Study 3. What can I expect?

Maybe you’ve been to a church building a few times, normally it’s things like at Christmas, a wedding, or even a funeral. The image you have of church is wooden pews, the bowl coming around for a collection, and a few hymns.

It is fair to say that here in the United Kingdom (this study is available across the globe) a lot of Christians are meeting in a church building that has been around hundreds of years. So, they still do have wooden pews and stained-glass windows, but there is huge diversity when it comes to the church buildings that facilitate Christians meeting together. We have school halls, pubs, warehouses, homes, and everything in-between where Christians meet and come together to celebrate and worship God.

However, a few common themes can be seen in most Christian churches and the idea in this study is to just help you be ready for that and equipped which in turn will hopefully enable you to feel more confident to step inside the church building.

What you might discover is that, sometimes, church decoration, even the songs that are sung can be a bit romanticised. What this means is things like lots of floral displays, banners and quilting. There might be a table with a lace cover and the songs being sung might be about love, surrender, comfort and protection.

You might see people waving flags and running around with streamers (depends on the style of church) don’t let this put you off. We have discovered that here in the UK lots of men do struggle with this stuff and sadly it tends to switch us off from wanting to get involved or feeling like we don’t fit into church at times.

But, there are also some amazing things that churches do to connect with us and getting involved in a local men’s group can really help.

You can also expect some form of talk from the front, after the songs, notices and perhaps something for the children it is normal to get a sermon/talk. This again will depend greatly on who is doing it and what the particular day is as talks can be themed or work through various subjects. Our hope is that the talk will connect, be relevant to your life and clearly applicable.

The last thing you might come across is communion, a simple act of breaking bread, and drinking, or sharing a cup of wine. This is simply done to remember Jesus’ life and death on the cross. Each church will have a way of doing this, so again, depending on the church building and community you are going into it will most likely differ.

That’s a basic idea of what you can expect when you go to a church. You may experience some, none, or all of these things, but our encouragement to you is to get plugged in and find a group of men you can relate to. Go for it. Being part of a thriving and active church meeting each week will help you grow as a Christian.