Among Christian Church Culture “church shopping” is not well looked upon. It’s filed under fickleness for consumerist Christians – people who want their “ears tickled.” Sometimes it’s viewed as what “troublemakers” do who just cause some kind of issue and move on when they get run off or after having a public tantrum on their way out. To be fair, these are broad-brushed generalizations I’ve gleaned over the years of reading blogs and books and tweets by predominately evangelical Christian leaders. There may or may be that much truth to it, but it’s the understanding I picked up whether or not that was the intended message. So it is with this in mind that I struggled with the question: Is 4-5 years the most I can stay in a particular church?

I think so far, I have stayed about a year after I start feeling it’s time to move on. It seems as though I reach a point where I realize something is missing. And I wasn’t sitting there just absorbing and consuming. I was giving. I was serving. And I grew, but only to a point. I am so done with Baptist churches, and having gone through some of the literature and minutes from meetings my parents kept, I’m even more averse. (That’s a story for another day.) I don’t want any more modern “seeker-driven” church built on megachurch patterns of motivational speeches (“relevant” sermons) bookended by a rock concert creating an atmosphere of emotional experience but never getting beyond a series of how-to’s for living the American Dream to its fullest.

I was talking to a friend one evening a few months ago about that “something missing” feeling. He felt it, too, though we’ve never gone to the same church. I’ve had similar conversations with other friends. It isn’t just me. I’m reading it in books and blogs also. This disillusionment with a lot of the modern church here in the United States. I think we’ve been focusing on cultural Christianity without Jesus.

I can find just as much right as wrong in every church I’ve been in. I’m not out to find the “perfect church” because I know that doesn’t exist. I know that having so many choices of churches is, of course, going to feed Christian consumerism. But just maybe it can provide something else.

I spent about 2 years with my first therapist and went as far as I could with that therapist. She helped me see a big issue I’d acted on for many, many years and cut me no slack for my excuses. I learned and I grew. But there was something deeper I needed to work on and it’s not an area she specializes in. So I found another therapist who does, 2 years later. And there will come a time when I will have gone as far as I can with her, though I feel nowhere near that point yet.

By using this analogy of going to a different therapist, it comes across on the surface as consumeristic shopping to meet my needs. But, the 2 years I spent with my first therapist enabled me to heal enough to break some destructive behaviors. My current therapist is helping me identify and correct other thoughts and behaviors that are destructive. Each of them helped and are helping me to grow with my current one building on top of what the first built.

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. 1 Corinthians 3:5-9a

Maybe this whole church search will continue to leave me still wanting more than there is. It all boils down to this: I want the focus to be on Jesus. Who Jesus was. What Jesus did. What Jesus taught. And considering that, how to love my neighbor. How to hear and surrender to the Holy Spirit and lay aside my self-focused desires and fears to do good to others especially the poor, the outcasts, the marginalized, and the despised.

I want teaching and fellowship that transforms me more into Christlikeness than whatever the current popular cultural church growth movement is. I don’t want to be entertained, I want to worship. I want to worship Jesus, not a system.