Grace Reformed Church

A small Presbyterian congregation about twenty minutes from the house, off a county road that doesn’t show up on most maps without zooming in. The building used to be a Methodist church before it was a Reformed one; the windows still have the long narrow proportions of mid-century Methodist construction, and the steeple is more decorative than functional. Maybe a hundred and twenty people on a normal Sunday, fewer in summer.

I started going about three years after I stopped going to Faith Bible Church. I had not planned to start going anywhere again, and would not have if a friend hadn’t asked me along to a Christmas Eve service one December and I had not, against my own better judgment, agreed. The friend has since moved away. I kept going.

The pastor is Daniel Renner, who preaches expository sermons that take a chapter at a time and stay with it. He does not raise his voice. He does not tell stories about his children except very rarely, and when he does they are short and never the point. The congregation skews older and quieter than I’d expected. There is a coffee hour after the service in a side room with the same yellow Formica tables the previous denomination must have left behind, and the same brand of supermarket coffee the previous denomination must have specified by clause in the bylaws.

I’d thought going back to a church would feel like reentry, like crossing a threshold I had carefully closed. It has not felt like that, mostly. It has felt like sitting down.