Easter

This was different.

We're looking for a new church. I'm ready to be honest about that, and I'm not ashamed of it. It would be childish to be ashamed of doing something you believe in. But we're looking for a new church, and today is Easter. This Easter has been... more meaningful because of our search for a new church. I don't know if this is the "something missing," but something has made this easter more meaningful to me.

I wrote about my trip to the Orthodox church in the beginning of February. That is, I guess, where Easter started. We visited the church on the last day before lent started... or some kind of lent. It was the last day that they could eat meat before Easter. I sincerely loved what I saw there, loved the realness and the community. It felt raw and beautiful and without pretense. I work in lighting and powerpoint at my church, I know how much is and isn't a show. StuffChristiansLike wrote a post about what goes on when you are praying. Lighting changes, choir getting in place, I saw all that because I had my eyes open the whole time. But at the Orthodox church, there was none of that. There was sunlight and candlelight and incense and the only music was coming from our voices and you could see everything and everyone. It's strange, that in a church where a veil is present between the congregation and the alter, I felt closer to the people around me and to God then I do in a church where everything is well lit and well timed. The trip to the Orthodox church showed me that Christianity doesn't happen alone, it happens in a community. That was something that had been missing at my church.

The next week, I went to a Presbyterian church, to visit my old Sunday-school teacher, Damien. I think I've mentioned how amazing Damien is, but maybe not here. Damien is a research librarian, a former competitive martial arts fighter, he was in the military at some point... He is - or was - probably the only person in my entire church who unapologetically had tattoos. I like him because he is a real person. He lives his life very really, he speaks his mind and does it well, and he was the first person I met in my church who was willing to admit that we probably didn't have everything right. It seems like an easy - and obvious - thing to admit, but he was the first person in a position of authority to do so. He is really responsible for my family looking for a new church, simply because his class showed us our history and how fake some of our points of argumentation were. Perhaps I'll write about him more some other time, because I really owe him quite a bit. Regardless, we visited his church. We went to his Sunday school first, which was the same as always, but with new people who... having different thoughts, asked different questions. But it was much the same. The service was forgettable. Empty except for old people (the contemporary service had already gone on), simple but honest preaching. Talk of lent and giving things up. There wasn't much life in it, I got the feeling that the life of the church was in the contemporary service, because the fellowship after was vibrant.

The week after that, I went to a Greek Orthodox church (different language, different location). I didn't like it. It was much bigger, it was much fancier, it was much more polished. It was far less real. Like... You know when you watch speeches, persuasive, and some of them are perfect to a flaw? And others are not as high quality, but so much more real that they speak to you more for being real. Like... people. The perfect Christians who talk to you and know all the answers just feel fake... and the half-irreverent, foul mouthed Christians who you can recognize as real people are so much more meaningful. (Bill Gothard vs. Donald Miller) This church felt dead. The psalms were chanted by a man who looked and sounded like he was dying. There wasn't even a homily. The service was almost completely empty until the end when they gave communion, and then it was suddenly full. It felt so fake, so empty, so mechanical. We go to church on Sunday, take communion, and then go back to our lives. It was everything that my church accused the Roman Catholic church of being.

Two weeks ago I went to a Lutheran church. It was smaller, but it still lacked the same feeling of community. More than anything, it felt like a missionary church. And... it was, really. The pastor and assistant pastor were from out of state - some state where the Lutheran church is much bigger - and had come here - to New Hampshire, the least churched state in America - to be missionaries. It was almost comical, the priest didn't quite have the liturgy memorized. He would get halfway through one of the large paragraphs, then have to stop and look at the book behind him to keep going. It was only comic because the words came so naturally to him that they sounded like his own words, and only when he stumbled did you remember that they had been said like that for hundreds of years. There were mostly only elderly people and middle-aged parents with their younger children. There weren't any... families, not like ours. In that way it lacked community. But after the service everyone opened up more and was more welcoming.

This week, today, Easter Sunday, I went back to my church. It was difficult to appreciate. But I don't need to complain about my church any more than I already have.

And... I don't really know how this has made Easter more meaningful. Throughout this whole church visiting process, my Dad has been eating vegetarian for lent, I've been exposed to vastly different services who all share this one idea: Christ died to save us and rose again to give us hope. It - Easter - became more meaningful because it is universal to all of the different churches of all the different denominations that I visited. And... I don't know if that's what was missing, but it is something that wasn't there before. I wanted to share this with you.