Searching for Intellect in a Church of Emotion

Church.

I've come to a realization that there's no perfect church for me. As Pastor Francis said, "we are not a perfect church, but we are a perfectly good church."

I don't know. I guess the more involved you get, the more dirt you find, but at the same time, the deeper your relationships become.

I'm afraid that in the future, my acts of service will be just a social utility than one used for the glorification of God. Since I am now on Welcoming Ministry, I miss a huge chunk of worship. And today, while they prayed and talked about events in the bulletin, I was making sandwiches upstairs for the congregation after the service. I was able to catch the sermon and stood outside of the door because it was too hot inside the auditorium and there were few seats left.

The most disturbing aspect that made me really uncomfortable today, was that while I was trying to listen to our pastor speak, some of the worship team members and random people were goofing off outside and probably only caught a quarter of the sermon. I mean, this is a worship team that everyone looks up to to lead us all into a time of emotional and intellectual praise to God and yet I feel like they're neglecting their intellectual side and just focusing on getting that 'high' from some good music. So how can these church leaders lead us if they focus only on one part of their spiritual lives and neglect the rest?

I don't know anymore. I used to say that I'm more of a heart person and would 'scoff' at the up-in-the air philosophical ideas yet when I find a church that really satisfies my longing for emotional worship, I'm feeling very empty in the intellectual department. Our pastor, when he speaks, gets carried away by his firey passion for God and starts rambling on about who knows what. He only makes sense in shards and fragments- and those shards and fragments may not have anything to do with the Bible passage to begin with.
And I really miss the summer BS project. I loved the ecclectic bunch of people that made delving into the Bible so interesting: engineer, linguist, illustrator, nurse, writer, fashion designer, doctor, psychologist, missionary. I love how all our talents and worldviews were used to shape the discussions. I loved what everyone brought to the table to give us all a new understanding of the Bible. And I love how we tackled the more neglected books of the Bible. It was incredibly fulfilling and I actually looked forward to these Bible studies. They met that need for a deeper spiritual nourishment which I felt I lacked at RHCBC. It wasn't a stagnant, dull and quiet time; it was a place of lively discussion, passionate talks about what we each knew and understood of the Bible and if we deviated, we deviated. But it was okay- we did it in laughter, in fun and in fellowship. It gave birth to other events like our love feast (no reefs allowed).

And now, I'm not sure where I stand. We studied a portion of Mark 2 during small groups, and I felt so discouraged because the passage was rather short and the discussion was dry.

I understand that church should not be a 'meal replacement pill' in your intellecutal spiritual hunger and that personal growth is equally important, but I feel like I haven't heard a really good sermon in a while. I realize that there are very few pastors that can speak well and I feel like the RWC pastor is not one of them. Perhaps in his own mind, his thoughts and sermon make sense, but to the audience, after going to the church long enough, you notice that you are either writing down points that are painfully obvious (yes reminders are good but when the sermon is only of reminders and does not delve into the passage any deeper, it lacks a breath of fresh air) or you're not sure how to write down the points because they're so sparse and broken that they don't make sense as a whole. On the side, I'd like to say how much I dislike the whole "quote a passage of scripture just for the sake of injecting some Biblical reference, but deviating so far away from it, at the end, the congregation is left wondering why you chose that passage in the first place."

Another problem with the pastor of our church is that he's very vague when he tells us that things like "poverty, death, mass murders are the consequences of our sin!" yet he doesn't go into specific examples. These cases then become some very up-in-the-air ideas and have no way of taking root into our lives. As someone said, the Christian has to hold the Bible in one hand, and a newspaper in the other. I feel like he has little grasp on the newspaper.

On Friday, this may sound arbitrary, but I was doing this 'colour personality survey' from a book on colours and I ended up with yellow- the colour of intellect. The surprising thing was that the description of the yellow personality described me so perfectly and that of an ENFP type: in its ideal environment that allows them to play and be themselves, yellow types are creatives and full of ideas and thoughts. They have a tendency to start new projects with a lot of excitement but quickly lose drive to finish them. However, in stifling environments, the yellow type will channel its creative energy into criticism, complaining and gossip.
It's so true. My IDC department is so stifling, all I am doing is complaining about the program and its inability to nourish our creative side (okay I have gone on the offense but it clearly failed).

I guess you can be creative in the intellect. I'm just trying to find that balance between too 'over the top' philosophy with the application and the heart. At CBC, I felt like I had to be the water that ran against the rocks and here at Remnant, the rock that holds firm in a torrent of emotions. In NY, I find myself arguing for things that I was against in Toronto. Where my intellectual/philosophical side meets with the creative, I still yet to find. All I know is that I'm more intellectual than I thought I was.