Finding Church

For the first time in nearly a decade, I felt at home in a church

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

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It had been years since I had felt at home in a church.

Despite the way things ended, I loved our church in Wyoming. The youth group had been my saving grace as I moved from an angry 11-year-old to a teenager fully on fire for Jesus. Most of my best friends went to our church. I trusted the adults who led the youth. And I loved our pastor. After all, he was my best friend’s dad and he had confirmed me, formalizing my membership in the church.

Long before my dad started having problems at our new church in Michigan, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the worship, I didn’t like the lack of interest in youth group, and I didn’t trust most of the adults around me. When my dad resigned during the spring of my freshman year of college, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to return there when I got back from my spring choir tour. And while I liked the church where my family settled, it was never my church. I went there during my breaks before I would return to college to attend the church across the street from campus. I got married at my parents’ church because it was their church. My membership was merely a formality, the result of being the eldest member of the family and still calling my parents’ house my home.

I thought things would change after my husband Jeff and I got married and moved to our own home and new jobs. After all, I would be teaching in a Lutheran high school as part of an association. While I would be encouraged to attend from a list of churches, the school was mostly concerned with me attending an LCMS church. I could choose from a wide range of churches with different worship styles, different congregations, and different connections to the school where I was teaching.

But that freedom proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be.

We floated around for our first year, most often attending one particular church where Jeff eventually started playing pick-up basketball once a week. (And at one point breaking his arm during one of those games.) My mom was eager for me to find membership at a church of my own and kept pressuring me to just pick a church and transfer my membership. The problem was, no one had ever taught me how to pick a church. My family had never “church shopped.” With the exception of our Lutheran church in Detroit, which we attended because it was two blocks from our house and my parents really liked it, we had only ever attended where Dad worked. Our family was members because we had to be members. It was part of our dad’s job.

In my second year of teaching, we bought a new house further away from the Indiana/Illinois border and it became necessary to find a new church where we could worship. We tried the Lutheran church in our new town, but didn’t feel like we belonged from the moment we stepped inside. It wasn’t just the stiff pews and old-fashioned passing of the offering in baskets attached to long handles. It wasn’t even the adherence to the old worship styles. It was a small town church on the edges of Chicagoland. We didn’t feel like we belonged.

And so we continued to search.

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A Light at the End of a Tunnel

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Or more like, I continued to search. Jeff would go to church wherever I decided we should go, but he wasn’t ready to go through membership classes. I finally decided on a Lutheran church about twenty minutes from our house, further south, and not an association member of the school where I taught. The pastor was verbally supportive of the work happening in the high school and did chapel services on occasion, but the church did not financially support the school and most members ignored that it even existed.