For about two years before I became Catholic, I tried to decide where to go to church. After I knew I didn’t fit in with the Baptists, I made a mental list of all the denominations in my town and considered each one. Logical, right?
I’d been a Presbyterian in high school, but the Presbyterian church in Bertram was a different kind of Presbyterian than I’d known, because of a split way back when. They were actually kinda like the Baptists where I’d already been, except they used a hymnbook I wasn’t as familiar with, so I didn’t see point in even considering them. (I admit maybe that was just an excuse.) All those people were friends so why couldn’t they all go to the same church anyway?
I’d been singing with the Grace Notes, my trio, for awhile, and one of the ladies was Methodist. There was a Methodist church in Bertram, and they were very “open” with their communion like Riverbend had been, so I did consider them. At that time though, they had a lady preacher who was kind of odd. She called everybody “Friend” whether you knew her or not. Also, one day I drove into Georgetown to visit one of the Methodist churches there. The minister was preaching on how proud he was to be a Methodist. Honestly, it didn’t sound very inspiring to me. From what I could gather, the basis for his pride was the fact that the Methodists had 350 years of history, and some of these “‘new’ churches springing up everywhere, well, what did they have to offer with only 1 or 2 or 10 years of history behind them?” Immediately I wanted to laugh, wondering what the Catholics might think of that speech. I wasn’t Catholic at the time, but I always saw the Catholic church as the “Mother” ship, even if I would have also said she took on too much water and went adrift sometime in the 15th century.
I’d been watching TV pentecostals for some time, since the mid-1990’s at least, and I tried to talk myself into driving to a large charismatic Christian fellowship, called Shoreline, in north Austin. However, I thought if I was going to drive all the way to Shoreline, then I might as well drive all the way back to Riverbend. I knew I was too lazy for either. And, I reasoned, I could always watch the pentecostals on TV anyway.
Then it occurred to me to use a different criteria than I’d used before. I thought about my ethnic heritage. I’d been adopted through the Lutheran Social Service. My birth father’s family, it turns out, were from the town where Martin Luther was born, and where he ultimately died, Eisleben. If you look on the internet, Eisleben has a website where they proudly advertise this claim to fame. I’d known a very nice lady who attended the Lutheran church in Burnet, the next town over, but I knew my connection to Lutheranism was the weakest of all. I’d never even been to a Lutheran church. And I didn’t really owe my birth father’s family any kind of ethnic allegiance anyway.
So I was stuck. Again.
Every Friday I’d be driving home from work, rehearsing in my mind all the choices I had for church. I’d try to decide and make my plan for which church to attend that weekend. And every Sunday, I’d sleep late and stay home. It was ridiculous.
I thought, what if I were a pagan? An unchurched heathen who had experienced a touch from the Holy Spirit? Where would I go to church? How would I decide? Would it be confusing for me? If it was confusing for a person like me who was already Christian, and had already been a member of a church, then I’m thinking it would be confusing for someone with little church experience, too. I’m certain that Jesus does not want things to be so confusing.
I stayed in this rut for part of 2004, all of 2005, and part of 2006, a very long time, it seemed to me.
The only thing that got me out of the rut was the voice of God.
