By Mike Koolen:

When you go to a new church, everyone wants to know your story.  Where are you at in your “journey”?  What brought you here?  How would you describe the “season” you’re in?

I will fully admit that these are all buzzwords and things that I had no knowledge of.  I never thought of a journey or a season; I thought you believed or you didn’t.

I’m learning to see things differently now but I thought I’d start out this series, or project, or journal (I really don’t know what to call it) from the beginning of my journey.

Raised by a Roman Catholic father and Protestant mother (no idea on denomination) we were church goers for much of my life.  I was raised as a Catholic who went to public school but still took part in all of the major milestone sacraments of the Catholic Church that a kid would go through.  Infant baptism, First Communion, First Confession and Confirmation were all a part of my youth and were essentially where I learned about God.

If at this point you’re looking for a rant against the Catholic Church, that’s not something you’re going to find here.  Even though I no longer consider myself to be Roman Catholic that doesn’t mean that I’m angry with the church for anything I’ve dealt with personally.  The Catholic Church provided me with a cornerstone or jumping off point to my faith; it’s where I repeated the Lord’s Prayer and it’s where I first experienced God.  

Like many young people, I pulled back from the church in my teens and 20’s.  While laziness would be the main reason, some of what I learned (or at least thought I learned) in the Catholic Church played a major role.  

I’ve always questioned the idea of confession to a priest.  If that helps you, then knock yourself out but it was never my thing.  If God was truly all knowing then he knows what I did all the time.  He would also know that I left out certain stuff when in confession so as not to cause problems.  He would know that those things were running through my mind when I was talking to the priest.  Being a public school kid, I didn’t have to experience it often but I genuinely feared confession and I haven’t been in a confessional booth in over 25 years.

Prayer is also a tough one for me that I’m trying to work through.  While I don’t know if I understood the lessons properly or not, I came away from church with the mentality that if I wasn’t physically in God’s house, no one was listening to my prayers.  This could be a twisting of the teachings, but the important part would be that is how I interpreted it.  A lot of things were tough for me with this mentality and I just couldn’t deal with it.  I would say that the final nail in my moving on from Catholic Church was during a time of family illness.  It was an incredibly frightening time for my family but not once did I darken the door of my local church.  I did however spend a lot of time talking to God during this time.  When the illness was rectified I basically took that to mean that someone was listening regardless of where I sat.  

After that, I didn’t go to church other than for weddings or funerals for 15 years…

Why start going to church in your mid-30’s?

I had friends that knew I was a person of faith and knew that I didn’t have any sort of community that I was involved with.  They asked me to come to their church and I resisted.  I thought that church was only what I had experienced as a kid:  

• People droning through creeds without really thinking about the words.  

• Hard pews

• fancy clothes  

• Sitting quietly and listening to the ones who are up front which means they’re better than you

As a kid, I don’t recall ever seeing someone sitting in a pew with a bible in their hands.  The Catholic Church still seemed to subscribe to the pre-reformation idea of the man up front is the one who reads from the book.

My wife and I talked for years about going to church and always found one excuse or another as to why it wasn’t the right time for us.  

One week, through the magic of Facebook, we discovered a friend of a friend was a Pastor in the town we live now.  And the church was only a 5-minute drive!  

How do I get out of this?  Think Koolen, think!  Can we use the kids as an excuse like we have been for years?  Apparently, the children’s pastor is a substitute teacher at their school and they love her…crap, can’t use that one.  Fine, I guess we’ll go. 

So Super Bowl Sunday in 2016, we loaded the family and headed to church.  Now don’t get ahead of yourself, this wasn’t a come to Jesus moment for either of us.  I still resisted.  I had hang-ups about how church is “supposed to be”.  It was too loud and there were padded chairs and people had coffee in their hands.  Everything seemed off.  

*Side note, when I told a friend I started at church on Super bowl Sunday, he said “geez Koolen, how much did you have riding on that game?

So, there we are at church and we were welcomed with open arms.  I look to the stage and there isn’t an old man in a robe reading from a giant bible; there’s a guy my age in jeans with a PowerPoint presentation that includes Lord of the Rings and even The Simpsons from time to time. 

Somehow, we immediately felt comfortable in this small community.  People embraced us, and the kids were thrilled.  I started to look forward to church each week but even still Church Mike and Work/Real Mike were two different guys.  

I still had some very old ideas when I started at church and I guess my whole life had brought me to that point but to use a very Christian term, I think my “journey” really started that day.