptation to which many churches have succumbed. Since 2015, however, there’s arisen the equally secular Trumpist infection that poisoned even such respected figures as Franklin Graham. There is also the never-ending cascade of revelations about sexual corruption in various ministries. I sometimes wonder if there’s not a touch of snobbery in my reluctance to just land somewhere. I’ll be honest: I can’t stand modern praise music and I’m uncomfortable about not joining in with the demonstrative behavior I see at most services anymore. I guess the days of organs, robes and old-school hymns are fading fast.

But I do feel the need to land somewhere. For one thing, I’m utterly horrified at the complete obliteration of the architecture of creation our society has undertaken in the last ten years. We’ve jettisoned the basic sexual dichotomy of the human species – indeed, the entire animal kingdom – and the institutions – think marriage – that enshrine that. So I’m church-shopping again. And I am humbly and sincerely interested in tips from anyone that I’m instinctually inclined to respect on how to select one.Your insights and recommendations are most welcome.