no interest in going to church

[NewCreation435]

I am sitting here at home a little before 11 am on a Sunday morning and have been wrestling with if I should go to a church and if I do what church that would be. I have visited quite a few over the last few years. I have thought about switching to a different denomination and see if that would help me feel more comfortable. it always seems to come down to a couple of issues for me.
1. The sermons seem very shallow. I want to hear something new or fresh or at least interesting. A person who has spent the time studying and is excited about the Word themselves and has something they want to share. So many sermons I hear today are dull and boring and rehashed sermons from the past without much substance.
2. I don't feel welcome. This may be partly my fault or I may have unreasonable expectations of others, but I wish I felt at home at a church instead of instanteous aware that I am a visitor. Maybe it is part of living in an area that is fairly rural but when I come in it is probably obvious that I am visiting and I don't feel like people make any effort to make me feel welcome. I didn't grow up in this area, so people don't know who my family is (who live in another state) and therefore I will always be viewed as an outsider.
3. I can't seem to find a place to serve. I tried helping out with children's Sunday School last year and felt like I wasn't really needed. There were two teachers already in the class I was told to go to and they didn't seem to need my help, so I didn't go back.
4. Disagreement with doctrinal stance. i did go to a seeker sensitive church that was very modern in its approach and had quite a few young people at it. But, they played secular music during the service and this was something that I didn't think was appropriate given that it wasn't Christ centered. Again, it might be that I am hypersensitive.

I did have someone tell me that I sound like I have had trauma from past church experiences and becauase of this I find it difficult to trust other christians and only allow people to get so close and then I tend to leave a church. I may attend for 3 or 4 months and then I am gone.

 

[MennoSota]

Forgive me for being so direct, jsimms, but your post is all about you and what you want. Perhaps God just wants you to be with other redeemed sinners...regardless of what you get from being there.
Our meeting with other Christians is not about what we get from the service. It's about being encouragers to others in the faith as we spend our personal time with God everyday.
Grow community in a church near you. Be a light as you walk in step with the Spirit of God.

1 Corinthians 16:13-14 Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.

 

[Lamb]

Jsimms I had a church I absolutely loved and yet I struggled at times to go to it and I was choir director so I HAD to be there LOL At my current church there are a couple of things I don't like that happens during the service but I know I just have to let it go because of all the other valuable things I get from it.

Are you growing in God's Word at any of the churches you've attended?

 

[tango]

I am sitting here at home a little before 11 am on a Sunday morning and have been wrestling with if I should go to a church and if I do what church that would be. I have visited quite a few over the last few years. I have thought about switching to a different denomination and see if that would help me feel more comfortable. it always seems to come down to a couple of issues for me.
1. The sermons seem very shallow. I want to hear something new or fresh or at least interesting. A person who has spent the time studying and is excited about the Word themselves and has something they want to share. So many sermons I hear today are dull and boring and rehashed sermons from the past without much substance.
2. I don't feel welcome. This may be partly my fault or I may have unreasonable expectations of others, but I wish I felt at home at a church instead of instanteous aware that I am a visitor. Maybe it is part of living in an area that is fairly rural but when I come in it is probably obvious that I am visiting and I don't feel like people make any effort to make me feel welcome. I didn't grow up in this area, so people don't know who my family is (who live in another state) and therefore I will always be viewed as an outsider.
3. I can't seem to find a place to serve. I tried helping out with children's Sunday School last year and felt like I wasn't really needed. There were two teachers already in the class I was told to go to and they didn't seem to need my help, so I didn't go back.
4. Disagreement with doctrinal stance. i did go to a seeker sensitive church that was very modern in its approach and had quite a few young people at it. But, they played secular music during the service and this was something that I didn't think was appropriate given that it wasn't Christ centered. Again, it might be that I am hypersensitive.

I did have someone tell me that I sound like I have had trauma from past church experiences and becauase of this I find it difficult to trust other christians and only allow people to get so close and then I tend to leave a church. I may attend for 3 or 4 months and then I am gone.

Serious question here - are you looking for a church to be a place you can settle, or are you going in to a new church looking for areas it fails? The reason I ask is because I sometimes find it easy to look at new things through a lens of "what is wrong with this new thing?" rather than "what parts of this new thing might be of benefit?". Sometimes the status quo is just, well, safer. It doesn't involve change, you can just keep on keeping on and doing the same tomorrow as you did yesterday. But sometimes a change is required, and sometimes it's important to acknowledge the downsides while accepting the upsides.

