Hi!
Welcome to my newest blog. While I normally write about the humor in family life and raising five kids at Graceful Like a Chicken, my family and I have been church hopping for over a year now and I wanted a place to record that experience for others so that they too might benefit from it.
However, I feel it is important to offer full disclosure on my biases so that my readers understand the lens through which I am reviewing these churches.
I was born, baptized and confirmed into the Methodist church. Both my grandfathers were Methodist ministers. (One very conservative, the other, not so much.) Three of my uncles are Methodist ministers as well: one formally a pastor in the south, another went on to retire as a Bishop and the third a pastor at a large Methodist church while also a professor of religion at a small liberal arts college in Florida.
Needless to say, I have often found myself most at home in the Methodist church. I did attend the youth group of the local Presbyterian congregation as a teenager however which began my interest in the variations in the denominations. I also married a man who was raised in the Roman Catholic Church but had strayed from any organized religion by the time I found him. (Oh yes, lost he was....but we are working on that together, via church hopping!)
Now, as an adult, I am ever encouraged by the common grounds we share as different branches of God's universal church, even when theologies seem to come from entirely different trees. I try hard (although I'll admit this is often a difficult task) not to see one way as right and the other wrong. Instead, I try to view the variations in the details as the many different attempts by a loving and merciful God to help each one of us fulfill His purpose for us in His great creation. As the body of Christ, we are far better off showing our love toward one another than squabbling (like siblings so often do) over the details.
Might we "love one another" as we are loved so that we might "shine like the stars in the universe" and point others towards the Truth we hold so dear.
Thanks for reading!
Karen
