Last month my wife and I moved to the mountains of beautiful southwest Virginia. We’re getting settled in, most of the boxes have been emptied, we’re getting acclimated to driving around town. And we’ve got a lot less stress here than we did living in the super-busy suburbs of Washington DC. One major to-do item when moving is to find a new church. Here are some thoughts I have noticed as we’ve been looking for churches to visit. So far we’ve visited three different churches, and there are five others on our list.
We started our search with a search engine by searching for “city name” then “denomination name.” This gave us a great start on getting familiar with our choices. We found about 20 churches in our first search. By changing the denomination in the search box, we found more churches, ending up with about 35 different churches that we could visit. So now to whittle that down to a more manageable number.
An easy criteria to use is location. How far is it from our new home to the church? We want to be involved in the life of the church, but spending a lot of time in the car to get there and back is not an attractive option.
Next, what does the church believe? Is there a doctrinal statement? Some churches have a basic bullet list; others had very detailed reasonings and explanations of their beliefs. Bonus points went to those churches that backed up their beliefs with scripture.
Also, what can we learn about worship services? For example, the number of services tells a lot about a church. A church with multiple Sunday services, or different services aimed at different groups, or only one service a week is also good information to have. How active is the church body? For example, are there weekly Bible studies? Wednesday night supper? Ministries to the homeless, hungry, students, homebound? Sunday school?
Once we are at a new church, we looked at these things: How friendly were the people? Did they introduce themselves, and ask about us? How was the worship service itself? What is the preaching style? How is the facility itself? Is the facility well-lit and maintained?
The type of music is important. Do they use hymnbooks or an overhead projector? A service using only an organ is very different from a service with a worship band. And it’s been a while since we’ve been at a church that had a choir, so that has also been something to get used to.
Here’s something interesting: while driving around our neighborhood (we got a little lost because I typed a wrong address into our GPS) we passed a very nice looking church that hadn’t come up on any web searches. When we got home, we couldn’t find any online presence for this church at all. Nothing on the web, Facebook, Twitter. A basic web site listing service times, information about your beliefs, and contact information is the minimum you need to have. And with dirt cheap hosting options, there is no valid excuse why your church doesn’t have at least a basic web presence.
So, we’re still visiting churches in our new neighborhood. It’s exciting meeting new people, but we’re really looking forward to having a new church home.
(Photo courtesy of Staffan Vilcans; used by Creative Commons license.)
