Not sure if that is helpful at all, but I do hope it is encouraging enough to help you “give it another shot”. Blessings

Our preacher friend told me when you start ‘church shopping’ it’s very easy to fall into the habit of moving from church to church, because there will always be something you can find wrong with any church. He told us it didn’t have to be the church he was in, but we needed to find a church and settle in and see what WE could do to help the church, not necessarily the other way around. Having heard that, we’re now in this state of frozen fear, because we don’t want to be ‘church shoppers’ lol. So we just sit back and admire places from the outside and try to guess what might be a good church for us. In the meantime, we still do our family Bible studies and watch “preachin’ ” on television, and try to continue to raise our little girls in a Godly home. To try to compensate for our lack of wisdom and sense of where to turn, we have amped up the way we study with our children, so as to provide as much of a Christian upbringing as is possible until we settle in to a church. We know this is our fault for not just finding one and going, but at this point with myself and my husband it has truly come to a point of just being..frozen.

The last church we went to, the pastor “preached” three Sundays in a row about what was going on with the building fund, and how they had done market research(??) before coming to our town to find out ‘where they were needed most’. We quit going when they told us our children would have to wear a name tag with a bar code on it so they could be ‘scanned’ in and out each time, and so they could ‘keep records’ to make sure the children had been picked up or had, yes, I promise, ‘ridden the shoot’ from the third floor of the mega-church building down to the ‘landing zone’ where the parents picked them up. Sigh.

We just want a nice, normal-sized church with common, everyday people like us, who want to get together and worship the Lord. One church we went decided to split, right there in church, the VERY FIRST AND LAST time we went. I was invited to a home church by a guy I used to work with and we were considering going until my ex-husband informed me the guy had lived next door to him for a few months and he was an ex-con who was running from child support and had stopped working and started a ‘church’ so he wouldn’t have to report his whereabout to the IRS. WHAT???

Anyway, enough with my lengthy diatribe. I apologize for the novel. Please keep my family and community in your prayers. We definitely have a lot of church BUILDINGS around here, as you say.

Ariana — I very much agree that it easier to do nothing than to actually invest in helping create real family and community. Blessings on your reflections.