CREEDE HINSHAW: Deciding to attend church is complicated

My wife and I drove to Atlanta to attend worship last Sunday. We had been invited to celebrate the baptism of a baby girl who is very special to us. Our trip helped me get in touch with the multiple decisions a person makes on a Sunday morning.

Here are 12 of them:

1. Decide whether or not to get out of bed and go to church. If a person decides not to attend worship, the rest of the decisions don’t come into play. This first decision was easy; we were eager to rejoice with our friends over the baptism.

2. Decide what to wear. Was this church formal or informal? What was the unstated dress code? Would we feel out of place if we made a poor choice?

3. Decide which route to travel. MapQuest and GPS helped, but we still made one wrong turn in Atlanta, necessitating a slight delay.

4. Decide when to leave the house in order to arrive on time. This isn’t as easy as it seems. My wife and I had different ideas of when the car should pull out of the driveway.

5. Decide what “on time” means. We didn’t know whether most people gathered 30 minutes prior to church for coffee and pastries or whether they poured into the sanctuary at 10:59 a.m. or 11:05 a.m. (We overlooked the announcement on the website that the service began at 10:55 a.m.)

6. Decide which service to attend in case of multiple services with varying styles of worship. Fortunately this decision was already made for us because we were coming for the baptismal service.

7. Decide where to park. The church sat on a corner and there was more than one entrance. We chose the wrong parking lot.

8. Decide how to enter the sanctuary. We discovered that the sanctuary sat on what seemed to be the “back” of the church. Since we had parked in the front lot we had a long walk. There was probably a shortcut, but we didn’t know it.

9. Decide where the restrooms are. They were not clearly marked.

10. Decide how to return to the sanctuary from the restrooms! There were lots of hallways and turns and if you didn’t pay attention you were quickly disoriented.

11. Decide where to sit so as to avoid (if possible) preempting a “regular” from their pew.

12. Decide what to say when the pastor invited the congregation to greet each other. Because we were sitting in a section of friends, we had already greeted each other. What else was there to say?

I could describe other decisions that morning. Would we sing unfamiliar hymns? Participate in the offering? Greet the pastor after church? Hang around in hopes that church members would greet us?

I’m up to 16 different decisions now. Who would have thought that going to church could be so complicated? For those who attend weekly such decisions have long been resolved. But not so for the casual or sporadic worshiper.

Email Creede Hinshaw, a retired Methodist minister, at [email protected].