"Dating" a Church--Terms 1

The following list is humbly submitted for your contemplation and entertainment. Please feel free to comment on any of the definitions.

Dating: When you are casually dating a church, you are doing just that. You are spending time with the congregation and getting to know it. Sure, you can date around, play the field. But do not get so close to one congregation that you end up breaking their hearts. You may find that the first church you date is "the one." This happened to me when I began attending Westview Wesleyan. Be careful with "making out" with the church.

Making Out: We all can remember in youth group when we had our "purity talks" about not making out with someone you are just casually dating. Unless the both of you are down with NCMOS (non-committal make out sessions), introducing a physical aspect of a burgeoning friendship can complicate the whole thing. So how do you make out with a church? I think it is by participating in extra fellowship times outside of the normal morning worship. It forces you to become more acquainted with the people in the congregation, building closer relationships. If you are not yet committed to going to this church, then it could become very difficult to leave if you want to play the field elsewhere. Kasey and I have "made out" with the current church we are attending for the past few dates. We have gone to lunch with couples, gone to a cookout, ate at a potluck, went for ice cream with the pastor and his family, and tonight we are going to have dinner at a couple's house. Some of these are non-committals. Some are not. In this case, we have not been the aggressors at all. We continually get invited to join in on the fellowship and the food (and since we would otherwise be eating tater-tots, we gladly jump at the chance to eat a real home-cooked meal or go to a restaurant). But now we feel as though opting to date another church would be to abandon some of the relationships we are building there. In short, making out is fun but forces you to DTR (define the relationship).

Going Steady: Once you have DTR, you can move forward in participating in other avenues of the church. We think that attending Sunday School is like going steady with a church. A lot of churchgoers just attend morning worship (sing some songs, listen to the sermon, drop the kids off in children's' church for an hour or more). But to get up that extra hour to hour and a half and show up for the intimate time of Sunday School is a big commitment. It means you are willing to put forth the effort to make this relationship blossom. A Sunday School class is usually comprised of people who have been at the church for some time and know each other pretty well. By joining the class, it says that you want to be that close with them. Usually Kasey and I do not attend Sunday School. We didn't when we went to the FWB church in Johnston City, and we aren't right now in Tallahassee. We did by accident our first Sunday at the Nazarene church. The next week we passed on Sunday School and were told we were "missed." We probably were. But we were not ready yet on just the second date to go that far. Being part of a Sunday School class is an important part of your participation in a church, but best to do when you have chosen a home church with which you want to go steady.
Note: I suppose a mid-week small group may fall in this category. I will discuss that later.