Not too long ago, my wife and I had our hearts set on going back to our home county. We couldn't find a church or anyone we really related to here. For me, the biggest deal was church. I was tired of not being able to be part of the fellowship of believers. We both were. It's not like we didn't try; we'd been to multiple churches in the area, all of which had something that turned us away, and had sort of given up. Not only that, but we had also been clinging to our old church back home, our hearts fully set on getting out of this hippie-town as soon as possible. We just couldn't find the right combination of sound theology and community we needed.
Then we found the church we're currently attending, Hope Community Church.
Now, we had tried this church before. We knew they were theologically sound. But we had had a hard time connecting the first time around, which I think was primarily because we were expecting others to start the connecting with very little effort on our parts. So we left on our inevitably-doomed journey to find a good church.
I think on this journey we looked up every church in the county on the internet (which is a ludicrous amount). Each website annoyed me; either they were just wrong on some crucial doctrinal issue or they were unclear on everything (or both). They also saddened me, reminding me of the poor state of the visible church with all these groups of people learning from false teachers. We only attended three churches in total because they were the few that actually looked good on the internet (we'd found maybe one or two others that seemed okay, I think), but each one was a let down in some way. Either the preacher was just weird, the sermons were pithy and shallow, or they were impossible to understand. We also couldn't find a church with people in our stage of life.
All of that wound up with us coming back to Hope Community. I had become so skeptical of every church in Olympia that I figured they probably weren't really all that great theologically, or that the preaching may be sub-par (to be fair, I had only heard the pastor preach once before; during most of our first time, the youth pastor had taken over during the head pastor's sabbatical. He was great, but I didn't know anything about the head pastor).
Guess what? We haven't left.
Not only was the preaching theologically sound, but it was clear and easy to understand; we'd been to a church where the Bible was extolled, but the pastor was nigh incomprehensible. The music was worshipful and meaningful; we'd attended a church for a while where the music, while rich with theologically deep lyrics, was more akin to a concert, complete with live auto-tune (which wasn't our reason for leaving, but that still rubs me the wrong way for multiple reasons). The sermon was rich and God-centered; we'd been to a church where we got a twenty minute self-help sermon.
We've also gotten far more connected with people. Originally we knew exactly two people, the couple who introduced is to this church, who are great and wonderful people whom we are very blessed to know. But now we know more people, we participate in events, we're excited to go to church every Sunday. We even met a couple in our same stage of life; recently married, same age, one's in school, no kids. They have a house though, but we're only slightly jealous of that.
You wanna know the result? We aren't so sad about living in hippie-town anymore. In fact, we actually like it here. Imagine that, huh? Actually liking where God has put you? We're also not in such a rush to go back. If that's where God takes us, so be it. But, we'd be happy to stay here for a while.
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