Since moving back to Bedford County and getting my own place in the mid 1980s, I’ve been a member of two different United Methodist churches. I left the first one under strange circumstances — my father had been assigned there as a pastor, and I felt he had been mistreated in the way the PPR process was handled one year. So I left that church (bearing a lot of very un-Christian anger, which I hope I’ve put behind me) and started attending my current church, Shelbyville First UMC — I had moved into Shelbyville by that time anyway, and so First UMC was the closest church to where I live. I have happily attended First UMC ever since, and after my father retired from the ministry he and my mother joined First UMC as well.

Even though I’ve changed churches myself, I’ve sometimes looked down my nose at “church-shoppers” — people who seem to hop from church to church and denomination to denomination for a variety of reasons, ranging from perceived slights at their old church to the allure of cool and exciting churches with dynamic, contemporary worship. I have always had the concern that people who “church-shop” are trying to make church serve them instead of seeing church as a way for them to serve God. Maybe in some cases they’re running away from preaching that steps on their toes, even though that’s part of what preaching is supposed to do.

But Richard Mouw, writing at the Christianity Today web site, defends the practice of church-shopping and notes that some of the people who criticize it are being elitist, even hypocritical — they get more upset when church-shoppers move in one direction than the other. I’m not completely convinced, but he makes some very good points, and I’m probably guilty of some of the attitudes he rightly condemns.