Monday, January 09, 2006

church hunting

Cambridge, it seems, is blessed with many brilliant churches. The problem? How to decide where to go. My obvious choice is City Church. It's where my sister goes, it's a New Frontiers church, it's full of families and students and older people and single people, it's a lot like Jubilee in lots of ways, but obviously different, being in a different area and having its own building. I'd be happy to go there. I just don't want to feel I haven't give anywhere else a chance. I want to get involved in a church and start making new friends, but I want to make sure it's the right place.

I've been looking at church websites to get a few ideas of other places I could go. I wouldn't chose a church on the basis of their website alone, but it does give you a feel for their style and often there's a good statement of the vision of the church. Trouble is, I think I'm finding reasons not to go places, rather than looking for places to go. For instance, one church has cell groups that are only made up of one sort of person, eg women's cells, couples' cells. I'd rather be somewhere that has a mixture of people in cell groups. True, I have been leading a group that was mainly geared to the 18-30ish (very ish in some cases) age group, but even within that there were men and women, single people and couples, students and workers. Other places I didn't like the sound of their worship style, too old-fashioned or too slick.

But then, firstly as I've already said, a webpage is not a good basis for choosing a church. Secondly, I need to visit some places and see what they're like. Thirdly, I need to pray about it and ask God to guide me to the right church.

Anyone got any tips on church-hunting?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi pigwotflies!! Forgive the advert, but I don't know if you saw this one back when I was church-shopping. It's an email interview I sent out to churches that caught my eye via the internet... Hope it helps a bit! I know how not fun it is to be "out of body".

Wolfie said...

OK, Then I read this post and gave-up the will to live. (well you asked)

Pig wot flies said...

Never mind Wolfie, I'm sure you'll recover.

Thanks Blest. I remember reading that post at the time. Now you've reminded me, I'll go back and reread it.

Adrian Warnock said...

Just go to city church pwf you know you want to really........