Hi Maggie, I’m Home! What’s Wrong, Girl? Smell Something? I Hope It’s Not That Cow-Dung I Just Rolled In. Some Thoughts About “Church Shopping”

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Dogs, I’m told, have a very keen sense of smell. I’ve noticed normally gregarious dogs as well as generally apathetic dogs turn into intense, deranged hounds when you have the smell of something unique on your person. Of course, so many of the different breeds of dogs we have today are what they are because they were originally bred for hunting some kind of “game,” as hunters like to call certain species of animals. Renee and I have a miniature wiener dog named Maggie.

Now, wiener dogs (oh, excuse me, dachshunds is the proper nomenclature) were bred to hunt badgers. Please do not ask me why I know this; I just do. As far as we can tell, Maggie has no real interest in badgers, probably because she’s never seen one before in her life; she currently prefers rabbits. I do like to think, though, that the day she sees a badger her in-bred instincts will kick in and she will transform before my eyes from the frumpy, obstinate, smarty-pants thing that she is into a raving lunatic beast consumed with murder. Yeah, that would be kinda cool. But the point is that she, like all other dogs, has a keen sense of smell, and would stop at nothing to decipher a new scent.

So tell me why she gave me a completely unsuspected yet eerily intense “sniff-down” when I got home from visiting yet another new church today. I wondered if she smelled baloney.

After graduating from college last May, Renee and I moved to Reynoldsburg, Ohio, in the greater Columbus metropolitan area. We moved back home, in a sense, because this is where we were from originally. We decided to begin attending the church where we had been before we got married and moved up to Mount Vernon, Ohio, where I was finishing school. It had been a place that, upon leaving, we knew we would miss a great deal. Once we came back to it, though, we realized how much we had changed in the interim time. All of a sudden, we became offended by the fact that this church held their Fourth of July service up to the same standards that they did their Christmas and Easter services. Perhaps higher, because I’ve never seen the congregation attempt to coordinate their colors so perfectly on Easter or Christmas as they did on the Fourth. Needless to say, that didn’t work out.

Mid-way through fall, we quietly defected. Since then, we’ve been searching for a new church, or “church shopping,” as the saying goes. (Let the record show, by the way, that I think how the saying goes sucks.) But it’s been difficult searching for a new church in the suburbs. So many of them personify that “Jesus wants to cuddle up in your heart and watch Lifetime with you” aesthetic that it really gets numbing after a while. You begin to wonder if anyone out there is still thinking about and buying into that whole deal which Walker Percy described as “God Jews Jesus Church.” And everytime I get excited by a new possibility, I get awkwardly disappointed. Let me give you an example.

I had known for a while that there was a church meeting at our local theater here in town. Since Renee has to work tonight, and she works third shift, she was catching up on some sleep this morning and I was going it alone. I figured, why not? There are some very good possibilities I could imagine in a church that meets in a movie house, you know? A church that is fully engaging in pop culture? A church that is taking the stories of Hollywood seriously and finding connections to the Christian faith? Perhaps a church that blends the old necessaries of reverence and the elements with the new ones of cultural engagement and relevance? Could this be it?

I walked in seeing movie posters all around me. I liked this fact, because it made me think of how we walk everyday with the stories told by others surrounding us, and here we have the opportunity to meet in a theater room and remind ourselves of our own story, and begin to imagine the ways in which we relate our story to these stories. Cool stuff, right? I almost immediately begin to doubt these possibilities when a friendly woman approached me, introduced herself as the pastor, and asked, “Are you looking for faith?” You have to understand, as someone who has grown up in the church and has always been unusually religious throughout, I really chafe at being seen by someone else as  one “among the lost.” I muttered something about looking actually for such-and-such church, and she laughed and said yes, that’s where you’re at, I just thought you were looking for someone named Faith. I didn’t really buy it, and the “convo” dropped off. Yeah, a little awkward.

There were only about a dozen people there, and so everyone came over to me, introducing themselves and the people standing close to them. Nearly every introduction ended in an anxious staring contest after we said our names. Those who know me know that I just love that kind of stuff. Eventually, God had mercy on us and moved the clock to 10:00, so we could begin walking towards the sanctuary. I believe it was screen 8.

Considering that I have just last week posted on this obscure blog of mine that I believe our praise and worship is essentially pornographic, I don’t really have anything new to say about the music part of the service, save that it was long. So long. Once it was over, the pastor spoke about how we shouldn’t get hung up on guilt, the band leader sang a Third Day song (from Jesus’ POV: “Just to be with you, I’d do anything,” etc.), and then I ducked out after she dismissed us. I scurried out into the lobby and towards the door, past what I guessed had been ”children’s church,” which consisted of kids running around with balloons. I didn’t even take time on my way out to grab a Timbit.

What’s so funny to me about this experience is that, even though I was generally undewhelmed with the church and its attempt to stoop to our culture’s level of individualism, I never felt a complete sense that this church amounted to nothing. They were friendly; overly-friendly, as middle-agers in a new, small church tend to be, but they were trying to do right by their kids and their consciences. And although by the time I weaved out into the hallway I wanted to question their effectiveness in, well, anything, I know that the only weekday activity they seem to be involved in is a weekly trip to the Mid-Ohio Food Bank. Certainly not flashy, but then again, the good stuff rarely is.

On my way out the door, a girl about my age was trying to corral the kids together. She caught me, introduced herself, and told me that the congregants usually go out for lunch, and wanted to know if I could come along. I thanked her for the invite, explained that I had things to do at home, then said I had appreciated her church’s hospitality, and went out the door.

Her name, by the way, was Faith.

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