In searching for a new home, you might start by listing the items you need and then the ones you want. You’d know the number of rooms you desire, along with the square footage. You’d know the type of kitchen that suits your tastes.
You’d have a mental picture of your ideal neighborhood–the people and the amenities. You’d understand that no home is perfect. But among the most important features of your investment would be that it sits in a place that feels like a community, safe and secure.
This marks the second year in a row in which I’ve begun the New Year resolved to search for a new home–a church home.
I grew up in a Christian church.
My family attended two, sometimes three worship services a week. Our church sat on South Cottage Grove Avenue in a large building that had been converted from an old Internal Revenue Service office. Long before I was born, so many renovations had taken place that few vestiges of the secular remained and the sanctuary was relatively seamless.
More Top Picks Oud Mood Lattafa Perfumes For Women And Men
My sister and I sang in the Gospel Choir. Our choir uniforms included black polyester skirts and white blouses that often smelled of bleach.
There was singing and preaching and shouting. So much so that Sunday morning service often crept into the late afternoon. This was bearable during the colder months.
But in the summer, the church–which had no air-conditioning and only had been fitted with a couple of small windows along a back wall–became an inferno. So the straightened and coifed hair that we often began morning service with, by noon always reverted back to near-Afros.
After college, I never returned to the church on South Cottage Grove as a member. To my family’s dismay, my return was as a visitor. Still, each time I visited, church members greeted me warmly, as though I was coming home.
While I have fond memories of growing up in the church, I also have some not-so-fond ones.
I left organized religion because more often than not, the pulpit was a place where the lessons were too paternalistic and doctrinaire. There were too many contradictions and things that simply didn’t make sense to me.
According to some pastors I’ve heard, a person could lead a hellish life and then on his or her deathbed profess a fondness for Christ and be ushered into heaven.
It was beyond my comprehension why a person who had led a stellar life–who’d fed the poor, housed the homeless, served others–wouldn’t get to heaven if he or she hadn’t confessed sins to Christ.
I know there are Bible passages that some say explain all of this. Still I believed, I believe, that God is much more just and far more discerning.
Last December, my husband and I resolved to find a church home for our daughter, who was 10.
In the black community, the church is as much a place of worship as it is the cornerstone of the culture.
I made a mental list of the things I needed and wanted in my new church home. I envisioned my ideal church as a place that appreciated a diversity of thought, and where questions were not just brushed off.
I wanted a place that valued debate, but understood that the answer to some questions is simply: “We may never know.”
I also wanted a place where there would be room to grow. I don’t mean the type of growth that comes with building membership or going mega.
Most important, I wanted a church where the core tenet was something like this: “OK, I know it’s hard–really, really hard–but try to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Treat people the way you’d want to be treated.”
If you start there, a lot of other things have a better chance of falling into place.
We visited church after church and never really found a good fit. So we stopped by the middle of the year.
I’ll begin anew this year with my family looking for the right church.
Of course, it will be with the understanding that no place is perfect. And that all the buildings we inhabit–the human one, in particular–are always under construction.
———-
More Top Picks Best Baby Gates For Stairs