How to Find a Church | WIW0001

Rumble link (same video as above): https://rumble.com/v610deq-how-to-find-the-perfect-church-a-step-by-step-guide.html

Christian living is a lot like mountain climbing. Picking the wrong equipment or an incompetent guide can have monumental consequences.

Today on Word in the World we’re going to talk about how to find a church. When I got the inspiration for this post, I looked around and was really surprised to see that nothing like this is out there, at least not that I could find. There’s no videos, no blog posts, no anything to tell you how to actually go about finding a church. So this is a post that needs to be made. People need help on how to do this.

This post is about how to find a church. I’m going to tell you things to look for but you have to do the work. I’m not going to tell you which church, denomination, or whatever you should go to. That’s up to you based on the information that I give you and anything else that you think is important.

The most important thing that you can do while you’re looking for a church is to pray. Pray for God to show you and bring you to the right church. After you pray you have to be open to what God wants you to do. You have to move where He wants you to move.

If you seek God earnestly and you follow what he is trying to get you to do, He will put you in the church that He wants you to be in. If you are faithful, He is faithful and He will put you where you’re supposed to be. It may take some effort. It will take some effort. But it’s worth it.

Churchless

Both my wife and I were raised in Christian homes. As we moved into adulthood individually, we each drifted away from the church for various reasons. God introduced us to each other, brought us together. (I truly believe that that was a God thing. It’s a different story for a different time, but I wholeheartedly believe that.) After we got married we started talking about needing to go back to church. To get back into church as a couple.

We lived in Phoenix at the time, so I started doing research into churches in the area. We talked about it, but it kind of fell off by the wayside. Life and work and stuff got – we allowed it to get – in the way.

Then our son was born, and that reignited the conversation – the need to get our family now back into church because we knew it was important for our children to be raised in a church environment. About that time, my work situation changed. I knew that we would be moving from Phoenix to Denver, although that was an intermediate term thing. It was going to be a bit, but I knew it was going to happen. I used that as an excuse to stay paused on searching for a church.

When we first got to Colorado, we knew that the first house that we lived in (in the Denver area), we weren’t going to be there very long. Again, we use that as justification to not start looking for a church. In both cases, the reasoning (faulty reasoning) that we used was “Well, we don’t want to get involved in a church and then have to cut ties in a short period of time.” Horrible logic, but that’s the truth of what we did and why we did it.

When we found the house that we live in now, we ran out of excuses. About that time, God started to work particularly on my wife, and really impressed the importance of getting back into church. So we decided to get serious and actually, really, truly applying ourselves to finding a church to call home.

So our decision was made. The question then is how do you go about finding a church?

What are you looking for?

The first thing you need to do is to decide what do you want in the church? What is it that you’re looking for?

• Most importantly, you want a church that teaches sound doctrine. That means a church that bases their teaching on the Bible itself.
• Next, you want a church that’s going to help you find Jesus, if you haven’t already. If you have, you want a church that is going to help you grow closer to him.
• You want a church that has good teaching – that uses good methodology and treats the scriptures with care.
• You want a church that has good fellowship – that you put down roots in and establish connections in and becomes an integral part of your life.

Now we’ve got some criteria, but that’s not really a list that we can use to evaluate a church on, at least not super effectively. How do we tell if a church matches, if a church is going to meet those needs? Well, let’s come up with some actual criteria that you can use to evaluate a church to look and see, is this church a good fit for me? As with most things in life, some criteria are more important than others. So I’ve split the criteria up into four categories.

