my new church!

I've been visiting a few churches out here, trying to find a good fit. It's been tough. I really want to be a part of a community that values worship. I'm finding that often worship has been reduced to 3 happy songs where everyone stares blankly at the worship leader, and maybe sings. Everybody has the full band and sounds great, but passion, awe, humility and, er, worship, seem to be missing. That was really hard for me.

Then I visited a church called Origins on Sunday night. It is in Long Beach, which is about 40 minutes south of me. Ben is the one who pointed me in there direction, and after checking out their site I figured the church was aimed at 20-30 years old crowd who are looking for a more organic, community-focused expression of church. That is really exciting to me, but part of me is still a little skeptical about it as well. There are many people trying to wrestle with these ideas, and how they put it into practice can be drastically different (which is part of the point...). So you never know what to expect until you are there.

To say it simply, I absolutely loved it. Before I could get in the doors they welcomed me and connected me with a guy who is gonna be at Fuller next quarter. We talked for about 10 minutes, and I could see genuine humility and hunger to love God and people. Worship was simply an acoustic guitar and 2 singers, and we started the service with 10 minutes of quiet reflection on our week and allowing God to enter into those times, healing and refreshing us. The worship time was so simple and raw, it was so easy to connect with God and re-orient ourselves around Him.

AJ, the pastor, is a really great guy. He spent some time in the Sermon on the Mount, really digging into Jesus' teachings on anger. He took it a lot further than I'd heard before, asking hard questions and refusing to stop at superficial answers. Then we split up to talk about it in small groups. We immediately were talking about serious issues, like "People close to me are lying about me to discredit Christians. How can I not be angry with them?" As we opened up and shared, we all were able to help each other see a different point of view, to understand more about forgiveness, and how hard but necessary it can be to love others.

After, they invited me to Chipotle. It's a weekly tradition. How can you not love that? (BTW, I thought you should know that Chipotle is widely loved by everyone I meet from all over the country, and they ALL understand quite well that imitators like Qdoba fall far short. It saddens me that in Colorado, Chipotle's home state, there is far more disrespect for Chipotle's loving gift to us.) AJ spent the whole time talking with me. We had a great time sharing stories and backgrounds. I already feel like I'm part of the community!

So that's really great! I'm excited about it. The only downside is that it is a good distance from Pasadena, so it will be a little harder to build friendships. But I think that will take care of itself in time.