When You Should (+ Shouldn't) Church-Shop
some food for thought
The music is too chant-y. The music feels like a youth group worship service. The priest makes everyone use the altar rail. The priest is always 20 minutes late. The homilies never mention the marginalized. The homilies are too political. We hold hands during the Our Father. We don’t have the sign of peace.
You get the picture. If you’ve ever uttered any of the above—or have at least thought them—congratulations; you’re a human being with opinions. Even the church you love the most will likely have a thing or two about it that drives you bananas.
So here’s the bigger question: when should you try a new parish? And when should you attempt to plant your flag and stick around?
Catholicism has many unique attributes, but one of them is our church structure.
I had never, in my entire life, heard the phrase church plant until about 2013. I had no idea people could just start churches. In the Catholic Church, every single person in the entire world is under the care of a diocese. A diocese has to approve the construction and viability of a new parish. Furthermore, you are required to attend not just church, but a Catholic Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation. It’s not like you can just hit up your local megachurch/home church/temple for the weekend and consider the box checked.
It is good to be actively involved and committed to a parish community.
Your church is not meant to be a drive-through sacrament station. It shouldn’t be the case that you don’t know a single other family, or that you don’t know where the confessional is, or that nobody would notice if you just stopped going to Mass. In a dream world, your parish should be the bedrock of your spiritual community and feeding.
Church should also be a place where you are setting at least some of your own preferences aside. Believe it or not, one of the hallmarks of our faith is that your preferences need to be acknowledged within a greater context of the holy, Catholic, and apostolic church. This is not a DIY, design-your-dream-church situation. It’s a place where you lay down your own will for the good of God and his kingdom. One of my favorite passages in CS Lewis’ beautiful Screwtape Letters is when the demon is writing to his nephew Wormwood about the beauty of encouraging people to church shop1:
“You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and only one, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his fidelity to the parish church? Do you realize that unless it is due to indifference it is a very bad thing? Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighborhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.”
“The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organization should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires. The congregational principle, on the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all goes well, into a coterie or faction.”
“In the second place, the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil. What he wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise – does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going. …This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper.”
“So pray bestir yourself and send this fool the round of the neighboring churches as soon as possible.”