• The first criteria is hard and fast indicators. These are the foundational bedrock truths of Christianity. Any church who doesn’t preach these is probably not worth your time.
• The next criteria is critical indicators. These are the bedrock aspects of the Christian faith, so you’re going to be looking at how the church deals with them.
• Next, you have important indicators, and this is where you see denominational differences really kind of start to pop up. These are things that there is some room for interpretation and application.
• And the last piece is what I call situational considerations. The Bible doesn’t say a ton about these things, but they have a pretty significant impact on your personal experience in that church, in terms of how it feels and does it mesh with what you expect

Hard and fast criteria

At the end of days, everyone will stand before the great white throne and be judged. If your name is found in the Book of Life, you will be rewarded for the service that you rendered to God during your life. If your name is not found in the Book of Life, you will be judged based solely on your actions and ultimately you’ll be cast into the lake of fire.

But Brett, you say, I lived a good life. It’s not good enough. God demands righteousness.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God

Romans 3:23

You need to make sure that your name is in the Book of Life. In the search for a church, there’s some things that you absolutely have to get right.

The Bible

First up is that the Bible is the complete, inerrant word of God, and is inspired by the Holy Spirit written by human authors. There’s a fancy term for this called Bibliology, so if you come across that in your search, that’s what they’re talking about. Ultimately, this boils down to one thing that has way broader implications than just this video, and that is that the Bible is an all or nothing proposition.

God

The next hard and fast criteria is that there is one true God made up of three persons. Our brains break at that. We can’t really get our head wrapped around it conceptually, but that’s what the Bible tells us. The fancy word for this is theology. People use theology a lot more broadly, but in its tight definition, theology is the study of God.

Let’s take a look at each person inside the Godhead. You might hear the term Trinity used. The term Trinity is never used in the Bible. It’s a term that we’ve come up with to help conceptualize and smooth conversations about this topic.

The Father

The first person is God the Father. Again, the study of God the Father is theology. God the Father is the head of the Trinity, and He is the Father of all things.

The Son

Next up is God the Son, Jesus Christ. The fancy term for the study of Christ is Christology. Fundamental aspects of Christ, He was conceived by the Virgin Mary and born. While He was here on earth, He was simultaneously human and God. He now sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven, and He is the commander of heaven’s armies.

The Holy Spirit

The third person of the Trinity is the Holy Spirit. The fancy term for the study of the Holy Spirit is pneumatology. The Holy Spirit is an immaterial but clearly distinct person of the Trinity. One of the most important functions that the Holy Spirit serves today is that He indwells the believer at the moment of salvation when we accept Jesus Christ.

Salvation

The most fundamental truth that a church must teach is that Christ died as a substitutionary sacrifice, was resurrected, and ascended into heaven. The fancy term for this is soteriology. You might also hear the term propitiation thrown around. That is the concept of Christ being a substitutionary sacrifice.

I’ll say it again, a little bit different: The church must teach that Christ died for your sins, was resurrected, and ascended into heaven.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.

John 3:16-17

Christ died as a substitutionary sacrifice for you. He was resurrected, and He ascended into heaven.

Jesus said to Him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

John 14:6

Christ took on your sins and died. In doing so, He imparted His righteousness onto you. He defeated death and was resurrected, and He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father. If you believe in Him, if you have accepted that He died for you, that is the truth of your spiritual salvation.

A church must teach this. If they don’t teach this, they’re teaching something other than the gospel. If they try to add something else onto this, they are teaching something other than the gospel.

These are hard and fast criteria. They are simply non-negotiable. These are fundamental, foundational, bedrock truths of Christianity.

Teaching

To get all this right, the church must study and teach the Bible, looking for the truth that is inside the scriptures. There’s a fancy term for that called exegetical teaching. I think it’s important that we take a slight detour here to break down what that looks like, so you know what to look for.

When we’re talking about studying and teaching, we have to look at the different methods that are employed. For the study methodology, there’s a fancy term for that – hermeneutic or hermeneutics. What hermeneutic, what study method are we looking for our church to apply? The literal grammatical historical method. And we’ll break that down here in a second.

Most importantly, you need to understand context is king when you’re studying Scripture. Context, context, context. Okay, so what kind of context?

