Church

Let's backtrack to our church situation. I had mentioned previously about our first Sunday in the area. We decided to drive and go to the first church we came to. Do not employ this as a church shopping option. Do your homework and find out what kind of church it is first. That is a much more efficient and satisfying method. The church we went to the first Sunday looked nice. Many of the churches here look like they could be used for a jigsaw puzzle. You know the type. It was a Baptist church. I don't know what that means except I thought all Baptist churches are alike in that they are fairly predictable and conservative. Turns out they aren't all that way. This one was approaching the other end of the spectrum. It wasn't crazy, but also not the type you fall asleep during. It lasted 2.5 hours. That's right, 2.5 hours. Usually, if I'm sitting for more than an hour I start getting sleepy. No sleeping here. Let's just say it kept your attention. It was a very free-flowing service. People would just go up front and start singing a song when they felt like it. We were asked if we would like to share a song. We politely said, “We really don't have anything prepared.” I was told that was fine, we should share a song anyway. At that point we had to resort to a more to the less polite, “No”.

After an hour of singing I figured that it was strictly a singing service and we would be wrapping things up soon. Not so fast; it's time for the sermon. Not a short one, either. The tone and the message seemed to alternate, between “God is Love” and “God has fire and brimstone with your name on it”. If the minister was behind the podium, things were pretty easy going. If he started down the steps, that's when things started to heat up. When he would make his move, he got more agitated, and substantially louder than seemed necessary. After almost an hour of sermon (an hour in real-time, much longer in my mind) the service went to more people singing and prayer requests - a lot of prayer requests.

I don't want to paint a negative picture of the church. The people were all very friendly and I wish them the best. Although I've never been to one, I know there are churches that are much more out there than this one. Its not the only things I care about, but two things I like in a church service are predictability and brevity. That church just wasn't my cup of tea.