Church: Part 2

In November of last year Stefan's mother was baptized. This was pretty amazing for several reasons: 1) She's a quiet and private person. Getting up in front of nearly a hundred people to talk about her faith and get totally submerged under water is not something you think she'd do if you knew her.


2) Most people get baptized when they're younger. She was 66 at the time and wanted to do it anyhow. She had always enjoyed singing in church choirs, wherever she lived, and one line from her testimony stands out, "I believe what I sing."


3) In addition to doing something we'd typically say was far from her comfort zone, she had a fantastic experience with the mentoring process she had both from the pastor and from another woman in the church. So much so that as we attended the service we also benefited from these relationships. It actually gave us pause to think, realizing that some of these elements were things that we had enjoyed in the last church experience we'd had in the US, but somehow hadn't found yet here in Germany for ourselves.


While the baptism didn't mark a point of earth-shattering revelations for us, it does mark a turning point. After living in Germany for nearly 2 and a half years by this point, we were growing increasingly frustrated with many things regarding our church situation.

I don't think here is the place to go into the details, but it is the place to say that we don't take commitment to a church lightly. We both believe church is about a place where you should not only 'receive', but also 'give'. Despite the many churches I attended growing up (thanks to all the moving), I was raised to look for a church that focused on Christ and the entire Scriptures while also living what was preached (for the most part; we are human after all!). It was also ingrained in me that you don't leave a church unless it's preaching heresy or that sort of extreme thing; basically stick with a church through thick and thin and do your part to help out and make it a better place. Minor on the minors (ex. drums or no drums), major on the majors (ex. sola scriptura issues, etc.).

That said, these things were not really the issues that were making us feel so out of place in our current church. We found ourselves in a weird, gray area; a fourth dimension of sorts that comes about when you've crossed into another model of church. Different church models naturally have their own natural strengths and weaknesses. However, we just felt like round pegs in a square hole. No matter what we tried, we just didn't FIT.

We were in dialogue with the main church leader over the course of a year about this issue. So it wasn't really a surprise when, in January of this year, we said we would be taking some time off from this church to try other churches to see what happened. We gave ourselves 6 months. There's nothing special about 6 months, but we felt putting a limit on it would helps us be intentional about our search and keep us from getting sucked into drifting around (or bailing totally).

We started going to Stefan's mother's church in Giessen. There were several other natural connections to this church, kind of too much to go into here, but that's how we got started there, and part of the reason why we've stayed there for the last 5 months.

But that's not where the story ends.