Context

• The first would be who wrote the book? Who was the book’s author?
• The next piece of context is when was the book written? It’s really valuable to be able to pin a particular book down inside the Bible’s chronology, because there’s a significant amount of overlap, especially in the Old Testament, of when different books happened and the books inform each other.
• The next piece of context is who is the book addressing? Who was it written to or for?
• Next we have to look at what was happening to those people at the time that the book was written.
• We also have to look at what was the culture of the people that the book was written to.

What we’re doing is we’re building an understanding of who wrote the book, who they wrote it to, what was going on in the history, the culture, the society at the time so we can understand why the author wrote what he wrote and how he expected the people he wrote it to, to receive it.

• The next piece of context is looking at what are the verses or passages around the verse and passage that I’m looking at? What’s in the adjacent sections? What’s in the adjacent chapters? What is in the adjacent books? If you’re interpreting a verse or a passage and something immediately before or after the verse or passage that you’re looking at contradicts it, your interpretation is wrong.
• The last piece of context is what is the literary style of the book? In general, the Bible is split into sections, but certain books have certain literary themes. For example, Genesis is a history book. Psalms is a book of poetry. You get the point.

Grammar

We understand the importance of context, and now we have to understand the importance of grammar. Remember, these books were written in ancient languages, mostly Hebrew and Greek. The grammatical structure of those languages is very different from modern English.

For example, in ancient Hebrew the word that’s used for God can be either singular or plural, but in our English translations it’s translated as God. The singular version is usually God the Father; the plural version usually refers to God the Trinity or two the aspects of the Trinity.

In Greek, the verb structure is super complicated, and it’s not something that is communicated clearly in the English translation. An example is the Greek word for love. There’s a famous story where Jesus is talking to Peter after the resurrection, and He uses the term that’s translated as love four times. What you miss in the English translation is that they’re using two different versions of love, and it has an impact on the story and tells you a lot more about what’s going on in the conversation.

Obviously original languages, being able to understand the original languages, are important. That being said, not everyone is an ancient Hebrew or an ancient Greek scholar. There are resources out there that someone who’s not experienced or knows those languages can use, and they should use, and they should tell you they’re using them. However they choose to do it, whoever’s teaching you should be looking at the original languages, and then telling you details from those that are kind of lost in translation.

Syntax

The next piece is how the text or the message is structured. This is syntax. This is what we typically think of when we’re talking about grammar, nouns, verbs, objects, all that stuff. Another piece of syntax is figures of speech or idiomatic expressions. An example of this would be something like “sharp as a tack” that literally translated doesn’t make a ton of sense. This usually manifests in the form of metaphors. The last piece of syntax is linguistic devices. Looking at contrasts and comparisons inside the sentence and the passage that you’re looking at.

Rules for interpretation.

• The first rule is literal interpretation. If the meaning of the passage is clear, stop looking for additional meaning.
• The next piece of interpretation is the historical grammatical approach. That is where we went into building all that context to understand what was going on at the time, and we spent time looking at the structure and the language that was used. We have to build an understanding of what is going on for that passage to be able to interpret it correctly. As previously stated, we have to take into account the adjacent scriptures, verses, passages, sections, etc. There’s some important rules of thumb here too.
• The first and most important is that scripture is internally consistent. The Bible will never contradict itself.
• The next rule of thumb is use scripture to interpret scripture. You should never use an outside source to interpret scripture.
• Another rule of thumb is that just because the Bible may mention another text, it does not give legitimacy to that text. There’s some places, especially in the New Testament, where Paul is talking about other heretical beliefs and people have used that to justify saying that these are canon. They’re not. Paul is making an example of what not to teach.

Critical Indicators

When I learned all this stuff about how to study and how to accurately interpret the Bible, one of the things that was really interesting to me was to go back and look at the arguments around theistic evolution. This is the attempt to hold the belief (the secular belief) that humans originated from evolutionary mechanisms some way, but try to somehow square that up with the Bible, and in particular the creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2.

