Church Visiting

One of the sometimes interesting things about traveling is finding a local church congregation to visit on Sunday. Believe it or not, not all churches are exactly the same, and finding one that you will feel comfortable in is occasionally a little tricky.

On our previous trips to Florida, we have visited the same congregation. It was a congregation that we found by looking in the Yellow Pages many years ago, back when people actually used the Yellow Pages for things like that because that was the only option. Nothing wrong with the congregation overall, except that it is about 30 minutes from where we are staying. So we decided to see if there were any other options.

When we were at Lads to Leaders back in April, there was an ad in the program from the Concord Street Church of Christ in Orlando, saying to come visit them when you are vacationing there. But after I started looking them up on the internet, I found out that they sponsor another congregation that meets just over a mile from where we stay. So we decided to visit the Maingate Church of Christ on our recent trip.

Maingate Church of Christ meets in a meeting room of a hotel owned by one of the church members. The preacher is usually a visiting minister who is vacationing in the area as well. It all sounded pretty unique.

I really didn’t know how many people might be there, but by the time everyone arrived, there were over 60 in attendance. And one dog. Yes, one couple brought their pet chihuahua. God loves animals, too, after all. And I must say that the dog didn’t make any noise at all. It was much quieter than most of the children there.

Overall, we were quite pleased with our experience. Of course, church is not all about us, but rather it is about worshiping God, which we were thankful to the Maingate and Concord Street folks to be able to do, thanks to their work.

I think we will visit there again next time around.