Wess has written a thoughtful three-part series on what to look for when shopping for a church: one, two, and three. Rilina is starting a series on the same subject, since she is looking for a church herself.

I feel like I ought to be able to contribute something here, since I have done a great deal of church hunting in the last few years and have blogged about it extensively. In order, here are reports on: St. Bede’s Episcopal, Lutheran Church of the Master, Church of St. Mark, Venice Baptist Church, Culver-Palms Church of Christ, Bel Air Presbyterian, Pasadena Mennonite Church, Joy of All Who Sorrow Orthodox Mission, The Salvation Army of Santa Monica, Long Beach Friends Church, and All Saints Beverly Hills.

But for all that, I hardly feel like an expert on church shopping. A lot of the time, I felt like I was wandering around not really knowing what I was doing. Certainly, I didn’t take the systematic approach that Wess took. In Wess’ first post some commenters took issue with approaching a new church with such a critical eye, even inspecting what sort of cars were in the parking lot. Actually I do agree that the cars can tell you something about the church, but I also was never quite so left-brained about it all, and am not sure I’d want to be. In fact in one post I said I’d scale back on the detailed blogging of church visits:

I’ve been thinking, actually, that blogging every church I visit so comprehensively may damage the enterprise. If I know I’m going to blog it it’s too easy for me to go into reporter mode while I’m there — making mental notes to myself, thinking how I’m going to describe something, estimating the size of the crowd, and generally doing things I wouldn’t be doing if I weren’t going to write it up. In some ways that makes me pay more attention, but I think overall it keeps me in that reporter’s role: on the edge watching, not actually participating.

The downside with being less analytical and more impressionistic is that a lot of personal things, like my mood and taste in music and whatnot, wound up featuring prominently in my impressions of churches. Looking back at those posts now I cringe at some of the petty things I went off about. Nonetheless, I’ve found in the three churches where I have stayed for some time that my first-day intuitions about them were basically right. What I expected to like I continued to like, and what I thought would probably annoy me continued to annoy me. What changed, if anything, was the relative importance of those things.

So while analysis is good, I still think gut instinct counts for something. I don’t mean necessarily going with the church where you feel most comfortable, because if you feel too comfortable it probably won’t push you enough. But churches definitely have their vibes — there are cheery ones, serious ones, excited ones, indifferent ones. And that can tell you a lot about what’s going on beneath the surface.