This all started to happen immediately after Darwin published his theory on the origins of man. It’s fascinating to me that people immediately started jettisoning their biblical worldview and adopted a secular worldview, but still tried to somehow hold on to the traditions of the Bible. What wound up happening and still happens today is that people try to twist themselves and the Bible into pretzels to make the Bible fit into a secular worldview, and it just doesn’t work. I’m not trying to tell you what to believe. You should study and you should come to your own conclusions about that. But it does illustrate the first two points about our critical indicators.

• The first is the creation/origins of nature and mankind. It really comes down to, do you believe that God created everything? If you do believe that God created everything, do you believe in the literal interpretation of the account in Genesis?
• The second critical indicator is the fall and the entrance of sin into the world, and that is tied super closely to origins of man, because what you view about how man came to be is really heavily influenced what you believe about the fall and the origin of sin.
• The next critical indicator is the existence of heaven and hell. The Bible very clearly teaches that both of those things exist.
• The next critical indicator is our ongoing sin nature, how salvation affects us and what happens to us afterwards. That is how we draw closer to Christ. The fancy word for that is sanctification.
• Having been saved by Christ, we are part of the Body of Christ, which is another critical indicator. How does the Church view the Body of Christ? How does the Church talk about that, describe it, and how does it affect how the Church runs?
• Another critical indicator is how the Church deals with the passages in the Bible on sexual immorality. There are quite a few of them, and if the Church is being honest and faithful with their interpretation, the Bible makes it really, really clear that it doesn’t tolerate sexual immorality of any kind.
• Another critical indicator is how the Church handles the Church offices for men and women. The Bible is pretty clear that there are restrictions that some offices can only be held by men. We need to look at how the Church interprets and applies those passages.

Let’s take a detour or a slight history lesson.

Important Indicators

There is a concept called Calvinism that emerged with a guy named Calvin in the late 1400s and early 1500s. About a hundred years later, the concept of Arminianism emerged in the late 1500s. Without going too far into the details on what these two schools of thought are, they have been in constant tension with each other for more than 500 years and still right up to today. That gets to the importance of important indicators.

• The first important indicator is the security of salvation. Can you ever be unsaved? Can you voluntarily reject your salvation?
• The next important indicator is the concepts of free will versus predestination. That’s a massive rabbit hole that we’re not going to go down in this post.
• Another important indicator is how the Church views marriage and divorce. A Church that tends to be more liberal with their interpretations on these passages, generally, but not always, is going to be more liberal with their interpretation on the immorality passages as well.
• Another important indicator is how the Church views spiritual gifts, mainly in terms of how they think the gift is going to manifest and which gifts they think are still active and prominent in the world today.
• Another important indicator is exactly how the end times are going to play out. There are a couple of different opinions on this. Just be aware and understand what your Church is telling you.
• The final important indicator is how the Church views baptism, when it’s necessary, and what is actually happening in that process.

Situational Considerations

I grew up in non-denominational churches. Most of the churches I attended had what you could fairly term as more contemporary style of worship music. I’m not saying we had electric guitars or anything like that, but it wasn’t just a piano either. One of the things that’s been interesting to me is the opportunities that I’ve had to attend services, for other congregations, and seeing the differences in how they handle music. Some have what borders on a full rock show. Some have just a piano. And some have none at all.

And I bring this up to point out that, oddly enough, a lot of times it’s the small stuff that can make the biggest difference in terms of our everyday experience. It’s because it’s those small things that impact our day-to-day life, and this goes for pretty much anything we do. (It’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to communicate effectively in marriage, by the way.) Understanding and taking a look at how your church handles these things is going to have a huge impact on the experience that you have going to that church. These are what I call situational considerations.

