As a child, I didn’t like going to church. Sunday was always the busiest and longest day of the week. Envied were the Sundays of my fellow sixth graders who slept late and played outside all day. Services were long, sometimes two each Sunday.
There were revivals that lasted days, Wednesday night services, visits to other churches, and pastor anniversaries. Not to mention the ‘One-Hundred Men in Black’ services which barely yielded fifty attendees. On our knees, my cousins and I tarried for hours at the command of our grandmother while she spoke in tongues. If Christmas fell on a Sunday, church would still commence. An earlier, shortened service, nonetheless, with my brother and me barely awake in pajamas ready to get home and open gifts.
This was the Holiness way of life growing up in rural, Moncks Corner, South Carolina. Church was a chore, an inconvenience, a mandate. I often lamented about our frequent attendance (silently grumbling, of course). Why did I have to be in church all the time?
In college and graduate school, I didn’t attend church regularly. I had logged enough church hours for two lifetimes. After graduate school, the ebbs and flows of life took me out to sea without a lifejacket. A void presented itself due to my sabbatical from church. I longed and thirsted for fellowship and intimacy with God.
“I reach out my hands to You; My throat thirsts for You, as a parched land (thirsts for water).” Psalms 143:6 AMP
I missed going to church! I yearned for the striking rise and fall of the organ, the hand claps in perfect unison, and the dry smell of Pompeian bless oil as it gleamed on my forehead. Stunted was my spiritual growth and lost was my connection with God because I had forgotten my roots. I had no church home, no first Sunday communion, no consistent praise to my Creator.
I joined my first church as an adult. No one forced me to attend services. No one forced me to worship and sing. I attended church regularly and cultivated my relationship with Christ. Church, fellowship, and worship finally intersected and led me to a closer relationship with God. I learned that fellowship can occur in my car driving into work, in Life Groups, or even in the midnight hour.
“Not forsaking our meeting together (as believers for worship and instruction), as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another.” Hebrews 10:25 AMP
“For where two or three are gathered together in My name, (meeting together as My followers), I am there among them.” Matthew 18:20 AMP
Church is more than the physical building or how often we attend services—it’s about worshipping with fellow Believers which creates a sense of community. Fellowship brings us closer to God. As a child, my parents and relatives created my introduction to Christ – my Protector, my Comforter, my Everything—by taking me to church.
“I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that … when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous.” Maya Angelou