The Catholic Undertow

Mary Ann Collins, A Former Catholic Nun

Appendix C

Finding a Good Church

Do you have a good church? If not, then you need to find one. The first thing to do is to pray for God to lead you to the right church. Keep on praying until you find it. A good church is a place where people believe the Bible, have sound doctrine, love God, and love one another. By “believe the Bible” I mean really believe it--not just give lip service to it.

People have different personalities. So do denominations, pastors, and congregations. As a result, individual churches have different personalities. You can find out about a church’s doctrine with a phone call to their office, but to get a feel for a church’s personality, you will have to visit it a few times.

If you are not comfortable with a church that you try, pray about it. The lack of comfort might indicate that there is a problem. However, it could just be culture shock. Any Protestant church will be different from what we were used to as Catholics.

The primary reason for going to church is to worship God and to learn about His ways and His character, through preaching and Bible studies. Hopefully, you will also make friends who will enrich your life and encourage you to become a more mature Christian. In order to do that, you will probably need to make the effort to get to know people.

You may not be able to find a church that meets all of your needs and desires. Perhaps you want to have activities with other single Christians, or you have children who need good programs for youth, or you find that the pastor isn’t as available as you would like him to be. Perhaps the music is not well done, or it’s different from what you are used to. Don’t let such things discourage you. Be grateful for what you have.

In some areas, good churches are hard to come by. Therefore, you may need to be willing to spend a lot of time travelling in order to attend a good church. In America, we are used to comfort and convenience. However, as Christians, we need to be willing to make sacrifices in order to attend a good church. God can show us ways to use the travel time fruitfully.

One way to get things into perspective is to remember our persecuted brothers and sisters in other countries. For example, in Indonesia, Christians are grateful to be able to meet together without being attacked by Muslims. In North Korea, Christians have to meet secretly and quietly. They don’t dare worship out loud, for fear of being heard by hostile people. In some countries, Christians walk for hours (sometimes a day or more) in order to pray together.

All of us have strengths and weaknesses. So do pastors. So do churches. There are no perfect churches. It’s probably a good thing that there aren’t, because knowing human nature, if we found one, we would probably make an idol out of it. Not being able to find a perfect church makes us depend directly on God. And that’s good.