Preface: Stephanie really does intent to post on this blog too, but she is currently engaged in a whole slew of craft projects. She will post again once her gnarled, arthritic hands recover enough to type.
As many may know from experience, searching for a new church home can be very difficult. Of course our ideal was to find somewhere as great as Beltway. We started with a church that we had heard about from a friend. It was very big with multiple campuses, tons of ministries and classes, and various worship styles and age groups. We tried it a couple times and liked it, but weren't thrilled about it. Obviously they were doing great work there, but something didn't feel quite right and it seemed like we were just settling for the first thing we found. And who could blame us? As we realized, moving to a completely new area means having no useful information about churches. So we tried looking around online. Using only websites to look for a church was difficult since you only get a little information and no real sense of what the people are like. So since we weren't satisfied with our original option we started looking around online and formed a list of potentials to try in the coming weeks.
Our first try took us to New Hope Church (see link above), a smaller church about 15min. drive from us. The drive itself is quite gorgeous, like most of Virginia.
The blurry shots taken by Stephanie in the car going 40mph aren't blurry, they're artistic. Stop complaining. We were quite pleased the first Sunday. The worship was great and the church was small. Steph commented that it felt like what a church would be if a few families got together to build a church. Because we liked it so much, we signed up for one of their new member meetings. During the week in between we received both an email and a card from them thanking us for visiting them. Yeah, we're easily impressed. So on our second visit, today, we went to the meeting after morning services (free lunch!) and learned a lot more about their ministries and history. Here's a pic of the building so, you know, you can get a visual:
They have a particular desire to remain culturally relevant and to serve the community. They've only been in this building since last year and they designed it to be a meeting place where the neighborhood could feel welcome. We feel pulled towards this church, but we're still checking it out and thinking and praying about it.Oh, and as one sign of confirmation, this is the intersection where the church is located:
It's missing some E's, but it's close enough.
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