The First Step..

Yesterday marked what I am declaring for myself to be my last official service at church, at least inasfar as my musician duties are concerned, and while I'm not prepared to say I will never set foot in another sunday morning service again, I certainly plan on it being an infrequent happening.

I was actually quite surprised and impressed by the reaction I got from the worship leader there, who has been a friend of mine for quite sometime, and was one who I was rather reluctant to broach the issue with. He was very gracious and understanding about it, which I greatly appreciated, and the worship set went smoothly, I am happy to say, though it further sent home the fact that I really was there simply to fill a spot and not because of anything terribly profound.

It was funny that there seemed to be an unusual number of people coming up to me to say that they were happy to see me and that I had been missed (I hadn't been in a few weeks before that). In a few cases it came across very genuinely and unassuming, however some seemed to be saying it also as chastisement - not directly, perhaps, but leaving the feeling that it was for my own good that I come to church, and I shouldn't take so many breaks. I kinda had to laugh inside at the irony of it all.

It was interesting as well that one of the points made in the sermon seemed to be that it is not a church's resonsibility to provide spiritual "meat and potatoes" to people, and that if a person finds they are only getting "the milk", that it is not scriptural to leave a church because of that, but the onace is on them to "get into the word" for the "meat and potatoes". I found this a little bit disturbing, because in my mind it very much SHOULD BE a church's responsibility to provide good, wholesome, nurturing spiritual sustenance, and if they are not up to meeting those needs, why are they a church at all?

I wouldn't continue eating at a restaurant that continually brought me nothing but greasy, processed, nutritionally vacant fast-food meals (I don't eat at McDonald's, for instance), because it is just plain poisonous and unhealthy for me to subject my body to that. On the same token, it would be silly of me to continually subject myself to spiritual fast-food as well, no matter how "scriptural" anyone wants to claim my decision to be.

As for the scripturality of leaving a church that isn't providing the right kind of spiritual sustenance -- it's hard to judge that, seeing as the modern-day concept of church is not scriptural either.

In any case, off I go!