Back in the Apostolic Church

Attending a service after fifteen-odd years

Me hugging cousin Troy (center)

Over the years, I’ve had moments of silence and quiet contemplation in dozens of awe-inspiring cathedrals throughout Europe, I was almost brought to tears by a lone bagpipe in a small stone house of worship on the Brittany coast in France, went to a stadium-sized place in Guatemala City with a band and camera booms sweeping overhead for live television shots, and I witnessed many sermons in rural one-room dirt-floored churches during a mission trip when I was eighteen—even leading grace for the first time in my life before a meal at a table full of missionaries. 

I’ve attended many a proper mass with priests, robes, and incense while teaching at Catholic schools in Spain or rural Czech Republic, and I recommend everyone go to a Sunday service in a foreign language. It’s quite the experience to sit there as incomprehensible syllables come from a priest or minister, who then says a specific phrase, and the audience breaks the silence to give a perfectly unison response in the same military-like cadence.

All of that is to say that I haven’t avoided churches, but I’ve never felt the need to make them part of my weekly routine. 

And when it comes to the Apostolic church in which I was raised, I honestly don’t remember the last time I went there on a Sunday. 

We stopped going shortly after I was confirmed at fourteen. Of course, I was there for my cousin Thatcher’s funeral in 2018, one of the hardest weeks of my life. And before that, I was at my maternal grandfather’s funeral in 2012. 

So I think I’d been there twice in the last seventeen-ish years… until a few weeks ago.