Everyday Spirituality: Divorce and New Church

    Divorce sometimes makes it necessary to seek out a new church. Or in some cases, it brings up enough spiritual questions to make people seek a place of worship for the first time. As a chaplain, I’m often asked to help people find a church. I can definitely identify with such a search.

Six years ago, I left my faith community in the Air Force Chapel to return to my California home and former role as a civilian hospital chaplain. In that role, I once again faced the challenge of searching for a new place of worship. That summer, my family and I began visiting Sacramento churches in earnest hope of finding a new church home. We were church shopping. 

Church shopping is not too different from Disney Park-hopping. They call it, (raising my fingers in that annoying quote sign) "church hopping." Like Easter bunnies, we hoppers tend to come in the spring. Hoppers really are just discriminate shoppers looking for a perfect worship place. They want a youth group for Johnny, a children's program for Sissy and a nursery with closed-circuit television monitors and daddy pagers.

Throw in Big Gulp communion cups and pews with first-class legroom, and you have what many would consider the perfect faith community. The problem with asking me to help you find the perfect church or place of worship is that I'm an "insider" who knows too much about the inner workings. I'm much like the meatpacker whose knowledge of the meatpacking process will cause him to avoid his own bologna.

In some churches we've visited, my wife will tell you I morph into the ecclesiastical quarterback who has been benched. From my pew bench, I wonder things like, "Where did this guy get his degree?" Or, "Does she really think she can pull off a 45-minute sermon? Or, "Is he going to quit preaching before the guy sleeping beside me cracks his skull on the pew?" Sometimes I find myself sitting in the pew daydreaming about the good old days when I was preaching fresh sermons every week.