I think there's also a tendency, especially in this internet age of instant gratification, to expect to arrive within a new group and be accepted into it instantly. That can also be a tricky balancing act because sometimes it takes time, but sometimes groups form exclusive cliques that it's all but impossible to break into. Think of how long it might take you to start opening up to someone new, inviting them to your home, seeing them as a friend rather than a fellow congregant and so on. It's not good that this happens in churches at all, but of course you're being introduced into a new church that already has established groups, trying to figure out which group you can fit into and be a part of. But the group has an established dynamic and may not have a sense of particularly wanting new people in it. Churches of all places should be more welcoming but of course churches are made up of people who are broken and sinful and sometimes the way that brokenness manifests itself is a reluctance to let new people draw close. Trying to figure out whether you just need to give something a little more time, or whether you're just dealing with one exclusive clique after another, can be tricky.

With regard to serving in a church, it's great that you want to serve. The thing is that some churches like to get to know you for a while before they give you things to do. Aside from child protection issues (even if you have child abuse clearances it's understandable people will want to know you as a person before leaving their children with you). One church I attended for a time had ongoing issues with people who would come to the church, volunteer in all sorts of capacities within a month, then disappear within a few months without so much as saying goodbye. Of course that left the minister in an impossible situation because whatever they were doing would just stop without warning. Personally I've only ever attended two churches regularly for an extended period, but both times I've wanted to attend for long enough to establish that I was planning on settling there before volunteering to do stuff.

Doctrinal issues can be a deal breaker for sure. Between the two churches I have attended long term I attended another church for about three months before concluding that their doctrine was so far removed from anything I could accept I just couldn't stay. I'd actually reached a point where I couldn't even be sure we were talking about the same deity because from what a lot of the people there said I didn't recognise the god they described. That was enough for me to leave. At both of my regular churches there have been lesser things that I haven't agreed with, but they haven't been big enough issues to break fellowship over. Thin and shallow sermons can be a problem, if it's a matter of routine. If you get the odd sermon that lacks substance I'd just chalk it up to "one of those things". Sometimes we have a visiting speaker I really like, sometimes we have a visitor who leaves me utterly unmoved (chances are other people in the church would say the same but the other way around). If the minister preaches the odd thin sermon, maybe they just had a bad week or struggled to pull much out of that week's text. If the minister routinely preaches thin, watered down sermons with no substance, maybe it is time to find a different church.

I'd also echo what MennoSota said about making sure you consider God's calling instead of exclusively looking at what you want from a church. I often find it can be good to go to church and not do anything at all. Some months I find I end up leading the service one week, working the audio-visual system another week, helping a new person with the AV system a third week, and on the week I don't have anything specific to do it's good to just go and not be doing anything. Sometimes I don't even join in the singing, just close my eyes and listen to the congregation singing. It's not like you have to be physically in a church to be in God's presence, but there's something to be said about making a commitment to offer a "sacrifice of praise" and gather with God's people.

 

[NewCreation435]

Jsimms I had a church I absolutely loved and yet I struggled at times to go to it and I was choir director so I HAD to be there LOL At my current church there are a couple of things I don't like that happens during the service but I know I just have to let it go because of all the other valuable things I get from it.

Are you growing in God's Word at any of the churches you've attended?

I have actually grown more from my own reading and study than anything I heard from the sermons in the churches I have gone to.

 

[Lamb]

I have actually grown more from my own reading and study than anything I heard from the sermons in the churches I have gone to.

Doesn't your church also have readings, hymns containing God's word or any other forms of God's word reaching you in the services?

 

[tango]

I have actually grown more from my own reading and study than anything I heard from the sermons in the churches I have gone to.

Have none of the churches you have been to offered you anything of value in any of the sermons? I know I've sat through a few sermons where the speaker waffled on for half an hour and left me wondering what their point was, and sometimes left me wondering whether they actually had a point at all. But usually I can pick at least a few gems out of a sermon, even if the overall message doesn't say much to me.

 

[NewCreation435]

Have none of the churches you have been to offered you anything of value in any of the sermons? I know I've sat through a few sermons where the speaker waffled on for half an hour and left me wondering what their point was, and sometimes left me wondering whether they actually had a point at all. But usually I can pick at least a few gems out of a sermon, even if the overall message doesn't say much to me.

Yes, there have been sometimes. I think overall though it is also important to me that I feel welcome and in many of those churches I did not, so I stopped going

 

[NewCreation435]

Doesn't your church also have readings, hymns containing God's word or any other forms of God's word reaching you in the services?

the contemporary services that they have don't have hymns, but the pastor does quote some scripture.

