The Last Service
Today was the last service of the church I had attended from 1991-2000, and then off and on again in 2002. This was also the church I worked at as a nursery school teacher and I attended nursery school there. The service was very long, over 2 hours, but very poignant. During the service we were given a river rock. At the proper time we were to think of all of our hurts either regarding the church closing, or anything else and take the rock and place it in a bowl of water at the front of the church. We were then given a smooth opalescent rock. It was very symbolic and meaningful and I think what I needed to be able to move on to attended another church without pain and disappointment. I'm likely going to start attending the Baptist church. I attended regularly in 2000 and then stopped completely. I got involved too fast because they needed someone in the high school ministry and my dad recommended me. (He had attended this church years ago, but now goes to another Baptist church in the neighboring town that caters to an older congregation, however everyone at this church knows him or knows of him). I really disliked working with high school students, I was totally intimidated at the time, and I was also dealing with a bad bout of sinus problems all at the same time. I went from attending every Sunday for several months to completely stopping. Nick and I have attended a handful of times since we got married and that pastor did marry us. All the hurt from the Presbyterian church I think just kept me from being able to feel at home anywhere else. Aside from the most recent pastor turning the church (well several members) into her personal cult, we had a gay pastor for a period of one month who then returned home and committed suicide. This happened in 1994 and the church never really healed from that. Prior to that they booted out a pastor who had an affair and subsequently married a parishioner. This church had more scandals than a soap opera! The ultimate demise of the church was that the previous pastor (the one with cult-like behavior) didn't do anything regarding the finances of the church. She wouldn't keep a part time secretary so no one realized how many bills had just been left unpaid until after she was finally asked to leave by Presbytery. Presbytery, the governing body above the church, I feel is partially responsible for what happened because not only did they allow the gay pastor to become our pastor knowing his history of mental health problems, they also let the current situation fester until it was out of control and too late. And this happened after this pastor closed a church in Santa Clarita by doing basically the same things! No one thought to look into that! She had blamed it on the men of the church because she said they didn't want a woman pastor. Obviously that wasn't the problem. She was creating her own little cult there and pulled several of those people over to her congregation at this church before she was asked to resign. And she actually had the nerve to show up today! We completely ignored her. But anyway that's the Cliff Notes version of everything that went on...nothing like this should ever happen to a congregation. By the end of the service I was in tears. The last hymn was "Amazing Grace" which makes me cry as it is, but hearing it as the last song, to the last service just did me in. I wasn't even going to go, but as our friend Sharon kept telling us about what they had planned we decided to. I'm so glad I went because I now have closure and can move on finally.