We recently went through a major transition in our personal lives; changing churches after 6 years of being members of the same one. That was six years of serving, ministering and working in the Kingdom of God. Six years of growth, of learning and unlearning. Six years I’m truly grateful for. But we had a strong inkling that our time there was up and God was calling us into a season of rest and healing for many reasons.
In this article, I won’t be going into detail about our reasoning behind us ultimately making the decision to transition, but I will share some tips for finding a new home church. These are things that my husband and I implemented during our search and as of now, I believe they truly aided in our decision making.
Consider This When Searching for a Home Church
Pray before you decide to leave your current church.
One of the things that I did before ever making a final decision to leave our then current church was pray. I knew what I felt in my heart and I knew the changes I needed in order to continue walking in this path and so I prayed. I poured my heart out to God, gave Him all of my reasonings for wanting to leave and asked Him to guide my decisions and show me when the right time to leave would be. I kid you not, I prayed for over a year about my situation because I didn’t want to make a decision that would affect me or my family.
Avoid making an emotional decision.
It’s very easy to make a decision based on your emotions, especially when you’ve been affected by many things. But in order to make the right decision, you can’t be emotional about it. I know, easier said than done. My husband and I spoke a lot about this decision before ever making it final. I won’t lie, I went back and forth in my head so many times because I didn’t want to hurt anyone during our transition. Aside from discussing it with my husband, I also journaled tons on the topic. I believe the combination of prayer, conversation with my husband, and journaling helped me get clarity on a lot of things I needed that clarity on it. At the end, my decision making was clear.
Know what you’re looking for in a church.
My husband and I went into our search knowing exactly what we wanted in a new home church: opportunity to serve the community and diversity. Those were the main two things we were looking at when we began watching online services.
One thing about our family: we love to serve. The food pantry ministry is a ministry we hold near and dear to our hearts and we knew that wherever we went, we wanted to be involved in food pantry missions and the homeless ministry. So finding a church that had both of these was essential.
Although we are a Hispanic family, our children dominate the English language over Spanish so finding an English speaking church was top priority. Not only did we want to be comfortable but we wanted our babies to feel comfortable as well and enjoy going to church. On top of the English speaking, we knew wherever we went, it had to be a diverse church because frankly, we didn’t want to stick out like sore thumbs. I’m just being honest here. We really wanted a church that was welcoming to all races and all cultures.
I do believe that if we didn’t know what we wanted in a home church, we would’ve probably still been looking. At the end of the day, no church will meet your expectations 100%. But you should have some non negotiable things you seek. For us, it was those services opportunities and diversity.
Socialize and connect.
Honestly, I’m not a social butterfly so meeting new people is very hard for me. I’m an introvert, if you will, so my fellow introvert might understand me a little bit more on this. But! But, but, but, I’ve had to make an intentional effort to get to know people in the church we’ve been attending. For us, we learned that we knew someone there after our first online visit, so maybe that made it just a tad bit easier to talk to new people, but it’s still be an out of comfort zone experience. And that’s a good thing. You will never find your people if you don’t get out of that comfort.
We are now members of the church we had been visiting and we still don’t know everyone, but let me just say, when you make yourself approachable, people will approach you. We’ve been blessed to be part of a church that has welcomed us in right away. We’ve socialized with many new people and although we’re still meeting and getting to know people, we’ve found to have many things in common with lots of people there… but of course, it’s taken intentional effort and getting out of our comfort zones.
Changing home churches isn’t an easy transition. A lot of times, it’s a painful one and one you’re not really looking forward to. But if and when that moment comes, know that prayer will always be the number one thing to do. After praying for God’s direction, take the necessary steps to make the transition somewhat easier on you and your family.
My prayer today is that if you are currently in a season of transition, this blog post be a helpful resource you can use to aide in your next steps. Everyone’s journey is different, of course. But I hope our experience and decisions can help you in your journey.
Let’s chat!