 

[tango]

Yes, there have been sometimes. I think overall though it is also important to me that I feel welcome and in many of those churches I did not, so I stopped going

A while back our pastor went to a conference and returned with a sermon about church and churches in general. One of the key points he made was how the thing that is most likely to determine whether someone returns to a church is how welcomed they are - if you can go into a church, sit through the service, hang around a while afterwards and leave without anyone even saying hello that's not a good thing. If the only time someone greets you is during the part of the service where the leader says "you may greet those around you" it doesn't count. If people don't feel they are welcome there, they don't return regardless of how good the preaching is or how lively/sound/reflective/whatever the music is.

Are you in a place where you can approach the church ministers directly and talk to them about how you feel unwelcome at their church? The reason I ask is that the church I mentioned that I attended for a short time had a problem that people would attend for a time and then just disappear, leaving the minister not having the slightest idea why they left. Even if they don't change anything (the minister I just mentioned didn't seem overly troubled by my theological concerns, even when I asked him to look at the Scriptures with me), at least they know why you didn't stay around.

 

[Lamb]

the contemporary services that they have don't have hymns, but the pastor does quote some scripture.

So those services are weak in feeding you with God's Word? That's why I really love liturgical churches because even if the pastor's sermon is boring or doesn't resonate with you that week, you're still being fed on God's Word throughout in the liturgical responses, the hymns and the readings besides having Holy Communion.

 

[NewCreation435]

So those services are weak in feeding you with God's Word? That's why I really love liturgical churches because even if the pastor's sermon is boring or doesn't resonate with you that week, you're still being fed on God's Word throughout in the liturgical responses, the hymns and the readings besides having Holy Communion.

Communion is typically around once a quarter in most Baptist churches I have attended. The Wesleyan church I attended for a while never had one while I was there. I'm sure they do and I just missed it

 

[psalms 91]

The Methodist church I go to has it once a month

 

[NewCreation435]

The Methodist church I go to has it once a month

Yeah, I grew up in the Methodist church and that is what they do at my parents church. I don't think once a quarter is enough. There is a
Christian church near me that has communion every Sunday

 

[Josiah]

[MENTION=59]jsimms435[/MENTION]



Friend.... I've not responded (perviously, lol) because I think your issue is personal and complex... and because I have no "answer." I will share some thoughts but I'm going to use up so much space I'm doubt it will much. But I DO care...and so I DO respond.


1. For ME, I just grew up in the church. While they are not the same, to ME Christ and His Church have always been inseparable. I LOVE worship.... I LOVE His people.... I very rarely miss Sunday worship (even on vacation) because I miss it SO much if I do. So, I admit.... I can't say "I understand." Take that into consideration.


2. While I "get" much OUT of church, frankly - that's not the point. To misquote President Kennedy, "Ask not what your church can do for you but what you can do for your church." The whole "what's in it for ME" mentality is a perversion, IMO. I KNOW this is harsh - and others have said it - and I'm SORRY. I do NOT mean to be critical. But sincerely, we ALL need to beware of self-centeredness, of needing self to be lifted up by others, to BE served rather than TO serve. I'm speaking Law here.... and that hurts.... but friend, we ALL need to CONSTANTLY be checking ourselves for this.


3. My Dad use to tell me, "There are only two kinds of people in the world: those looking for greener grass and those making the grass greener." We ALL are fallen..... we LIVE in a fallen world..... perfection exists only in Jesus. When we spend honest time in front of the mirror.... when we KNOW (deep in our soul) we breathe only because of God's mercy and grace.... it becomes easier to see we ALL need to work on getting greener... Who was it that said "Any club that would accept me is a club I want no part of?"



I hope you can consider these in the spirit they are meant.... and I'll continue to pray for you....... Some additional (secondary) points .....



4. I am one of those who LEFT a parish (and denomination)... VERY reluctantly and sadly. NOT because I felt "unserved" (indeed, I felt very loved and affirmed) .... not for any ministry reason (indeed, I still strongly affirm the ministry of my former denomination and parish).... not for worship reasons (I loved the worship and would have accepted any worship style), but because of theology. IMO, there ARE valid reasons to leave - NOT Jesus, NOT His church, NOT regular every Sunday public worship, NOT personal ministry, but a congregation (and the denomination it may belong to). For ME, chief among these is theology: is some view being demanded that is wrong (or maybe demanding it be accepted dogmatically is wrong)? I won't say "I agree with you" if I don't. Yes, every congregation permits non-members (and I did that my first 2 years when I worshipped with Lutherans) but that to me is not acceptable, long term. IMO, an immoral church is another reason (I'd have problems with a sleezy pastor or a church that embraces abortion).... I'm not against leaving a parish FOR SOUND REASONS that we can't change, BUT I'd strongly recommend to be careful. See point #3. We all know church members who seem to never be happy and constantly changing churches, my guess is 90% of the problem is with them, not their churches. "Church Hopping" IMO is cause for spending a lot of time looking in the mirror.


