Being raised in the church from the time I was born, church has played an on and off again role in my life for nearly 55 years. The ideal of church is great, but I don’t think there is a single church on the face of the planet that lives up to the ideal. I have gone to church for my parents, for Ty, for the girls and yes, sometimes for myself.
Ty and I love the UCC denomination. It’s open and affirming when it comes to homosexuality. It’s progressive on social issues. There is no real dogma. I was free to be an open universalist when I went there, but the church we attended for five years became too much of a burden. I was burnt out from serving there and it was struggling financially the entire time which was exhausting. It was also no place for teenagers or pre-teens as Kayla and Shayna were at the time. We needed a change. For convenience we started attending Crossroads, a non-denominational mega church. It is close to the house. They have the mega productions and the coffee and all of the trappings. It was good enough for Ty and not too offensive for me, usually.
However, after Shayna passed Ty actually needed more from a church spiritually. She started listening to Unity church via Podcasts and finding a lot that was actually helpful in her grief journey. We decided to check out the “local” Unity church which is 25 minutes away from us on the other side of town.
Unity is a church that is founded on metaphysical principles. It’s a new thought church. There is no dogma one must adhere to. The sermons present things in ways I have never heard in a church. It’s more like the stuff I read. Deeply Chopra, the Dalai Lama and Buddha are often quoted. Jesus is highly revered, as our role model and spiritual leader, but you are free to believe what you choose about Him. There are energy healing Sunday’s where you can get a reiki healing or even a reading from a medium.
We haven’t really plugged into the community there yet. While it’s a smaller church and we can actually see the people who are there on Sunday mornings, we are kind of laying back. I’m not involved in serving. I’m still on a break from that. But, it’s nice to have a place we can go on Sunday morning and both get something from it. It’s nice to know we’re not going to hear about hell or why homosexuality is wrong. It’s nice to have a church to go to that actually has something helpful to say about the grief we are going through in the here and now, not in the by and by. A church like that is a rare find, for me anyway.
