Chapter Ten — If You Go, or If You Are Coming Back (2 of 2)

Some will receive you with a simple welcome. Some will ask for a period of instruction, or confirmation, or chrismation, or baptism. Some will tell you that your step is a grave one.

Hear them out. That is part of counting the cost, and it is a cost your household should count with you.

Finding the next church. If you are looking, look carefully and look more than once.

In the Pew survey, most people who looked for a church attended a service, and about half talked with a minister (the figures are at the back).

But most of what matters cannot be seen at one service. How does the church treat someone who fails? Who can correct the pastor? Are people known and cared for? Is the gospel the center, week after week? These take time to learn.

The Denominational Mapping Instrument on this site has a page of questions to take with you when you visit a congregation, at /dmi/visit/.

They are grouped by how you find out: what you can see at a service, what you should ask the pastor or priest, and what you can only learn from members or with time.

Use them. Begin with the questions closest to your musts. And keep apart what you saw from whether it suited you. Something unfamiliar is not wrong for you because it is unfamiliar.

How long to visit. Longer than you think. One Sunday tells you very little about a church.

Visit several times. Go to something other than the main service: a study, a meal, a work day.

Talk to the pastor. Talk to people who have been there ten years and people who came last year. Ask how the church handled its last hard season.

Then give it time after you join. You do not know a family after a month.

Do not bring the old church's wounds as a test. If you left because you were hurt, you will carry the hurt into the new church. That is natural.

You will watch for the signs you missed before, and that is not unfair to the new church. It is wisdom you paid for.

Ask the new church the hard questions: who can correct the pastor, what its policy is for keeping children safe, what it did the last time someone was harmed. A church worth joining will be glad you asked.

The only unfair thing is to hold its people guilty of what others did. Let it earn your trust slowly.

If the same thing happens again, you will know. If it does not, you will have been healed a little by a church that did not do what the last one did.

Join something. Some who leave a church never quite join another. They visit. They watch online. They stay on the edge. Months become years.

The conviction of this book: do not let leaving one church become leaving the church.

You were made for a family, and no one is fed for long on the edge of one.

When you find a place, commit to it. Be known. Serve. Come under the care of a shepherd. Belong.

If a church hurt you, Chapter Eleven sets the pace for this, not this paragraph.

If you are coming back. Some of you are not in any church. You were raised in one, and somewhere along the way you stopped going.

Maybe nothing happened. Life got full, you moved, and Sunday filled up with other things.

Dear friend, this letter is for you too.

You do not owe anyone an account of where you have been. The father in Jesus' story did not ask his son for one before he ran to him (Luke 15:20).

If you no longer know what you believe, you can still come and listen.

If you were raised in a particular tradition, Chapter Four can tell you how it sees coming back. If you were raised Catholic or Orthodox, ask a priest what returning involves.

Start small. One service. One conversation. One friend who will go with you. The Father is already watching the road (Luke 15:20).