She Goes to Church
Two churches hold a special place in my heart.
When I was 6, the first meeting of our little future Evangelical Free church was held in my parents’ basement. I saw a church grow from the ground up. It grew up as I did.
I still treasure my history and friendships there. When I was 14, our pastor preached an Easter sermon from Isaiah 53. By God’s grace, I grasped Christ’s substitutionary death in a deeper way than ever before.
When I married A.J. I joined him in attending a Sovereign Grace church, which is both Reformed in doctrine and charismatic in worship (both of which I love!).
My two church families have blessed me unstintingly. My Ohio church helped send me to Peru in 2007. My Florida church literally made our wedding possible. And there are a myriad of other examples.
I love online friendships, but I’m so grateful for the body of Christ in my immediate vicinity.
Both church families have been amazing in their loving kindness and generosity to our family. We will always be grateful for the lovely wedding and reception your FL church family provided for you.
I totally agree! I miss having a church body to call home. God has taught me a lot in the past 2 years we’ve been out of a (caustic) corporate church setting, but I miss the fellowship. I keep praying for the right place that teaches a sound doctrine. The little place we’ve been going to occasionally really lacks in charismatic worship, which is SO hard for me (being that I’ve grown up Pentecostal my whole life) – it’s not that we want a perfect church, but finding a family oriented, biblically sound and charismatic worship setting is proving to be difficult. Oh well, God knows!
I know it can be so difficult! I really never found a place that fit during my college years. I hope that you find a home somewhere!
You are so blessed that you have good churches near you. All the churches in my town are Arminian doctrine and worldly/weak. The closest good church is an hour and a half away.
But I can’t honestly complain because I have my family to fellowship with and I can find good teaching online.. 
That’s so tough… I’m sorry. We are really blessed.
Even though I love the church I went to in high school, I had never experienced (what I now know to be) true biblical fellowship until I was overseas, living in Korea. There were 3 other foreigners (=Americans) that I worked with, and we became SO close. That was another reason I was so scared to come back to the States, I did not foresee a way to ever have that deep type of fellowship/friendship again.
How wrong I was! We visited GCC after visiting a small, lovely but dry church, and after Mike actually said, “I just want to find a church that is reformed but has deep, meaningful, vibrant worship.” My (unbelieving) response? “That does not exist.” It wasn’t even 2 weeks later that I found GCC online and we went to visit for the first time. We didn’t need to go to anywhere else. I totally understand what you mean here, having a church like ours is SUCH a blessing! I am so, so thankful!
Me too! I love this testimony. And I missed you this Sunday!!!
hey anna – what exactly does it mean to be in a Reformed church?? By the way, i changed the name of my blog from http://www.hearthstonedevotions.blogspot.com to http://www.scribbleletters.blogspot.com
I agree with you, online community are great, but nothing compares to the sweet fellowship with brothers and sister in church