Church

The saga of Laura Looks for a Church is, I think, drawing to a close.

For a while I've been going to Glasgow Elim. And it's been good in many ways. However, the Pastor is very much caught up in the 'Florida Outpouring' and, having watched one of the services there on God TV, I just got more and more uncomfortable about the whole 'movement'. To me, it doesn't appear to have reverence for God.

There were some other things wrong at Elim too. The Pastor would use ... um ... dubious language. Profanity, I suppose you would call it. The word in question is in common useage and probably isn't even considered a 'swear word' by the majority of people anymore. But since when do we conform to the pattern of the world? I found it inappropriate.

There were other things - coarse joking, saying 'magic' words over people who came forward for healing, lack of Biblical teaching, addition of man's (mis)information to what was taught from the Bible. It was all wrong. In my opinion. Do you know, I've been mulling this post for a few days and I was going to say something along the lines of: "Lots of little things were wrong and they all added up." But these are major issues I'm listing.

The long and the short of it is that the Elim Church and I have parted company. I have no peace about going there and a whole lot of peace about not. So I was back to Church shopping. Which is a horrible expression but what else can one call it? Actually, I didn't shop very hard. I quit Elim and didn't start going anywhere else. Maybe I needed time to clear my head from all the mumbo-jumbo?

But on Friday of last week, I found myself looking online at local Churches. Again. I was really quite dispirited about the whole thing. So I decided to lighten up a bit and took the Belief-o-Matic test. And, half in jest, I said to God: "OK - whatever this comes out with, that's what I'll go to." It gave me the highest score for 'Mainline to Conservative Christian' and the next highest for 'Brethren'. The two were virtually tied. I clicked on the 'relevant' links the site gave and found out that I really do believe what other people, similarly categorised, believe. The denomination that kept coming up was Evangelical. And there's a Church called 'Cartsbridge Evangelical Church' near here. I've been a couple of times before and really, really liked it. So I started surfing over their site and over the sites they link to. And one of the links took me to a directory listing in which Cartsbridge's denomination is given as 'Brethren.'

Now, I'm not going to start trumpeting about having a message from God. But I will tell you that I have such peace about attending there regularly. I went on Sunday and it was really good - everything I would want in a Church, so far as I can see. Additionally, my family have no problem with me going there. In fact, my mother used to go to a Brethren Church when she was a student! This is compared to the Elim Church which I very carefully never told my parents I was going to because they'd have had kittens. And, as I realise now, rightly so.

Anyway. I think this is where God is placing me. I'm not going to step forward to make a commitment until I've been going regularly for a goodly while (I'm thinking a year wouldn't be unreasonable) but I'm so glad that the search appears to be over!