Church

Well, after ten years of searching for a church home since we've been married (and moving around 7 times hasn't helped) we finally found one in North Raleigh Church of Christ.  Finding a rather conservative church that reflected our beliefs was actually a lot harder to find than one would have thought.  And then when you finally find that, is it a place where you feel that you belong?

I will be honest, the first four or five months we went there, we were sporatically attending.  It then dawned on me that if we wanted to become part of the church family that we needed to jump in and participate in things.  This church is not a huge church.  I think maybe for church (not Sunday School) that there are usually about 200 on the attendance report.  So, maybe a tad bigger than the churches we grew up in, but still small enough for my liking.  And of course, we don't have kids, so it made it a little harder to really jump in and meet people.

We joined the church a few weeks ago, and then an interesting thing happened.  And honestly, I thought it was a GREAT idea that they did.  Did you know that about 20% of the people in a church do about 80% of the work?  Really, it's probably true.  So, they wanted to get other people involved.  What did they do?  They held a "job fair" in place of Sunday School last week called "All In Sunday".  Each ministry set up a table and you could read about it and the ministry leader would answer questions and you could sign up to help with any of the ministries that you felt led to do.

So, I signed up to keep the nursery, to be on the meals ministry (take meals to the sick, new babies, after funerals, etc), the card ministry, to be involved in the ladies' book club, go to the ladies Tues morning groups and Wed night groups (when I'm not working--which is more than 50% of the time).  Mark signed up to help mow the church property, do carpentry work, serve communion and help with the offering plates on Sundays, and on the Habitat for Humanity building team.  Had they not had this, I'm not so sure we would have done all of that.  I think that is true for a lot of other people as well.

So, you'll probably be hearing me blog a bit on the different things we're doing with the church family.  I am excited to have these people in our life here.