My Story [Emily] pt 2

I started going to our local Catholic church again but didn’t feel welcome or at home there. Nobody said hello to me or introduced themselves. They were probably all waiting for someone to say hello to them.

Then a friend told me about a church she’d found called Freedomhouse. She was not the sort of girl who you’d imagine at church, she’d always insisted that she was an atheist. I was intrigued. I went along with her one week, more to make sure she hadn’t joined some strange cult that anything else.

What I found was so different to any church I’d ever been to before and at first I was quite uncomfortable. Instead of spires, stained glass windows and wooden pews there were chairs inside a community centre. Instead of a priest in robes there was Brandon, our pastor, looking just like a regular guy. Instead of organ music and hymns there were guitars and drums playing modern worship songs.

It definitely did not conform to my expectations of what church should be but, like Father McCormack’s sermons from my childhood, it was not boring.
Neither was it unwelcoming. The one thing Freedomhouse always tries to do is make newcomers feel at home and if you can walk in and out without anyone saying hello or offering you a cup of tea then we have seriously failed.

Despite this homely feel, I still wasn’t sure about it – it was too new and different – and if it hadn’t been for a certain babysitting job then I probably wouldn’t have gone back. A few weekends later, it was my friend’s birthday and I had to miss her celebrations to baby-sit. To make it up to her I decided to go to her strange church again.

So I went for the second time, then a third and then a fourth. After I’d been going for a few weeks, I got talking to a guy there named Daniel. It was the first time I’d properly spoken to anyone there apart from my friend. It was also the first time I’d thought about what I was doing there, in response to his, as ever, probing questions. I began to realise that I couldn’t put my continued attendance down to feeling bad about missing my friend’s birthday anymore.

There was something about Freedomhouse that I couldn’t stay away from.

PART 3