“Who are you?” an elderly woman demands as she peers up into my face. I have never met her.

A middle-aged man shrugs apologetically, “I should know you, but I forget your name.” I’ve never met him, either.

Barely making eye contact, a young person nods at me and shoves a folded paper my way, while continuing a conversation with a friend. I’m not sure I want to meet her.

What none of the three said was, “Welcome to our church.”

My husband and I have been searching for a new church since late spring. Every couple of weeks, we wade into the discussion about where we will worship next as we look for a church home. He announces the names of churches he’s recently driven past and wondered about, as I grab my phone and type their names into Google for the low-down.

Evaluating the options isn’t an easy task.

We have a few limiters to begin with: the first is geographic. A potential church can’t be located in the small town where I retired from teaching. I’m not interested in sitting in worship with my former high school students.

Then there’s the content of the service. Neither of us wants politics to be the focus of a sermon, and we definitely don’t want any groups of people to be targeted for hatred. We both grew up in “God is Love” theology, so labeling people as “evil” is a stretch for our faith.

Music is another issue. We’d like a blend of traditional music and praise music, but nothing that lasts more than about ten minutes at a time, that is unintelligible, or that is missing lyrics and music to follow.

Then there’s the “dead time.”

I’m most comfortable with a significant amount of quiet worship time. I don’t need a pastor or musician or layperson to fill all of the service with noise. I prefer time to process, center myself, and listen to God. The energy of the gathered silence speaks to my condition.

Not so much my husband’s. As in Life with Father, he’s the Methodist.

After sitting through the unprogrammed worship time the first time he attended my semi-programmed Friends meeting, he asked in earnest, “What was all that dead time?”

Sigh.

I’ve come to accept that attending an unprogrammed Friends meeting every couple of months will meet that need for me.

Our beliefs are another challenge. That’s where the Internet helps. I can scroll through the “What We Believe” page of the church’s or denomination’s website. I usually read them aloud, and if they pass muster for both of us, I move on to vet a recent sermon that’s been recorded on YouTube. That’s the next big hurdle.

As a former secondary ELA teacher, I’m told I set a high bar for sermons in organization, content, grammar, and presentation. I can accept that. I want to follow the pastors’ reasoning and support, while also being moved by their fervor. I also want them to speak using subjects and verbs that agree. And I want to be left with a challenge, a call to action. Not that I’m grading them…exactly, but I want a sermon to be effective, both in content and delivery. I can accept a pastor’s casual clothes, but I don’t want to be distracted by the pastor perched on a tall stool with a foot jiggling as he speaks or pacing around the stage gesticulating wildly, or standing perfectly still, reading behind the lectern and looking up at the ceiling every couple of paragraphs.

Together, we have a long list of needs, expectations, and wishes. So many that it’s almost like house shopping: which ones are most important? Which can we set aside?

Even so, we’re trying to be open-minded.

During the past months, we’ve worshipped at early services and later ones, with a handful of people and large crowds. We’ve worshipped in a converted hardware store, a crumbling stone church, and a labyrinthine renovated one. We’ve wriggled to get comfortable on simple wooden pews in a plain country meetinghouse and practically taken root on padded pews in a neo-Gothic edifice. We’ve had our ears blasted by rock bands and also sat in silence with only roosters interrupting our meditation.

With all these varied worship experiences and despite all my teacher-like, analytical evaluation of each church’s location, its denominational beliefs, and unique contents of its service, surprisingly, I’m finding that our lasting impressions generally come back to the people we’ve encountered.

We’ve met a gamut of church members. We’ve been surrounded by complacent elderly worshippers and young Christians on fire, as well as everyone in between.

We’ve been completely ignored during the “friendly” greeting time, and we’ve been chased through the lobby when we slipped out before communion. We’ve been interrogated about where we live and which church we attended previously, and we’ve had attendance pads and pencils thrust into our hands to fill out “for attendance.” We’ve had adults seated behind us talk continuously during the service, and we’ve had young people in front of us walk in and out of the service to refill their coffee cups.

But we’ve also received warm hugs—mostly from elderly women who are the self-appointed huggers of the congregation. We’ve been invited to join the congregation in tea and cookies and discussion after a service. We’ve joined the congregation in singing our hearts out with a well-worn hymnal in hand. We’ve listened to orchestral music from lofty pipe organs, and we’ve been inspired by gifted singers sharing their amazing vocal ministries. We’ve been prayed for and kindly invited to return.

And most importantly, in several places, we’ve felt the loving arms of our Lord.

Years ago, a wise pastor once told my youth group that he was secure enough in his faith to worship anywhere. Maybe that should be our aspiration.