This week has been a bit rough between pregnancy headaches and the sudden return of my morning sickness. I've pretty much just been hanging out. I did however, manage to read all three Hunger Games books in three days…. I was initially uninterested when I read the sleeve on the first one, but finally gave in to the unanimous endorsement of…well, everyone. And I have to agree, these are a great read! They are well written and keep you pulled in all the way through. The characters are well developed and realistically flawed. The books are a great blend of politics, enough futuristic technology to intrigue any sci-fi nerd, romance, and action. They had far more depth than I originally anticipated from the "teenage gladiator games" description I had read. If anybody has a Nook and wants to borrow them, let me know!
I ended up sleeping away most of Saturday because of my nausea meds…unfortunately, this meant that I was wide awake from midnight to 5am Saturday night. Annoying. Nathan was up for a while because he's a late nighter. We browsed through our baby name book again. I'm not supposed to have an ultrasound for another four weeks but I've been freaking out about some things so I'm going to request it at my 17 week appt. Tuesday….which means we could find out the gender in just two days!! I feel like once we know, we'll want to decide on a name right away. So that was fun. We definitely have some favorites but nothing we're totally set on yet. After expecting to have to wait til February, I can't believe we might know this week! And I have absolutely no idea… for the first part of the pregnancy, I totally thought of the baby as a girl but I think my mom's finally brainwashed me into expecting a boy. The good part of that is that I'm a little more adjusted and a little less terrified by the idea of raising a boy. It's not that I don't want one eventually, I just feel like I know what I'm doing with a girl. I can handle dress-up, playing house, even the whole teenage girl thing…after all I grew up in a house of estrogen. But boys? Messy, adventurous, "boys will be boys" boys? I'm clueless.
Then we got talking about church (at three in the morning)…
Moving and visiting churches has made us re-examine what we're looking for in a church. I feel like everyone has their "pet purpose." Church obviously serves multiple purposes, but everybody usually has one that is most important to them when they are searching. One of our friends is super relational (and theological) and the most important thing to him in a church and a pastor is the ability to build relationships and have community. I get that because true community is hard to find and oh so important. We're definitely not meant to do this life alone and I believe the local church should be our primary support group--other than family. Having people that aren't afraid to be real and struggle together is invaluable.
We had a challenging discussion recently with another couple who really want to find a church that is service oriented. We're clearly instructed to take care of the poor and the needy but a lot of churches assume this means supporting missions (part of the picture) and maybe having a deacon's fund for families in the church. This couple wants to do more, specifically getting involved with community outreach in a real way. And not just as a way to guilt people into giving you five minutes to rattle off the Romans Road of the gospel, but because the service itself is the gospel at work. It definitely pushed us to look at not just finding a church where we can learn and fellowship, but where we can serve as well or that is at least open to our ideas on serving.
For me, and I think for Nate, we're naturally drawn to churches with gifted teachers where we can learn. Especially at this point, where we are still trying to work out some of the major points of our theology and need some strong guidance. We've been really blessed in Huntington and in Lynchburg to have pastors who were gifted teachers and invested time in helping us work through some of this stuff. It was an added blessing to have community with our RUF pastor, Jason, and fellow RUFers in Huntington but not the reason we chose the church. Corporate worship is also one of the other functions of the church and this has been strong in both of our last two PCA churches. The administration of the sacraments is also one of the church's purposes and one that's important to us to be done right. While practice may vary on some of the finer points (Welch's v. Merlot, singing, liturgy, etc.), there are some things that shouldn't vary such as an attitude of reverence, a clear explanation of the sacrament, and a barring of the table.
The hard part is figuring out what's most important (and not just personal preference), what's Biblical, what can be compromised or found elsewhere, etc. For instance, is it necessary that solid teaching occur in a Sunday morning service or is one-on-one counseling sufficient? How much do the finer points of the Lord's supper reflect a matter of the heart and how much are they just personal preference? Do you have to have community with the whole body or just your community group? How involved should the church be in witnessing to and serving the community? What does that actually look like today? How important is it that the service reflect time and forethought in its selection of songs and liturgy? Should that really impact the worship?
Unfortunately we don't have a lot of answers. We have a lot of personal preferences. We know what we like and what we're comfortable with. But that's not the same as knowing for sure what's Biblical or what's simply a matter of preference in practice. Some things are obviously unbiblical, but those are usually easy to identify and avoid. Needless to say, the culmination of our discussion was that we need to do some investigating, both of what's biblical and meeting with the leadership of the church we're attending to see what they really think on all of this stuff beyond what is apparent on Sunday mornings. Since we're here for the long haul though, we definitely need to do the work to figure all --well, at least a lot---of this stuff out before seeking membership. We also have six months to make a final decision on where we stand on infant baptism and get comfortable enough to explain that stance either way.
