Wading through life

(Here’s the blog that’s been brewing for a few months… Please note that it continues (for quite a while) via the “more” link after paragraph six.)

So, I was attending this emergent, relevant, post-modern church ever since my senior year in college. It was all about everything I was all about: doing stuff with excellence, being artsy and relevant and non-traditional…all that jazz. Incredible music, lots of media, coffee and more coffee. We were on A Current Affair (see video) and national media for hosting a “Porn Weekend” with the ministry xxxchurch.com. Just a lot of cutting edge ministry going on there.

I fit in for a long while. I became a lead member of the media team that ran the computers during the services, was helping them design a new Web site, led a small group with some friends, began a mentoring relationship with one of the pastors…

But almost a year ago, I started getting a little uncomfortable there. There had to be more to the church and the body of Christ than doing things with excellence and being culturally relevant. Maybe that wasn’t who the church was trying to be…but from my perspective, that’s what was coming out.

During the previous summer (’04), I had started attending a good friend’s church on Wednesday nights. A book study on Waking the Dead by John Eldredge (essential reading) got me in. And I pretty much kept attending Wednesday night services there from then on. Scott and my other roommate started attending on Wednesdays as well as we started another book study: Renewing the Mind by Casey Treat (not the most well written book, but a lot of good principles).

Eventually Scott and Clark started attending there on Sundays. But I stuck to my guns at the church I was at; I was committed to it. And as God and my good friends know, I’m pretty stubborn when I set my mind on stuff. So for about 6-9 months, I began to wrestle with the idea of leaving. I didn’t want to because there were so many things I loved about it. It just fit “me” so well. I quote “me” because it fit the “me” I knew…not necessarily the me I was supposed to be…or the me God had created me to be–just the me I was aware of up to that point.

But as I started to engage God on new levels and be exposed to the God of the Bible rather than the God of 21st century America or the God of the Thumb of Michigan or the God of Spring Arbor University…I began to get very uncomfortable with my faith/theology/what-have-you. The God I had experienced and/or was told about up to that point didn’t really line up with the God I was reading about. And thus my faith journey’s theme for 2005 became “There is more…” It was reinforced at John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart boot camp and even more so at the church I go to now: Real Life Ministries in Albion… Read the rest of this entry »

I just wrote a five-page blog. And now I don’t want to edit it because it is so late. So, I’ll have to do it tomorrow over lunch or something.

Be on the look out for the confessional you’ve been waiting for: my story of switching churches!