• The first of these is the church’s approach to evangelism. If a church is being faithful to the scriptures, they will attempt to evangelize in some manner. It’s a question of how much emphasis they place on evangelism and how they interpret how that should look.
• Another situational consideration is the emphasis that the church places on volunteerism or service. This manifests in a couple of ways in terms of do they think that you should go out and volunteer and do external stuff? Also, is the church volunteer-run? Is it people -volunteers – running the sound system and doing worship services and teaching Sunday school, or is there paid staff for that stuff?
• A big situational consideration is the size of the church. You are going to get a very different experience in a small church versus a large church. When I say small, I mean a church that has a congregation of somewhere between 50 and 100 people. To me, a large church is a congregation that has 1000 plus. You’re going to have very different experiences between those two churches.
• Another situational consideration is what ministries does the church offer? Are you looking for a men’s group? A women’s group? A couple’s group? A youth group? A group for playing hacky sack? (I don’t think that’s a thing.) What ministries are there to support you in your growth and your journey as a Christian?
• Another situational consideration is how the church itself is organized. This goes more into the administrative part of it. Is there a board that runs things? Is the board the elders or is there kind of an administrative board? Who handles the admin? Is there secretaries? Is it more like business? All of that sort of stuff. That’s going to be a little bit more under the surface, but as you need to access resources from the church, that’s when that sort of thing is going to become more important.
• The last and probably the most important situational consideration is just how the church does things in general. How does the church do worship services? Is there multiple services? Are you encouraged to stay after? Do they run concurrent Sunday schools? All that sort of thing is really going to have a huge impact on what experience you have in that church and what you get out of it.

About Denominations

Like I said previously, I grew up in a non-denominational Bible church. I spent my entire youth going to non-denominational services. So, it was really interesting for me to go to denominational services every once in a while. If you’ve never done it, when you first walk into a denominational service, you kind of have to catch on to what everyone’s doing.

Everyone who is a normal tender knows what the flow is and kind of knows what to expect. That’s sort of true in any church, but it’s particularly true in denominational churches. There is an established order of things, kind of “What is the order of operations here?” Even stuff as simple as “I know now that we’re going to sing, so I’m going to pull a hymnal in front of me” and stuff like that.

It’s worth unpacking the denominational thing a little bit more. First off, what is a denomination? The short version is basically questions came up throughout church history, and the different denominations have interpreted different things different ways. For the most part, the different congregations or denominations can support their views biblically; it’s just an interpretation difference.

All other things being equal, what’s the difference between a denominational service and a non-denominational service? Denominations have a set of codified beliefs or statements. Usually you see this in the form of like a catechism or something like that – cliff notes, almost. Nicene Creed is a great example of a denominational doctrine statement.

The other thing that comes out of going to a church that is part of a particular denomination is that there’s a hierarchical structure. What that means is you have the individual church that you’re part of, usually a local governing structure of some kind, maybe another level. And then you ultimately get to a top tier or mothership level inside that hierarchy. For the most part, it exists to support the church and also clarify or address any doctrinal issues that come up.

Non-denominational, on the other hand, is pretty much the exact opposite. (Shocker, I know.) Basically, each non-denominational church establishes their own beliefs. They have to go through and extract biblical doctrine for themselves and say these are our statements of faith.

Additionally, there is no hierarchical or governing structure that the church belongs to. The church is truly an independent body. The independence of a non-denominational church kind of cuts both ways. The church is free to do whatever it wants, but some of the support mechanisms that exist for a denominational church simply aren’t there.

Remote Church

We’ve made it through all the criteria for what you should look for in church and suggestions for how to evaluate the church. It’s worth taking a sidebar here to talk about remote church services.

A lot of churches have been recording podcasts or videos in some form for quite a while, especially the bigger churches with the bigger budgets really leaned into this a long time ago, but it really took off with the advent of COVID and all of the craziness that surrounded that. I’m not going to get into the politics or my personal thoughts on the COVID mess and everything that happened there. The big takeaway is that a lot of people shifted to attending church online and they have been slowly trickling back since then, but it’s taken a while to recover. I guess what I’m trying to say is go, physically go, walk into church.

