Last Sunday, I did something I hadn’t done much lately: I went to church.

I haven’t been going to church too frequently over the past few years, for various reasons—not least, a lapse of faith lasting several years. When I did go to church, it was to Mount Lebanon Baptist Church, which is just a couple minutes from our home and is where my wife went to church all through her childhood. It’s a great church with a very welcoming community; still, I’m a Presbyterian and not a Southern Baptist, so I’ve been looking for another church in the area.

Last March (that’s March of 2012, before we started Saving the Game—see what I mean about not going frequently?), my wife and I visited First Presbyterian Church of Greer and were very impressed. Everyone we talked to was friendly and outgoing. Everyone recognized that we were new to their congregation and wanted to talk to us. They even gave us a loaf of homemade bread with a business card for the church attached, and I’m a complete sucker for really fresh bread. (Okay, starches in general, but this blog post isn’t about my weight loss attempts.) We didn’t go back, because sitting through a worship service was a struggle for my pregnant wife and that’s the sort of thing that only gets worse as pregnancy progresses, but we determined we’d give them a really good look when our child was born.

Well, when our daughter was born we had other things to deal with. I haven’t talked about her heart surgery and health issues much here or on the podcast, but taking our daughter out in public wasn’t an option for a while because of the risk of infection. And of course, once you’re in the habit of not going out on Sundays, it’s easy to find excuses not to change those habits. So we didn’t.

The thing is, over the past year or so my faith has been slowly returning. Plus, my wife and I kept promising ourselves that we’d start attending church again. We also wanted Rachel baptized at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Greenville (the church I grew up in and the church my wife and I got married in), and one of the conditions the pastor there set out for us was regular church attendance. I’ve been studying more theology and talking about it more in my “co-host of Saving the Game” role. And we watched The Discovery Channel’s “The Bible” series (which was actually quite good, and which I’ll write another blog post about soon.) A lot of things piled up to lead us back to church, and I’m not sure I could name all of them (though I bet I can name the source) but by Easter, we were dead-set on going back to church.

One of the really nice things that First Presbyterian of Greer does is a “Presbyterian 101″ Sunday School class. It’s mostly for new members of the church, though I suppose anyone could sit in on it, and it’s particularly useful for those people who aren’t coming into the church from a Presbyterian background. It’s a three-Sunday course explaining Presbyterian theology, First Presbyterian’s history, and lastly the polity of the Presbyterian Church. (“Polity”, by the way, simply means “government”—how the church is organized and governed.) Unfortunately, we missed that first class on theology because we both had a terrible, flu-like cold and didn’t want a really nasty virus to be our first gift to the congregation. I managed to make the second class, on First Presbyterian’s history, but my wife still couldn’t make it and I skipped the worship service because our daughter (whom I’d brought along to give my wife a chance to nap) just couldn’t last any longer.

Last Sunday, though, all three of us made it, and I’m very glad we did. The class on the church’s polity got a few minutes in before we came up against the ideas of spiritual independence (the idea that everyone’s individual relationship with God and Christ through Scripture and prayer takes precedence over any position the PCUSA General Assembly, or even the particular church or its pastor, might hold on any particular issue) and “mutual forbearance” (basically, the Church stating that congregants might differ on issues but must collectively agree to not judge each other on those differences unless they fall outside those basic Trinitarian guidelines—per Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”) A class on the role of deacons and the Session and whatnot quickly turned into an engaged discussion on the theology of freedom of belief and St. Paul’s “weaker brother” argument from Romans 14. We had former Catholics coming at it from one end and former Baptists from the other—a really fascinating discussion, to the point where we agreed to have an impromptu fourth class next week to do a “Q&A” with the class’s teacher and the pastor about the intersection polity and theology. My wife told me afterwards that she felt a lot better about the Presbyterian Church, knowing that the church doesn’t try to impose any particular position on issues and that it has room for these sorts of conversations. Fun stuff!

After all that, my wife and I finally got to attend a worship service at our church for the first time this year. I stress ‘our’ there because First Presbyterian’s already begun to feel like it’s ‘our’ church, rather than ‘her’ church or ‘his’ church. Peter’s talked before about the comfort of a traditional worship service, and the Sunday service there was both comforting and energizing. It was good to feel that we were part of a fellowship of Christians again!

I don’t know that there’s a particular lesson for Saving the Game listeners and readers here—more than anything else I just wanted to share my excitement. I suppose if there’s any takeaway here, it’s that no matter how long you’ve been away from an organized service and church, there’s always a congregation out there waiting to take you in and say “welcome home”. Don’t be afraid to find them.