5. IMO, theology matters. OBVIOUSLY, I've become a Lutheran (and rather passionately so) and IMO, conservative/confessional/traditional Lutheran theology is true. I found my home. And I'm pretty comfortable encouraging people to attend an LCMS, WELS, ELS congregation. But I know that doesn't "fit" for many.... and some don't live close enough to be involved in such a parish (and I do not encourage just an internet connection). I have a LOT of friends and family who are inactive Catholics, and unless they have a "deal-breaker" issue with the THEOLOGY, I encourage them to return to the RCC. I think I shared the time when I missed Christmas Eve Worship in my church (which I REALLY misssed!!!!) because I had a coworker who had not been to her Catholic church in decades but mentioned how much she loved the Christmas Eve service in her Catholic Church as a kid.... but she was timid.... so I picked her up and went WITH her to Mass, in hopes it would an open door for her. I want people to connect.... WHERE isn't a big issue for me (well, not LDS, lol). I acknowledge too that sometimes there is hurt.... pain... sometimes people feel slighted or harmed by some church... and leading them to forgiveness is hard, but GOOD.


6. I read this one: Years ago, when Moody was a parish pastor in Chicago, he called on a family that hadn't been in church for weeks. He was shown to the Parlor where there was a fire burning in the fireplace. He engaged in small talk for awhile but then wanted to get to the issue of his visit. He went over to the fireplace.... took a tool and removed a coal from the fire and placed it on the hearth where it immediately (and slowly) became to cool and darken. He spoke of the importance of worship ... and finally directed them to that coal. "When I came into the room, that coal was int he midst of the fire - and it was hot and glowing - it was heated by the others and heating the others. But it was removed. And it has been growing colder and darker ever since, and if you could measure it, so has the fire."




Sorry....


- Josiah



.

 

[Bluezone777]

As for point one, perhaps it is because you see everything preached be so shallow, look around and see people perfectly content with that preaching then proceed to wondering what is wrong with these people? How can so many be content with such shallow, lifeless preaching? A lot might think the problem is with you but perhaps it is not you who is the one with the problem? I would find it curious how can a supposed life filled people be full of such lifeless preaching and see nothing wrong with it? The only logical conclusion to come to is you are dealing with a lifeless church, led by a lifeless man with God and his spirit no where to be found.

As for point three, I look at it as you don't want to simply punch a clock do your time and not care what comes of it. You want your work and time to be fruitful and not just be one more person who simply shows up just for the sake of it, does something for the sake of it and doesn't care if nothing fruitful comes of it.

From what I can see, you seem to display a sensitivity that is sorely lacking in this world in which people even those who claim to profess to be followers of Christ can look at things that should be obviously wrong and not see anything wrong with it. Being sensitive doesn't always mean you are the one with the issue as it can sometimes be a sign that the majority who are not sensitive to it are the ones that have the problem.

 

[Arsenios]

The Methodist church I go to has it once a month

We have it three days a week...


Arsenios

 

[Romanos]

We have it three days a week...


Arsenios

What has it like that?

 

[Arsenios]

What has it like that?

Daily would be better...

But the Service of the Divine Liturgy takes about an hour and a half, and uses, in our small Services, a small rounded loaf of specially prepared bread...

Some monasteries have it daily...

So we have this service at 6AM Saturday, 10AM Sunday, and 4AM Monday mornings...

It is usually preceded by the one and a quarter hour Service of Orthros (Matins)...

I think you may have meant WHO has these Services at these times?

We do - The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Orthodox Church...

At least some of us do...

Many do not...

I thank God that some of us do...

More are coming, God willing...

We have been doing this Service for 2000 years now and counting...

Consecrating the Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior to feed His sheep...

"Give us this day our super-essential (hyper-ousia) bread..."


Arsenios

 

[NewCreation435]

Daily would be better...

But the Service of the Divine Liturgy takes about an hour and a half, and uses, in our small Services, a small rounded loaf of specially prepared bread...

Some monasteries have it daily...

So we have this service at 6AM Saturday, 10AM Sunday, and 4AM Monday mornings...

It is usually preceded by the one and a quarter hour Service of Orthros (Matins)...

I think you may have meant WHO has these Services at these times?

We do - The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Orthodox Church...

At least some of us do...

Many do not...

I thank God that some of us do...

More are coming, God willing...

We have been doing this Service for 2000 years now and counting...

Consecrating the Body and Blood of our Lord and Savior to feed His sheep...

"Give us this day our super-essential (hyper-ousia) bread..."


Arsenios

I'm curious about why you have them at such early times of the day?