Cannonball

About two years ago, give or take a month, I left Fairfield Baptist Church. Today, I'm probably three or four visits away from re-joining it. I'm writing down what happened between then and now, so that any curious parties can read it here, and that way I don't have to tell it a bunch of times.

I moved here from Texas in 2007. Back in Texas, I was a member at Calvary Baptist Church of Nacogdoches. I helped out with the youth group, taught high school Sunday school, and headed up the AV workings for Sunday morning worship services. I spent a ton of time in church-related activities, and felt very rooted there. I knew what was happening, and they knew about twists and turns in my life.

When I moved here, I visited six Baptist churches, and out of those, I joined Fairfield. For a month or two, I taught first and second grade Sunday school. Then, I started teaching the college Sunday school class. I also pitched in with VBS, with Faith team, and with occasional events like the Fall festival and the block party. But somehow, it wasn't quite the same. I lived all the way on the other side of town, and it seemed as though quite often big things were happening at Fairfield that I never heard about. I never thought anyone was deliberately trying to exclude me, but I did feel badly out of the loop. Example: when Mick went home to be with the Lord, I didn't know about it until two weeks after the memorial service. I had this nagging feeling that somehow my roots hadn't taken. Once or twice, I set out to visit other churches, but never felt a peace about changing, so I put it on the back burner as a vague spot of discontent.

In the summer of 2013, I had a persistent ringing in my left ear. It turned out to be this. One of the symptoms of Ménière's Disease is sudden unexpected dizzy spells that can make it unsafe to drive. Since I'd been walking to and from work for six years, and since Enterprise Car Share had just come to town, I realized that the only reason I still needed my own automobile was to get to church. It occurred to me that if I joined a church in my own neighborhood, several things might change, all of them in a reasonably healthy direction:

• I might feel more rooted. My theory was that I would cross paths with people from my church family at the grocery store, at Alton Baker, etc., and have more of a sense of community.
• I could stop upkeep on a car I didn't use, including dropping car insurance. This seemed to me like wise stewardship.
• I could get out in front of the dizzy spells problem by giving up my car before I had to. Major life changes like that are never quite as traumatic when we choose them as when they're forced on us.
• I would also, to be honest, get a break from the jobs I was doing at Fairfield. I was terribly burned out on teaching Sunday school, and helping out with AV for the early hymn service was the biggest reason I couldn't give up my car, since I couldn't arrive early enough if I took the bus. The wise thing to do would've been just to speak up and ask for time off, but I didn't have that much wisdom handy.

So I started visiting Garden Way Church in October 2013, and I joined in January 2014.

I met some wonderful people at Garden Way, and I'm glad I had the experience. That said, it didn't take. The reasons it didn't doubtless have as much or more to do with my failings as with their traits, but it's now abundantly clear to me that it wasn't a good fit.

I don't regard it as a mistake, because I think I needed to learn a few things. The biggest among them is that I feel less rooted in my church because in Texas I had a job that wasn't very labor intensive, and here I work about a sixty to seventy hour week. Don't get me wrong; I love my job. But it does crowd out almost everything else in my life. When I went to Garden Way, I took the unrooted problem with me, and it didn't get appreciably better. The idea about a neighborhood church and a sense of community was just dead wrong.

And I also will say that whatever Garden Way's merits, and they are considerable, I've found Fairfield to be a church that's very warm, up front and basic. What first attracted me to Fairfield over the other churches I visited back in 2007 was that people weren't frantic to cover up imperfections. There was an honesty, and a wisdom about making fundamentals the main thing, that I didn't find in other churches. And I'm not saying it's absent from Garden Way, but I do think it's a particular strength, a particular provision from God to Fairfield.

So as of today I'm still visiting, and I plan to visit through September and keep praying about this. But it does increasingly feel as though I'm back where I belong, and that about October it'll be time to move my letter.