Is church going to be weird?

People usually mean something specific by weird. They mean being made to hold hands with a stranger, being asked to stand up and say their name, being cornered afterward, or watching something happen on stage that they have no framework for. Those fears come from somewhere. Plenty of people have a story.

So rather than promising it will feel normal, here is what actually occurs. You walk in, someone says hello and offers you coffee, and you sit wherever you want. The band plays for about twenty minutes with the words on a screen. A pastor talks from the Bible for about half an hour. There is a closing song. You leave. That is the whole shape of it.

Visitors are never identified from the stage. Nobody is asked to stand. There is no part where you turn and share something personal with the person next to you. If you want to sit in the back and say nothing to anyone for 70 minutes, that is a completely available option and more people take it than you would guess.

What might feel unfamiliar is simply that people are singing, and that some of them clearly mean it. If you have not been around that, it can be a lot at first. You are allowed to just watch. Nobody is monitoring your participation.

The part we actually care about is that you are not performing. Ps. Sam preached at our very first service about wearing a mask, about how much of his life he spent trying to be the version of himself that would fit in, and about what it took to take it off. A church that has that as its founding message is not interested in making you put a mask on to be here.