Church

For the last year or so I have taken a sabbatical from church.

I was starting to feel disillusioned by going to church at the time, mainly because due to my busyness at weekends I only attended church when I was on ‘duty’ – either as a steward, student worker or in some other capacity. My other ‘church’ has for a long time been the student society I attended when I was a student at Sheffield, but partly due to the nature of my job at the time and due to not being a student I didn’t feel my place was there either. That along with a fairly nasty bible study made me make my decision to leave church behind. 

Having never really been without a church, this was at first a scary thought, but then became a liberating experience.  During the time I’ve had off, I’ve reflected on my faith journey – where I’ve been, where I’m at, and where I think I’m going. 

At the time I walked away from church, I spoke to a colleague at work about the fact that I was very clear about what I don’t believe but I’d like to know what I do believe too, and it was difficult to be part of an establishment which didn’t necessarily address either of these areas of concern – in fact in some ways (particularly during the bible study mentioned above) it highlighted that the loudest voices were the ones preaching the things I most definitely didn’t believe in.  I’ve regularly attended the weekly university service (with said colleague) which has been beneficial in stopping me being completely disillusioned with it all, but other than that I’ve only occasionally been to church (mainly because the missus is preaching!)

Anyway, with my move to Brum it seems a sensible point to start exploring going back to church again at least it some form or another.

So since making that decision I’ve had the experience of 2 church services. One was the christening of my former uni chaplain’s daughter at the local Methodist church. Now christenings are never a very good indicator of a church because 1) no one knows who is the baptism party and who is a regular so no one talks to anyone and 2) the service (even when the parents are both clergy) rarely gets any deeper than ‘woo, we have a new member of the Christian family’.   In fairness, it wasn’t that bad and when I explained to the minister as I was leaving that I’d just moved into the area she did say ‘welcome’ – though I couldn’t say whether that was an invitation to return or not.

Unfortunately I may never want to go into a church again as the second service I’ve been to was this, which the missus does justice in describing at her blog. She probably wasn’t as harsh as I could have been. The service made me despair that this is potentially what I’m getting back in to – in fact it made me want to hurt myself or someone else (the preacher)…it was so bad that I’m imagining God was probably despairing too and is also thinking a sabbatical from church might not be a bad idea (well at least that one!)