The Quest for the Perfect Church

Last evening David and I had the opportunity to give our testimonies in the evening service and were welcomed into membership at our church. We felt a mingling of joy, relief, and like we had just finished a long endurance race. We have not been official members of a church for about four and a half years. During that time we’ve attended a few churches for an extended period of time, visited I don’t know how many others, did church at home with just the two of us, and missed a lot of church due to my health. To say it has been a challenge would be a gross understatement.

I suspect that some of the folks who read A Gracious Home have gone through (or are still going through) a similar experience. And to a lot of readers here what I am going to write about will seem completely foreign to their experience. This post is primarily for those who are also wrestling with the whole finding-an-appropriate-church thing.

Let me just start out by saying that I am well aware there is no perfect church. More times than I can count people told us that we needed to just go somewhere since there was no perfect church for us to find. We were well aware of that fact. We weren’t searching for the perfect church. We were searching for the right church for us. We weren’t church hoppers. We just had a hard time in finding a place where we could worship, serve and become members without violating our conscience.

Through this process I have gained a completely new appreciation and understanding for why people give up on church. There were several times over the course of our search that I could have easily thrown up my hands and said, “Forget it! This isn’t worth it! People who live in isolated places go without fellowship and we can, too!” Obviously, we never gave up. We knew we had to be in a church for our own good. But I can honestly say that I have a very good idea of why people who love the Lord and are saved walk away from attending church.

There were a number of issues we sorted through in our search. We knew we were Reformed in our theology, but how Reformed? I’ve written about some of that, including our need to make a decision regarding infant baptism. We found the idea of a family integrated church intriguing. We thought a lot about what it means to be in community with other believers and how a local body should live out that community. I think these are questions that many sincere believers are asking as they wrestle with the compromise and flat out silliness going on in a lot of churches and denominations today.

Ultimately, we realized after we visited and looked into many churches that promoted some of these things, there were greater issues involved that we could not look past. So in the end, these were the issues that were deciding factors for us.

We realized we could not be happy in a church that was primarily making decisions and functioning in a reactionary mode. I realize that determining this is highly subjective. What we might call reactionary others might call walking in light of their biblical convictions. It is hard to draw the line clearly in the sand. In our experience, we had to sort through whether we felt people were living out their convictions in secondary matters or if they were being reactionary to what was going on around them. We were not interested in being in a church where the main reason for coming together as a congregation is because all the members have a similar ax to grind.

Related to this, we realized we could never be at peace in a church where secondary matters were highly important to a large segment of the congregation. It has been our experience that oftentimes when people feel passionately about their convictions regarding secondary issues, that it is impossible for them to allow others to live in peace if they have a different conviction. Frankly, the thought of being in a church where a large portion of the families had strong convictions about not celebrating Christmas, homeschooling, headcoverings, KJV only, etc. sent up huge red flags for me. I have found very few people who can hold to these kinds of convictions and allow others around them to make different choices. It seems more often than not their attitude is that the person who does’t hold to the same view simply hasn’t studied the issue out enough and if they did they would certainly come around to the other view. I mean no offense to anyone reading this who holds to any of these views. But we could not anticipate being in a church like that and being able to live in peace with the other members of the congregation long-term. The subtle (and not-so-subtle) pressures to “see things their way” are just too prevalent.

We also realized that aesthetics are incredibly important to us. Many newer congregations meet in gyms and other non-church building type places. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, we both realized that as artistic people we crave beauty in a worship service. Whether it is the building, the quality of the music, the way people dress, or the reverence of the worshipers, we know that we worship best in a more beautiful and traditional setting. The thought of worshiping in a school gym or a large multi-purpose room/auditorium is frankly really depressing to us. We greatly appreciate a beautiful sanctuary, a choir, a grand piano, an organ and stained glass windows. We appreciate reverence and seeing things done with excellence. A certain amount of structure and familiarity frees us to focus on God rather than wondering what is going to happen next.

Probably the biggest sticky wicket for us in the entire process has been the role of women in the church. When we found churches that had a more open policy about what women could do, we found that they were too progressive in many other areas such as worship style and preaching style. When we found churches where we liked the worship and preaching we found they were too restrictive in their views on women. It has been HARD to find a church that embraces women both in a more “traditional” role as a wife and mother, but also allows them the freedom to effectively use their spiritual gifts. Churches seem to swing too far in either direction for us to be comfortable with.

After all of our searching and wrestling, we ended up in a traditional church. It seems rather ironic to me that we spent four and a half years looking and ended up in the type of church I probably would have sought out in the first place. But I don’t regret the time we spent in our search. We asked a lot of questions, met many wonderful people along the way, and are now much more convinced in our spirits as to what we really believe.

There are a lot of conservative ministries, authors, speakers, and so on out there today advocating a need for radical changes in how the body “does church”, how families should function, and how believers should interact (or not interact) with the world. Many of them have valid concerns that I would agree with. But how it is fleshed out is a completely different matter. I think many of these people have a vision for something better and in many ways I agree with what they are saying. On the other hand, I am also deeply concerned that many people who are being influenced by these ministries are being led towards situations that are not any healthier than where they started out. Dysfunctionality comes in all different sizes, shapes and colors.

It seems to me that there are some fundamental questions that need to be asked. After going through all we’ve gone through, these are the questions we ask about churches and ministries that seem to promote an excessive view of these topics. Are the people looking for the will of God in their lives and living out how He has created them to uniquely function in his church or are they looking for control and security? Are people looking for Jesus or are they looking to have all their ducks in a row in such a way that everything is black and white? Are people seeking to live effectively and biblically in the world or are they looking to retreat from the world? Are people convinced and convicted by the Holy Spirit that they should do something or are they reacting to some aspect of dysfunctionality in our culture and so swinging to the other extreme so as to be “right” where the culture is “wrong”?

I know someone else who searched passionately to do everything “right” and “biblically”. He was consumed with getting his ducks in a row and making every issue extremely black and white. Anyone who disagreed with him was clearly suspect and not to be fellowshipped with. Someone gave him a word of warning that he could search and search to get everything absolutely right and if he did, he would end up lonely and miserable. That is my concern for my brothers and sisters in Christ who are caught up in this search. David and I flirted with the fringes of this and frankly it is a scary place to be. I am thankful that the grace of God, David’s strong sense of freedom in Christ, and our history with God kept us from making mistakes that I’ve seen other people make. A lot of what we wrestled with was academic and theological. We read, discussed and researched, but never jumped in with both feet into situations that were damaging. We briefly visited churches/congregations and talked to leadership in churches, but never went beyond that. The pain that we suffered through this experience was minimal compared to that of others who considered similar paths. I know that there are a lot of hurting people and families out there who have been severely damaged and traumatized by their experiences in finding the “perfect church”. Instead of providing their family with the “perfect church home and community”, the parents have ended up in a nightmare situation they can hardly begin to fathom.

If you are one of those people, I encourage you with the love of Christ to return to your first love, the Lord Jesus. I encourage you to consider whether the choices you are making are bringing joy and peace to your life. Are you listening to the Holy Spirit or the voice of man’s reasoning and persuasiveness? God is not the author of confusion and He wants to be found. The Spirit brings life and joy and peace. The Spirit does not drive us to decisions made out of fear, but draws us to God through His grace, mercy and love. Living the Christian life should be a beautiful exercise in walking hand in hand with Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, not an oppressive tangle of conflicting ideas and information pressed upon us by folks with an ax to grind. Our experience in the body of Christ should be characterized by joy almost all of the time. If it is not, then it is time to seriously reconsider what that body is promoting and whether or not God is calling you somewhere else.