Church Search

Some time ago, D and I decided to visit some of the neighboring churches who practice our faith. Coming from a fairly large church ourselves, the adjustment from a congregation of over 1000 to only 30 has not been easy, to say the least. But, out here I don’t think the church attendance reaches more than 200 anyway. So, back to the subject at hand, in the first congregation we visited we found ourselves in an old church that could have leapt from the pages of a history book. Perched on a hill, its a-frame topped with an old steeple making it the highest point on the block, the brick building seemed tired and in need of a face lift. On this particular evening we happened to come late, I googled the church and the times of the services and apparently they were wrong. So, we tried to slip in quietly. Have you ever tried to slip in quietly to a church that has twenty pews and 10 people in attendance? Yeah, we didn’t slip in as much as we marched in, banging the back of the pew with Roma’s car seat and Cylas asking loudly where we were at. I tried shushing him sternly, but his curiosity is not easily abated. So, I pulled out all the books, toys and coloring books I could to quiet him down. The preacher was an older man with a head full of dark brown hair, a rather large pair of glasses, reminiscent of the 80’s, and a lisp that made the sermon so much more interesting to listen to. We were greeted with smiles from a sweet faced lady, who we found out later was the pastor’s wife. Shortly after we found our seats, the lights clicked off and the front of the sanctuary was lit by the beam of a flashlight. The preacher held the flashlight and waved it around trying to emphasize how important it was to ‘punch a hole in the darkness’. We left that evening with smiles on our faces. It was a cute church, but we wanted to visit it again on a Sunday to get a better idea of what their church was like. I suppose I should write about our Sunday morning visit in another post along with an account of what happened when we visited the second church…