Finding a home church can be difficult in college. It can be hard to find one that suits the church personality you are used to, that correlates with your beliefs, is close to where you live and allows you to be actively involved.<\/p>\n
When I was a freshman, I would go to different churches to see which ones fit what I was used to.\u00a0 Back home, my church serves between 80 to100 people a week. Everyone knows everyone; we are a family.\u00a0 It was a great church to grow up in as the worship pastor\u2019s daughter.\u00a0 However, it was rough coming to a large city where there are so many options and different kinds of churches to choose from.<\/p>\n
Not only that, but as a pastor\u2019s kid, I was always at the church.\u00a0 If it was not youth group, it was worship team practice. If it was not worship practice, it was Vacation Bible School.\u00a0 If it was not VBS, it was \u201cClean-the-Church-Saturday.\u201d You get the picture.\u00a0 It was never a hard task to find a way to serve at our home church as my parents volunteered my brother and sisters and me for everything.<\/p>\n
Coming to churches in the Riverside area was a different story. In order to get involved I had to be intentional in seeking out ways to be actively involved in the church body. It was even more difficult because there was the small matter of having school, homework, projects and also attempting to find consistent transportation to get to church activities.<\/p>\n
However, about two years ago, I started attending CrossPointe Community Church in Fontana with a few friends.\u00a0 For some reason, this church just clicked. I did not know very many people but I was intentional about getting to know people at the church. This past summer I lived in Fontana, and one of the main reasons I wanted to stay in Southern California for the summer was so I could build deeper relationships with people at the church and serve more frequently.<\/p>\n
Since that time, I have become involved in many ministries at church, and I feel comfortable calling it my \u201chome church\u201d.\u00a0 I participate in the worship team regularly, the children\u2019s ministry, the church\u2019s computer ministry, the youth group ministry, and I attend the college group. God has also blessed me so that I have been able to get to know people in the senior adult ministries and other ministries throughout the church.<\/p>\n
I feel as if God has grown me in order to help me learn how to build solid relationships and make church a genuine thing for me.\u00a0 Because it did not come easy for me like it was when I was younger, I have to be more intentional about how I deal with people and grow with people. It has been such a blessing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finding a home church can be difficult in college. It can be hard to find one that suits the church personality you are used to, that correlates with your beliefs, is close to where you live and allows you to be actively involved. When I was a freshman, I would go to different churches to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audrey-hanson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/lancerdiaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/lancerdiaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/lancerdiaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/lancerdiaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/lancerdiaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/lancerdiaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/lancerdiaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/lancerdiaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.calbaptist.edu\/lancerdiaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}