Study in video is a great tool. There is a ton of resources on YouTube to watch. Personally, I like to go back and rewatch certain sermons because I know that there is stuff that I missed. A good pastor will give you some really rich material, and it’s really nice to be able to go back and look at that again and say, OK, did I get that right? (I’m rabbit-holing myself.)

The point is that church isn’t for God. Church is for you. Church is supposed to be a time of fellowship where you gather with the body of believers – you spend time with each other and become part of each other’s lives. That’s how you build the support system, the system that is going to help you survive the tough times and help you grow during the good times and building. Those bonds with other Christians is so important to your growth and your endurance.

Getting a little bit more specific about that, we’re talking about discipleship, mentoring, accountability – all of these things that you have to have interpersonal relationships built for them to work. You need to physically go into the church and be in fellowship with people to establish those connections for discipleship and mentorship and accountability and the things that really enrich and support your life and so that you can do the same for other people.

Turn knowledge into action

Early in the post, I said you need to pray about your search for a church. You should always be praying, but you need to pray for this specifically. It’s really important to reiterate that while you’re searching for a church pray. Pray for God to lead you to the right church; be open to God moving you in certain directions; and when you feel God prompting you to do something, respond and act on that prompting.

We’ve talked about what to do. Now it’s time to put the work in. Let’s unpack how this actually looks.

When we started looking for a church the first thing was that my wife and I talked and decided that a non-denominational church is probably the way that we want to go. After that decision it was matter of finding out what churches are in the area. The easiest way to do this is to use a search engine. I spent a lot of time on Google Maps and I compiled a pretty lengthy list of possible churches.

Most churches have a website, and that’s one of the things I used as kind of a filtering criteria because I figured that if a church didn’t have a website, the overall culture of the church probably wouldn’t gel with what I was looking for, for my family. I’m not saying that you have to do that, but whether or not church has a website and how up to date their website is, is a pretty good indicator of the dynamics inside the church in terms of age and technology use and things like that.

The next thing is to spend time – and it does take a lot of time – actually going on to the church’s website, finding their statements of faith, and reading through them. You need to sit there with the statement of faith open and either a Bible in your lap or a Bible app on your phone or a Bible app online. (There’s a bunch that are available for free. Online, I use a website called Sermon Central. On my phone I have two apps – YouVersion and Logos. Both solid options; there’s a bunch of other options out there.) The point is, as you’re going through the statement of faith, they should have Bible verses in there supporting every statement that they make.

You should pull up those Bible verses, read the verse itself, say, “Does this apply?” Remember, context, context, context, read the passage around that verse. If they cite an entire passage, read the passages around that passage. Does their application track with the rest of the stuff that is around that passage or verse? If it doesn’t track, you should probably steer clear of a church that does not faithfully and carefully interpret and apply Scripture.

Now that you’ve been through that, you have a list of churches that (at least in theory) you agree with in terms of doctrine. Next, you need to go, walk into the church and actually go to a service there – go to a couple services, and see how it feels. See if the teaching is good. You have got to get eyes on and make your next assessment.

What you’re looking for there is overall feel, but you also need to pay attention to what’s being taught. Does their teaching track with their doctrinal statements? Are the people that are teaching you (be it in the main worship service, in Sunday school, or whatever) being faithful in how they handle the Scriptures? Are they using good teaching methods?

As you’re going through this, especially if you’re in a small church, people are going to identify you as the new people. It’s normal to feel new, but you shouldn’t feel out of place. You shouldn’t feel like a fish out of water. Most importantly, you should feel welcome. People should be excited to see you there.

As you’re going through this process and you’re attending services and stuff, if you express doubt about the church, you have any questions at all, people should want to help you figure that out, to help you sort through that. It may come out to, this just isn’t a good fit for us. If that’s the case, hopefully the church will say, “Maybe you should look at this other church, that might be more what you’re looking for.” At the very least, they should say, “Sorry, this didn’t work out. God bless. I hope you find a church you’re looking for.” Under no circumstances should you feel pressured to stay.

