Church Thoughts

I said that I would talk about the church a little bit, so here I go. We joined our church nearly 30 years ago, and absolutely loved it. The people there were like our family, and our three daughters always knew that they could go to anyone in the church at any time of the day or night, and they would be taken care of. That all changed a couple of years ago, when some people who had been just mildly annoying became unbearably so. All of a sudden, we were being told how to worship, how to think, how to feel, and how to pray by a very fundamentalist group of people (this was not a fundamentalist church). We were informed that God only hears prayers that are said out loud, and that the only way to pray is to ramble on and on - well, they didn't say that, but that is what they did. These decrees were not by the pastor; unfortunately, this group of people decided that the pastor was no longer welcome in our church, and took great steps to remove her.

When some of these things started happening, I was reminded of the Pharisees, people who said one thing, but behaved differently. As time went on though, I equated this behavior with the Sadducees, who really thought they were better than everyone else. It makes the Pharisees appear to be simply misguided folks.

New Church

My husband and I left the church that we had been attending for nearly 30 years because of some rather serious events that were occcurring. It has been a long, painful process for us, as the decision was a difficult one. After nearly a year, we are starting to feel less anxious.

We have been attending another church in our community for some months now, and are starting to feel comfortable there. We move slowly, and stay back a bit, because we are very gun-shy about what happened. The church we go to is a different denomination than our old church, which is not a problem, and there are some things that we are just starting to get used to, but it is going well. The minister is a very nice person, the people are friendly without being phony, and we have been accepted.

Some day I will write about the problems we faced.