Faith is Christ is more than mere fellowship.
A support group is important, yes, but Christ is supremely important.
Unless Christ is the center of your service (Lutheran still?) the something is terribly wrong.
I know of a church that had young children sing and dance — and that was the service.
Not centered on Christ.
No, I’m not still Lutheran. I came to believe in Jesus as a child, but learned little more than the Gospel. The Lutheran Church never taught us the whole Bible. We weren’t told to read it and taught to memorize Scripture. Most people in the church wouldn’t have been able to recognize any but a handful of the most famous passages of Scripture, although Scripture was read every Sunday.
Once I was an adult and with full awareness accepted who Jesus is and what He did for me, then I looked around for a church, but after the Lutheran, which was all I knew, I didn’t really want one if they were like that. That’s when I tried the Catholic Church, and it seemed promising then. People exchanged “peace” and I thought that was great. I thought it was fellowship after coming from the Lutheran. But no one ever spoke to me and I had no clue about anything, and something still was unsatisfying about. I’d only read Genesis, Exodus and the Gospels, but I began reading the Gospels over and over and the Catholic (Cont’d)
Church seemed to have pretty much the same problem as the Lutheran that I’d left. It didn’t seem to have the same spirit as what I found in the Gospels. At that point I may have heard some of the Christian objections to the Catholic Church but didn’t understand them or really the differences between any of the denominations.
Then a few years later, though, when I was pretty much a liberal Christian and Democrat, as well as an identified lesbian, I happened to hear of Christianity.com Forums. One thing I had recently come to accept was that the Bible was all true, although I hadn’t read it all or intended to. But a few times I saw people mention “the whole armor of God,” and needing to put it on, and one time the thought came to me that I didn’t know really good and useful things like that which were apparently in the Bible and other people used and turned to for help when needed. So by the grace of God I decided right then to read the Bible and His Word took over my life and turned it into (Cont’d)
His Garden, is how I see it. My whole life and His Word are joined. And to go back to something you said, I was not interested in fellowship *instead* of Christ but because of Christ. I believed in Jesus since I was young but without more mature Christians to help me along, even just to point me to the Bible, I didn’t know where to turn or what to do, and tried out so much that just came along.