Church

Okay so I have been attending the same church now for over 8 years since the very last Sunday of 2001. I hated it at first as it was so alien to everything I thought I knew about church but I started going back each Sunday in 2002 and attended an early morning bible study where we read through the whole bible cover to cover during the year. I came to truly love reading God’s word to us and really connected with God and felt that everything I had searched for all my life was complete in this new relationship. I also started to enjoy being part of a church which appeared radical in that it really genuinely did what it could to help other people. I became a part of this amazing body of people and got involved with feeding and helping the homeless, attending bible studies, informal prayer groups, youth meetings and eventually joined the camera team. You see this church produces a weekly tv programme which is broadcast all over the world and is filmed purely by volunteers of which I was one. I became totally immersed and loved the person I was becoming and felt freed from a lot of baggage I had been carrying around all my life.

My relationship with God was the most important part of this new life but I was also loving the life that I was living and eventually met and married a wonderful guy. His parents had been a part of the church when he was born so he had seen the church go through various transitions as people came and went. He was a part of the sound team and often did the sound for the tv programme in the studio which is how we met really.

After we married we suffered the terrible loss of our first born son which hit us both very hard and our marriage has dealt with a lot of other stuff over the years. At this time, I joined the choir and soared in my love for God because he had proved himself completely faithful to me and although I still grieved I just loved being able to worship God through the pain and the tears.

However, now I am really struggling with the church I am a part of. In some way I have gone from being a part of it to just attending. You see the church made the decision to scrap the choir which is fair enough but there was a joy to being a part of it which went beyond singing on a Sunday on the stage. I think it was about being excellent as a person and being focussed on my devotional life so that what I was singing was what I was also authentically living and feeling. This could have continued after the choir but well it didn’t, no excuses really.

Then a woman who I had learned so much from and who was a part of the senior leadership team left at a similar time to a lot of other people who I had also learned from. She was such a big influence and role model in my life that I named my Gorgeous Baby after her. When she left the church it really rocked my world. I couldn’t understand why so many great people would choose to leave as I still loved the church and didn’t think there was anything wrong. 

The worship music is great, in fact world class but it's about really, truly connecting with God and not about performance just the simplicity of honest, true worship. 

I contacted someone who I knew had left the church at a similar time who has given me some great advice and recommended two books by Rob Bell called Velvet Elvis and Jesus Came To Save Christians. It was great that I was able to connect with someone. I'm definitely going to check those books out along with some serious soul searching and prayer. All I really want is the reality of Jesus and more of him in my life, and to be able to gather with others who know and love Jesus.

I think I've found that within the community of believers that  get to do life with and each step along the way I am always learning and growing.