Church One

Easter Sunday 2011

Church #1

I chose to attend a church I have been to before here in my new home town. This is a church of my “own” denomination. The worship services I have attended in the past year and a half have confirmed for me this is no longer a worship service that engages or moves me. I don’t feel I can give anything back in that hour. I find myself criticizing things: the hymn that nobody knows how to start singing, the typographical errors in the bulletin, the theology of the children’s moment, and on and on. I’m not saying that the worship service is responsible for my critical stance, only that this is what is called forth from me during that hour. I felt emotional, felt my eyes tearing up, one time: during one of the hymns when I flashed on the choir and the sanctuary of my home church in my former hometown, and how they were likely singing the same hymn this morning. I missed them, and I missed the quality of those worship services, even as I recall my critical moments in that sanctuary. The worship service at this church places the sermon just at the very end of the service, so that the message is preached, and a sending forth hymn is sung, and that is the end of the service. The minister told a joke about third graders listening to the resurrection story; it was funny; it energized me to laugh. At the end of his sermon, he told another joke about a child and an Easter card, and tied it back to the first joke about the third graders. Again – funny and energizing. And of course, the sending forth hymn is one of my “funny” Easter traditions – “UP from the grave he arose…..” which always has me giggling and connecting across the miles and years to a young woman I used to worship with in my former hometown. Each Easter, we remind each other of our glee when this particular hymn is sung. Tradition!

Ah, but you ask: what brought you closer to God? What caused you to stop and consider a new way of seeing the Holy? Well, nothing in this worship service did that. I did hear encouragement to go out and make the world a better place. I did hear reminders that Christians have eternal life, they never die, their sins are redeemed by Christ’s death, etc., etc. These are to me the clichés of worship, that are repeatedly voiced, but rarely examined. And they were not examined in this worship service, but hey – what did I expect?