The girl beside me drew this:

The priest told me my drawing was very good but that hers captured the true meaning of church. He went on to explain the Body metaphor, but I had no idea what he was getting at. Feeling embarrassed at my ignorance, I stopped attending the class and tried looking elsewhere for God—if he was really out there somewhere.

I soon found a Christian group on my university campus called the Navigators. After mustering up courage, I went to one of their evening meetings where I found about two dozen friendly people my age who welcomed me and showed some interest in getting to know me. The meeting started off by having us sing several songs together, then someone prayed, after which the group's leader stood up and began talking. He started by reading Luke 18:18-23 which goes like this:

A certain ruler asked him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"

"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother."

"All these I have kept since I was a boy," he said.

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy.

The speaker went on with his message, but my attention remained fixed on what Jesus had said:

"Sell everything."

After the meeting was over I nervously approached the speaker and asked if Jesus's words meant that if someone wanted to know God he had to give up everything he had or wanted to have in life. The speaker hemmed and hawed a bit and replied, "Well, no, that's not necessarily true."

But the idea stuck with me and a plan began forming in my heart. The next morning I wrote some letters to say that I was turning down the graduate program, scholarship, and prestigious summer job I had been offered. Somehow I had come to the conclusion that the moment I dropped these letters in the mailbox, something big would happen—that God would reveal himself somehow. So I took the bus to the university, walked up to the mailbox, lifted the slot cover and slipped the letters inside.

Nothing happened.

I went home and sat in a daze for the remainder of the day. Then late that evening I phoned the friend who had first told me about God and explained what I had done.

"You're crazy!" was the reply.

"Well, what should I do now?" I asked.

"Ask Christ into your life."

I hung up and lay there in bed and said out loud, "Christ, come into my life. I don't know if you're there, but if you are then help me. I've just given up my whole future and I don't know what to do, so if you're there please show yourself to me and come into my life."

As I prayed I sank deeper and deeper into despair, but something inside me kept speaking these words out loud. Then at the point where I felt myself helplessly falling towards total nothingness, I suddenly had a vision of a man hanging on a cross on top of a dark hill with light shining all around. And I heard a voice saying:

"Hah! You've taken everything important to you, your whole future, and you put in on the altar as a sacrifice hoping I would reveal myself. But the sacrifice that I made for you is infinitely more than you could ever do for me!" 

When I heard those words I laughed out loud and said, "Hah! I have eternal life!" Then I rolled over and went to sleep, and when I awoke the next morning, everything felt new.

Now what?

Finding church

On Sunday that week I walked into my friend's church. It was the first time I had ever been in a church, and it was exciting! The church was Evangelical and non-denominational and it was bursting at the seams. The preacher was well-known in the Evangelical community and his sermon that morning was on Isaiah chapter 6. When he raised his hands at the end of his message and said, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" I wanted to jump up and shout, "Here am I! Send me!!" But I didn't, because it was obvious from the behavior of others that you just didn't do that sort of thing in church.

When they discovered I had certain interests and talents I was quickly funneled into the workings of the church. Since I was classically trained musically, I soon became their go-to pianist for hymn singing on Sundays. And being an avid bookworm, I also found myself helping out a lot in the church library. I began devouring Christian books and attending Bible studies, and soon my head was swelling with knowledge. Invited to bring the message one Sunday evening, I preached through the entire Book of Judges in half an hour!

During that first year of my new life in Christ I also experienced another kind of fellowship. The Navigators ran a six-week communal living program called Hothouse that was intended as a kind of crucible for discipleship formation. We met together daily in small groups for prayer and Bible study. We shared meals and took turns cooking and cleaning up. We went out in pairs to a park and spoke to strangers about Jesus. It was challenging and exciting, but I experienced a huge letdown when the program finished. What should I do next?

I decided that I needed to find out more about this thing called "church" by visiting some other churches. So I looked through the Yellow Pages (it was the 70s) and picked out four churches from different denominations: Presbyterian, Quaker, Baptist and Eastern Orthodox. Note that the reactions I describe below are those of a recently converted pagan who had zero prior experience going to church!

First, I visited the Presbyterians. ("Wow, that pulpit is high! Why is the preacher wearing clothes from the eighteenth century?")

Then I hung out with the Quakers. ("Man, this is weird, that woman is shrieking like she's having hysterics!")

After that I checked out the Baptists. ("Well that was very nicely choreographed, almost Hollywood in terms of production quality.")

I even tried visiting an Eastern Orthodox church. ("Hmm, this is fascinating but I can't understand a word the guy is saying.")

My brief denominational excursion was a strange experience for me, but as a new believer it also made me excited to learn more about church and about the history of Christianity. I was glad however to return to my plain old vanilla Evangelical church, mostly because I was finally getting to know some people there.

When the year had passed I found myself in West Africa working for a development agency. I had gone there in obedience to a vision God gave me, and during the three years I was there I attended an Evangelical mission church and continued to grow spiritually. When I came back to my home in Canada however, I discovered with consternation that the preacher had left my old church and was now meeting in a home with about two dozen former members of the church. Not knowing what to do, I began alternating my attendance between my old church and the house church. After a few visits however I realized that most of the people I knew and liked were in the house church, so I started attending there regularly.

I soon discovered that house church was quite different from "normal" church. We sang together, prayed together, laughed together and cried together. We shared our problems and helped one another out—we were like a family. We even took turns teaching from the Scriptures. ("Wow, Mitch, I never knew one could talk a whole hour explaining one single verse from the Bible." I wasn't sure whether Cliff was praising me or being sarcastic.)

House church was also where I first began experiencing spiritual gifts. I didn't realize this at the time since by then I had adopted a cessationist position, though this was more due to my scientific training than my leanings towards Calvinist theology. On one occasion for example, I drifted off into a daydream during someone's boring sermon, and through my dream I learned for the first time that God was really my Father. When I was asked after the sermon if I had any comments, I shared my daydream and everyone went "Woahhh!!" indicating it clearly had a prophetic impact on them. I had never seen this kind of thing happen in my old church, probably because everything was carefully choreographed on Sundays. Perhaps church bulletins for Sunday services should include a line that says "Time for expression of spiritual gifts (optional)" or something similar.

Eventually some disharmony arose within our house church. The argument was over whether it should remain a house church or start meeting in a public setting with intent to grow into a "real" church. Some valued it as their church family and wanted it to remain small so they could continue sharing their joys and struggles with one another. The preacher however told us that churches were supposed to grow, so at his insistence we rented a meeting room in a downtown hotel and our Sunday services were opened to the public. A few people left the church because of this change, but many more joined us and soon we had doubled in size.

At this point the preacher pressed me and another young man into service for doing some of the preaching. He then began stepping back from preaching as it turned out he had never actually wanted to start a church in the first place, especially a house church. Then one day he and his wife were gone, and the two of us were left on our own to lead the church. We had no idea how to run a church, and the older people who had previously attended the house church left began leaving since they had only joined it in the first place because the preacher had been there. Everything quickly fell apart at this point and we closed down the church.

I felt devastated. I had failed at my first try at church leadership, though in actuality I had received no instruction or training on how to lead or plant a church. I had also by this time experienced several different kinds of church ranging from traditional to home-based and even some communal living. I had enjoyed house church the most, but I would probably have never had that experience if I hadn't joined a traditional church first. But my varied experiences with church and my magical mystery tour to different denominations left me with a nagging question growing in my heart:

What actually is this thing called church?

--->  Go to chapter 2