[Today’s run: rest day]
I was sitting in church this morning and lit upon this idea of doing a blog post about the churches that I have attended. If you don’t like the word church, you probably should just skip this one.
During my early years I was taken to Grandview Park Baptist Church (GARBC) for three sermons a week. My paternal grandparents also attended that church. When I was in elementary school I came to the conclusion that this preaching about sin and forgiveness applied to me as much or more than anybody. [I still think so.] I was baptised by pastor Harold Scholes. Later on I attended middleschool and highschool years at the GPBS school and eventually graduated from there. The pastor during that time was Dr. Paul Tassell.
I attended college for a year in Arkansas. During that time I attended various churches in NW Arkansas, mainly a small E-Free church (I don’t remember in what town).
Then I went to Iowa State in Ames. It was really the first time that I had to decide if I wanted to get up and go to church on Sunday morning when most people slept in. I attended Campus Baptist Church (GARBC) in the old building near the ISU campus. The pastor was Charles Alber.
After finishing college and getting married I was in Chicago. For a few months we attended a little church on Diversey street east of the Brickyard Mall. Now it is called the Brickyard Bible Church. The pastor at that time was Nick Troupus. We then moved out to the suburbs and we attended Fox Valley Baptist Church with pastor Doug Compton.
We moved back to Des Moines and attended Fellowship Baptist Church where Bob Renaud was pastor, then Jeff Holub.
Then we moved to Estes Park, Colorado and attended Estes Park Baptist Church (SBC) under Steve Hammond, then Paul Logue. Later, we moved to Fort Collins and attended First Presbyterian Church where the senior pastor is Rich McDermott.
Now we live near Columbus, MS and attend Main Street Presbyterian where the senior pastor is David Strain.
When we lived in Estes Park I was very active in the church operations at EPBC. My wife suffered some medical problems and we didn’t see eye-to-eye on my church responsibilities. That and a few other things led eventually to her attending the Community Church of the Rockies while I went to EPBC. That didn’t work out too well. When we moved away from Estes, I just determined to go where she would go. She has good taste in music and knows good preaching so I can’t complain. We don’t completely agree on all doctrinal issues but we’re well within the “margin of error”, so to speak.
To say just a bit more about that: I think that conservative churches have a tendency to put a lot of pressure on women and wives to act and dress a certain way. It seems to me that my wife felt this pressure and I was not useful in providing relief. It grew to be very discomforting for her. Switching from baptist to presbyterian churches has, I think, relieved some of that discomfort since we both have a bit of “outsiderness” in that environment. Our expectations about our own performance has changed and our level of participation has also relaxed quite a bit. [She probably has a different understanding of what happened. Just FYI.]