Most importantly, you should never feel like people don’t want you there. That is a massive red flag. You should feel like people want you there, they want to get to know you, and they’re super excited that you’re there.

One thing to consider (it’s probably worth a conversation with the pastor and the elders or whoever the governing body is) is that when you get to a certain point, you’re probably going to want to become an official member of that church. What does that process look like? During that membership process, usually there’s questions that they’ll ask to make sure that, you’re a good fit – there’s no serious doctrinal issues or anything like that. As you’re going through that, you should never need to actually prove anything or justify yourself to that body. What they should be doing is making sure that your membership there is a good fit. They shouldn’t require you to prove anything to them.

It worked for us

We got super lucky and I freely admit this. I did a ton of research online. I spent hours and hours looking through doctrinal statements, sorting out these are churches that I think are worth going to. We sat down and we talked over the list )I think I had a list of somewhere between 15 and 20 churches), and we decided that we’re going to start with the church that is closest to where we live.

It happened that we walked in there and it just felt right. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. I have never felt more comfortable walking into a church in my life. I still remember being warmly greeted and not the kind of, “Hey, you’re new people here.” I can’t explain that there was an acknowledgement that we were new, but it was a, “Really glad you’re here. Is there anything you need? Can I answer any questions for you?” No pressure. It was just a very easy experience.

After the services, it was (we go to a small church) being able to talk to the pastor after service. We’re just kind of feeling each other out, and the pastor getting a feel for where we were and vice versa. Again, no pressure. It was just him figuring out if we were a good match and helping us figure out the same.

We felt welcome there from the very beginning. That may not happen for you; there’s a lot of people that they have to go through looking at a couple of different churches. If that’s the case, hang in there.

We sat and we listened to the service, and I was really impressed with the care and the detail that was being used in the teaching. It was very interesting for me personally. The pastor was working through the book of Ephesians at the time, which is probably my favorite book in the Bible. We really liked and were impressed with the quality of teaching. We liked how the worship service was run. We liked the atmosphere of the church.

One of the things that I think really kind of helped us decide this is the right place for us is that after the services, we talked to the pastor and it was a process of him kind of helping us figure out if we were a good fit. There was never any judgment. It was gently probing questions, kind of figuring out where we were. It wasn’t a whether or not we belong here; it’s trying to figure out how we can help you.

It took us three or four times to say that this is where we want to be. After the first service, we walked out and we were talking on the way home. Both my wife and I were really, really impressed and felt amazingly comfortable. After we were there a couple-three-four weeks, we figured, this is it – this is where we should be, and we’ve been there ever since. That is our church home.

I used to think that the term church home was kind of cliched, but really, it’s true. A good church home (most importantly) has good teaching, but what makes it a home is that there’s people that you enjoy being around. It gives you opportunity and encourages you to grow. It has ministries that support you and your family. A church home exemplifies the body of Christ. Most importantly, a good church is going to put the pursuit of God before everything else.

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near.

Hebrews 10:24-25

Closing

This is a long post. I appreciate you reading this far. I really hope that this has given you inspiration. I’m not trying to push you to anything specific, a denomination or whatever. I’m trying to help you find what’s right for you.

If you think I got something wrong, please let me know. Really, let me know.

I would love to know if you learned something or in general what you got out of this post.

Now, it’s on you; start looking. What are you waiting for? God is not going to drag you into church, but He desperately wants you to be in the right church, so you can learn and you can grow and you can draw closer to Him. But you – you – have to start. So just start.

I can’t beat this particular drum enough – sound doctrine and good teaching are essential to spiritual growth. It can take some time to find the right church. I freely admit, my family and I were super blessed that the first church we walked into was an amazing fit. That may not happen for you, and if it doesn’t keep looking. I promise you, it is worth the effort. The right church for you will wind up being a sort of extended family, and it is a home. The right church will change your life in some of the best ways possible.

Thanks again for reading the entire post.

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God bless.