Church

Most Sunday mornings I sit at the front of church and wonder what I'm doing there.

At the moment church for me as it is, is a waste of time. It is moribund. It is dead. Lacking relevance and without passion. Regularly unorganised. Lost. Conflicted. Regimented yet poorly thought out.

The people there are generally quite nice though.

I dont think any Church is perfect and all will have their good points and bad points. I beleive that my particular chuch serves a purpose, it has been praised for the childrens work it does and as a result half of our congregation are children from around the estate who come with or are sent by their parents. Which is great! The church is in a poor area and many of the people who attend the chuch have complex home lives and emotional problems and so the church also employs a counsellor who people can visit. Our pastor also does a lot of home visits to keep up with peoples problems and to help where she can. Which again, is a great social service and brilliant for those those who get something from it especially as the church lacks money and resources that others have. Perhaps more churches should be more pastoral in this way.

However, I often feel that this is a Sunday social service club which is trying to be forced into a God shaped box.

Each Sunday I struggle to keep focussed. My mind wanders, mainly as I wonder if anyone else is following. Leading worship at church puts me in a unique position where I can see people. People obviously do church differently. For Pentecostals it's all about closed eyes, raised hands, speaking in tongues and falling over, for Anglicans it's all about the liturgy, communion, hymns and nice cups of tea, for Baptists, it's all about getting wet and finding a middle ground. For Nazarene's it's about people looking bored as the unorganised leaders attempts to glue the service together with filler and tenuous links, and then waiting until the service is over so they can nip out for a fag before collecting the kids from Sunday school.

From my experience of church it is almost impossible to make everybody happy although most will try and cater for all groups and tastes. No one is perfect after all.

But I feel I am uncatered for. Which is why I go to another church in the evening and meet mid-week with friends from church and discuss the Bible and God and try to get to grips with everything as well as a regular bitch about church also. For a while I was telling myself that I wasn't awake enough in the morning to fully get into church properly in the morning which is why I got more out of there alternative, but really it's just because it is because it is an effort and an inconvenience.

Church has become Chore-ch (see what I did there)

And so this is my predicament.

I have just been appointed the task of being worship leader at the church, which would be a great honour apart from the fact there wasn't anyone else to do it and no-one really listens to me. It is certainly a challenge as it will be my responsibility to lead the nice and well meaning but apathetic people of a church I'm increasingly getting sucked into and becoming reluctant to be a part of, in praising God.

Am I wasting my time or will this be a fantastic learning experience?