How do you go about finding the right church? Is it like finding a new house that you have a list of essential criteria to tick off? But sometimes when house hunting you just walk into a house and fall in love with it. It feels right for you. Can it be the same with finding a church?
When we were house hunting before our move, we had a list of criteria of what was essential and another list of things that would be nice but not critical. When looking for a church a similar checklist is good.
What I consider essential in a church is primarily one that faithfully preaches the word of God, not leaving out bits, not adding to it, not picking and choosing which bits to believe and which to relegate to the area of myth rather than fact. And it happens. My husband and I were in a church for a while where the Word of God was undermined and so many of the miracles attempted to be explained away. Needless to say we soon realized that was not the place for us. We went to another church during a holiday one time and the Bible was not even opened and read. Or another, years ago, where the talk had nothing to do with God’s Word. It was just a five minute homily about flowers.
So when looking for a church when we were preparing to move, what did we do?
Firstly we prayed for God to guide us to the church where He would have us and where we could serve Him. We set out our criteria of what a church should have
1. The church needed to be solidly grounded in God’s Word and teaching the bible faithfully. Even if all the other points lined up, this was by far the most critical and not negitable criteria.
2. The church needed to have music that enhanced worshipping God and where the lyrics were related to the sermon topic, not unconnected and put in the service because it had a good tune.
3. The church needed to be welcoming to newcomers and have people we felt we could relate to.
4. The church needed to have a presence and be active in the community.
We then went to the area where we were thinking of living and made sure we were there on the weekend so we could checking out a couple of the churches.
The first day we arrived we felt unsettled about our decision to move and wondered if we were mad to leave a good church, a comfortable home and an area where we knew lots of people. We began to have serious doubts about the wisdom of the plan. That was Saturday afternoon.
On Sunday we turned up at a church that people from our church in Orange had told us was a biblically based and evangelical church.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you how under God’s guidance we found the church for us.
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