But why is the clipart pastor preaching from the yellow pages?

Of the liberal-leaning churches on my list, almost all have women pastors. I’m delighted to see women in church leadership, and not surprised that they aren’t often seen in more conservative denominations. I’m just sorry that there’s not a more even distribution of male and female leadership across all denominations.

Another observation--of the churches we’ve visited so far, there's a correlation: the older the church building, the grayer the hair of the congregation. Someone should do a study on that.

Here's a tongue-in-cheek link from the satire site The Babylon Bee. It's fun, and not too far from the truth--but I think introversion is largely misunderstood, and also perhaps the reason that Ben and I are having such difficulty finding a place that works for both of us. The two churches that he's liked most were the most extroverted. And it's not really about hugging, or "passing the peace," or even talking to people. I don't mind any of those things, in the right context. It's the too-frenetic energy pulsing in the air, the pressure to be sunny, the anxiety about saying or doing the wrong thing when there's a firmly established culture there with a veritable scroll of unwritten rules and expectations. It's like being forced to take a high-stakes test that I didn't study for, and extroverted people will never understand, because either they can intuit the rules, or they just don't care if they flub.

Comments

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...

Two absolutely serious lists, and a silly one. Actually, all three are serious.

So now here we are, looking for a new church home for the first time in four decades. Ben and I each have lists of what we’re looking for; our lists aren’t anywhere close to the same. This is my list: · Neither tiny nor ‘mega’ in attendance. 100 – 200 people seems ideal · A quiet, contemplative worship service · No “performances” on stage, either by singers or speakers who call attention to themselves. I don’t mind contemporary music (I prefer a blend of old and new), but I do mind showiness. The people on stage are not there to be the center of attention, and I don’t go to church to be entertained. If all the song leader does is establish pitch and help the congregation know when to come in, that’s dandy. As a musical person, I also really like to have notes to look at. · A good mix of ages and genera...

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