One thing I love, one complaint, one shameless plug

This is something I love about Ben. No matter what the song, no matter whether he knows it or not, no matter if the congregation is one which barely moves their lips to sing or one which sings with gusto, he’s going to sing it loud.
One of the things I was most looking forward to when visiting churches outside our home territory was having a great excuse to eat Sunday dinner in a local restaurant. Well, that hasn’t happened even once, because the churches we’ve visited have all had services too early in the morning. This doesn't seem at all fair.
In other news, I posted a thing on Facebook Monday that went micro-viral. That is to say, it got quite a few comments and even some shares. It was perhaps the truest thing I've ever written (aside from those times when I've written about my hatred of bugs), and if you missed it on Monday, you can read it here. It's not about church; it's about these two little girls. God makes a cameo appearance.

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Stuff that doesn't go anywhere else, and some hyperbole.

Now that I’m caught up with Sunday visits, I think I’ll try to post some midweek thoughts about churches in general, The Church, my own ridiculousness, and anything else that seems relevant. Some of it might be serious, but mostly not. It’s good to write again, even for an audience of ten. You know how places like classrooms and meeting rooms and churches have unwritten but rigid seating charts? That’s another anxiety of mine— am I sitting in someone’s seat? One Sunday, I was quite sure we were doing just that. They stopped, they stared, they looked around, puzzled. What is happening to my WORLD? they seemed to think. They stumbled blindly to another seat, disoriented, and sang all the songs half a beat late. Sorry, people who usually sit there. A friend wrote this comment on a satirical link I posted about introverts in church : Have you seen the new blog by the Berrien County Ministerial Alliance? Yeah, every week a different minister/preacher/pastor posts about ...

Baptist Roots (but not deep ones)

Little Baptist me Ben and I married in 1975, when he was 23 and I was just a few days past my 20 th birthday. We’d both been raised Baptist—not the super-conservative independent Baptists, nor even the very conservative Southern Baptists, but American Baptist, the most mainline protestant Baptist (but still pretty conservative, for all that). Only two generations before us, Baptists weren’t allowed to play with cards or dice, to go to movies, to dance, to drink alcohol. That was gradually loosening up by the time we married, but both of us would still have considered ourselves conservative, evangelical Christians at that time. I’ll say right off, though, that even as a very young woman, I had a bit of a rebellious streak, and I wasn’t as Baptist as my upbringing. In college, I became involved with a church that was part of the hippie-ish charismatic movement that was blooming in the 70s. The church was different...

That peculiar smell some old churches have

* Since last week's posting with my wish list for a new church, I've heard from someone who occasionally cleans in her own church building. She reports that recently she found a pile of fingernail clippings in the sanctuary. I never thought I'd have to say this, but I'm adding this to the list: it's important that my future church be fingernail clipping-free. June 17 Presbyterian (USA) We chose this church because the denomination is on my list, and because Ben was somewhat familiar with the church, as it’s the meeting place for his weekly counseling session for men with domestic abuse issues (he’s a counselor, not a counselee). When we entered the stone-and-brick building, I noticed that peculiar smell some old churches have. I think it’s composed of velour pew cushions, mildewed plaster, and old peoples’ sloughed-off skin cells. And old peop...

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