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Church Hunting

Paul Salaman demonstrates how to track down the best for you

After recently uprooting and moving on to a new town because of a new job (my wife, Christine, and I) were faced with once more with the task of seeking out a good church to go to. After finally leaving the sunny climes of York this will be our third church we’ve been members of in as many years so we’re quite practiced in the art of church hunting, which can be frustrating and angstful experience but also can be a time to reflect on the purpose of a local church.

Whilst at York we went to Hes Church and got fairly heavily involved there but I never really felt happy there. I don’t wish to knock the church as I still think very fondly of it. But with all this picking and choosing its very easy to become selfish, pandering to your whims and miss the point of what the church is there for and so what makes a good church.

If you ask many people what the purpose of their church is and what is its most important function the automatic answer is that it is a place where people come together for worship and its main function is the Sunday morning service. This view, I feel, stems from the fact that these are the prominent features of what most churches do but I feel this is a wrong view and often degrades church going to non-interactive spectating analogous to a cinema or theatre where you put your money on the plate and expect to be entertained. Coming together for worship is a good thing but is not, I feel, essential to Christian living. The Bible makes clear we should be worshipping and praising God at all times and in all places, not just on a Sunday morning but the Bible also makes clear that we should come together as groups of Christians. The question is why?

Many good Christians don’t see the need to go to church, pointing out that living a good Christian life is about being ‘out there’ in the world, following Christ, and to a certain extent that is true. The most important fruit of our Christian living should be our work for Christ, whatever that may be, and it is for this reason the church is there.

The thing is we can only be truly effective in our Christian work if we support and are supported in our local church. The best analogy I can think of is that of an army and before I use it can I just point out that I am a pacifist and wouldn’t want to push the analogy too far.

Firstly an army is a very large collection of people with a common objective, winning the war. This is obviously analogous to the universal church wishing to do God’s will. To be effective an army must do certain things. It must communicate well with each other and most importantly with the leader who has all the plans of attack. It must split into smaller groups, e.g. regiment and battalions, that will literally work together, supporting each other to achieve the objective. It must also train and equip its soldiers for the tasks they will face.

In the same way, for Christians to be effective in their service they must be encouraged to seek God’s will through scripture and prayer, not just for themselves but for churches, cities and nations. They must come together in local churches to support and encourage each other and sometimes actually to do the work together. They must also teach and train each other in Christian living, sharing wisdom and experience.

If all Christians tried to do God’s work independently of each other then the universal church would be like a disjointed and confused army with soldiers running around in different directions, tripping over each other and doomed to failure. This is the reason we belong to churches as regiments in the army of God. Taking the analogy further we must remember that a regiment is only a subset of the army and must work together with the rest of the army if it is to succeed and so no church should be an island but must think of itself merely as part of the Universal Church.

Knowing the purpose of the local church can now help me in picking one for me: it must be mutually supportive (not necessarily during services but through house groups/study groups and fellowship), it must train and guide its members, it must help its members to draw closer to God (the closer you get to God the clearer his will becomes), and of course it must be encouraging its members in going out and doing God’s work.

The Church that we finally decided upon is a big, very ‘going places’ church and it was a difficult choice. A major argument against it was that the church already has a wealth of talent and some of the churches we visited were crying out for people like us but the question I had to answer was not “What can I do for the church?” nor “What can the church do for me?” but “How can the church enable me to do the best for God?”

Paul Salaman

Last modified: 25th November 2005