Changing Churches
My wife and I went to the front of the church last Sunday, declaring our decision to transfer our membership to a new congregation. Many people today are disenchanted with the idea of church membership. I’m a strong believer in membership and involvement. It’s a commitment you make to be an active and supportive part of a community.
Our transfer was from Gonzalez United Methodist Church to First United Methodist Church (Pensacola). I list both churches, because we are going from a church we love to another church we expect to love. Gonzalez has been a place of service for us, and we are moving to First Church because we believe that we will be able to be of service there as well.
So on Pentecost Sunday, with my former student Rev. Geoffrey Lentz preaching on the Holy Spirit, we made the move. It’s a bit uncomfortable. It’s a much larger church than I’m used to, but the idea is that there are more people there who are interested in the type of teaching I do, and I can perhaps teach more often at my home church than going out elsewhere. At the same time there is some excitement in this. A total of 52 people joined the church at the three services that day, 36 confirmands, and the rest transfers and some professions of faith. There was one baptism of a new member.
For the summer, Jody won’t have a contemporary service, which is hard for her, but we love the sermons both by the senior pastor, Dr. Wesley Wachob, and by Geoffrey. I am looking forward to a great deal of learning as well as teaching.
If there is no contemporary service, then what is the point of this church at all? Is it just for keeping up people’s idea of history? Every service at every church should be “contemporary” in the sense of being up to date in reflecting where the congregation currently is at. Or by “contemporary” do you just mean a particular style of music?
Peter, I used the term pretty loosely, for which I apologize. What will not be present until September is a service that is more interactive and uses contemporary music such as my wife appreciates. In September, they will start a liturgically structured service that features contemporary music. I couldn’t give you a technical description of the precise sort of music that will be involved. The order of service will draw heavily on tradition, as in very early church, not 19th century! 🙂
My wife would prefer a less structured, more spontaneous service with music that involves guitars and drums.
I would imagine that “contemporary” in terms of meeting needs of community and congregation must be already happening, because the church is growing, bursting at the seams, and they are having to buy and refurbish a new building so that they can have the new service, which is why it isn’t going to start until September–there’s simply no place to put it.
Thanks. That’s what I thought you meant, but I did want to clarify. I hope the new service is also as popular and reaches younger people who are not traditional churchgoers, although I wonder if it will if it is too “liturgically structured”. But of course it is not for me to say how a church should operate in a context so different from my own.