Or maybe going to church was a glorious success

As we complete our blogging project of visiting a church a week, it seems time to evaluate.  We started the blog long after blogs stopped being wildly profitable. During any week of our year-long trip, we spent far more than we've made from Cheers and Amen, the book about that trip. In my heart of hearts, I hoped millions would stumble upon our profundity, and we’d change the national conversation. Last week I concluded that -- from a purely mercenary perspective -- the project was a failure.

This week I'm looking at our project from a different perspective, and I can see it was a grand success.

For instance, if you just look at the fun factor, the project worked big time. Just looking at our church visits, we were welcomed warmly in an African American church in Birmingham. It was fun to sing new songs in different parts of the country -- and to sing songs that I haven’t sung in church since I was a teenager. We were able to worship with friends we haven’t seen for years, sometimes decades. And then there was all the fun we had traveling the whole country and exploring the nooks and crannies of the places we were living.

If we just look at what we learned, the project was a success. One thing that spurred us to visit churches was people who said, “The church in America is dying, like the church in Europe.” We think God is still working in Europe, but we had the chance to see for ourselves what God is doing in His church in America -- and we found that He is doing great things.

Some say, “Young people aren’t going to church anymore.” But we went to a variety of cities; Kansas City, Atlanta, Nashville, Minneapolis, where we saw hundreds (making a total of thousands) of millennials and whatever the group is younger than millennials gathering together to praise God in word and song.

If people are concerned that churches in America aren’t being innovative, we saw cause for hope. We saw churches meeting in gyms and trucker’s rest stops and bars. We saw churches that throw birthday parties for poor children, feed hikers on the Appalachian Trail, give parenting classes in jails, and hand out clean underwear and socks to the homeless. We worshiped with people of many ethnicities, ages, and social status. We worshiped in congregations in the very poorest and most wealthy parts of the country. We worshiped with congregations that would probably identify themselves as politically blue and those who would identify as politically red. And in all this great variety of places, the name of Jesus was praised.

Yes, we occasionally went to churches that seemed pretty dead and we wondered why the congregants even bothered. There were times we went to churches and we were ignored. There were times when the preaching was dull, times it was heretical. But we looked for warm places where the Word of God was proclaimed, and that’s usually what we found.

But the main reason we consider the project a success is because we believe we did what God called us to do. We gave the project a lot of thought and prayer. We asked God to show us if it was really what He wanted us to do.

Especially in 2016, when we were traveling to a church and a bar in every state, at times we wondered whether the whole thing was just an idiotic idea -- particularly when I was worrying about money. But then God reminded us that He was there and He was with us. He would put just the right people in place at just the right times to provide the encouragement we needed. And sometimes He showed Himself by putting us where people needed us.

On a Sunday afternoon, while we were at a church in Washington D.C., I went for a walk. I saw an elderly woman doing a very ineffectual job weeding the patch in front of her apartment. I asked her if she needed help. She said that various members of her family had promised to come and help her, but had all backed out or just didn’t show up. She said she’d been praying for someone to help her, so I knelt down and pulled some weeds. I sometimes wonder if God planned the whole project to answer one woman’s prayer on that one afternoon. If so, we were doing God’s will and the project was a success.

This is the final post for Dean and Mindy Go to Church. Eventually, all these posts will migrate to DeanandMindy.com. We’d like to thank all of you for reading and -- even more -- thank you to all of you who welcomed us in our travels. You made it a wonderful experience. And if you haven’t read our book  you might want to consider buying it at Amazon.)