I try to find a place for us to worship on the Sunday morning while we're on vacation, lest it seem that vacation means vacation away from the important discipline of meeting together and worshipping with God's people, even if it's a community of believers who we'll see once and never again. So with the help of the Yellow Pages and Google Maps, I scour our vacation venue to local churches. Then I do the brain-intensive work of considering a number of criteria:
- What is the church's denomination?
- How far is the church from us?
- What time is the service?
Note that these are the criteria which are readily available on a website. In reality, I'm still pretty much making a decision in the dark. Churches within the same denomination have wildly diverse types of worship services. Even within the PCA, a service at Redeemer in NYC and Covenant Presbyterian Church in Short Hills offers significant differences in terms of preaching styles, music, and use of liturgy. Dare I say it, there are some things that Redeemer would do "between the lines" within the Book of Church Order that Covenant would absolutely forbid.
Who knows? We might find ourselves in a church service tomorrow as the only Asian attendees of a Pentecostal service. For a Sunday, I'll be quite content with hearing the Word, singing a chorus or two of praise, and praying with others under the lordship of Christ.
What these vacation church visits also does is give me an appreciation for the concept of the "home church". Very much like home itself, there's a wonderful sense of familiarity and belonging. As the Cheers theme song goes: "Where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came. You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same. You wanna be where everybody knows your name."
Naturally, there's much for that "good community" that makes our church, or any church, tick. But maybe I'll save that for another post.
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