What church means to me

I want to say that the purpose of church has changed for me. While in Mexico, the church’s purpose has not changed. I still enjoy going to church for the same reasons that I did while in the United States.

My church in Mexico is much smaller. It is about the size of my colleg campus ministry but with a little bit of an older congregation. We usually only have 10-25 people on any given service and there is only one service. Because of the size, the community feels a lot more like a family.

The first thing I do when I see people arrive is greet them. It is an unspoken social rule in Mexico, that if you don’t want someone to know that you dislike them, you must say hi to them. (People do sometimes have these thoughts if they do go ungreeted.) I always greet everyone. There are benefits by greeting people every time you see them. You begin to build a deeper connection with them just in the greeting. I love this aspect of Mexican culture. It builds a closer relationship between everyone. After church, everyone stays for coffee and tea. We all talk about how our weeks were and about what is going one. Every once in a while, someone will say “I had a really hard week”. We all know that we are in this together and listen to each other’s stories about out hard weeks. It genuinely means a lot to me that we are so open to listen to the problems in each other’s life because sometimes it is a heavy concept like, “my coworker quit” or “I have cancer”.

I love the music we have at church. I love understanding less than 100% of the sermon (either because it is in Spanish or because I don’t pay attention). I love being in the building. But I think that the thing I love most about church is that it adds consistency to my life. I know that whatever has happened in my week, I can come and unload to a family that is around for me as they know that I am around for them. To me this is what church is. My family.