I went to church today and I feel really bad because I want to start exploring our sister church. It's funny how you always take new members classes when you first want to join a church, but they never teach classes on how to leave a church. I love the people in my church; these people are like second family. But our church has changed, really changed.

The minister who was there when I joined left and went to a church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I don't blame the guy for wanting to leave. He and his wife had three kids and San Francisco is a hard place to have children if you don't make a lot of money. His older daughter never took ballet lessons. Every little girl should have ballet lessons. Even I had ballet lessons and I grew up without that much money.

But pastors don't make that much money and this guy was a rising star in the Presbyterian denomination, well thought of, and he sat on the board of McCormick School of Theology. The guy was bound to go and go whereever he wanted to. It was just a matter of when. After he left, the church had a series of interim pastors for about a couple of years and that's hard when a church loses its leader. And the old minister was a great sermonist. You always felt like he was speaking directly to you and talking about your life. I've come to realize that sermonizing is a gift and this minister definitely has it.

I had stopped going prior to minister's departure and I still feel bad about that. I was starting to get involved in other things and I had my own spiritual routine at home going, so I stopped going to church for community worship.

I started going to church again after 9/11 because I felt such a need to be close to people who were worshipping in community and it made me realize how important corporate worship is. It's fine to do your own practices at home and that works really well, but worshipping in community is such an important part of leading a spiritual life, if only to know that there are other people struggling with their faith like you are.

A couple months after 9/11, the church installed a new pastor and I liked him at first, but he's a little more conservative than the other guy and not the rising star and not a good sermonist. Alot of the people I liked have either left now or are dead. I mean, there's still great people there, people I really,really like but the church has shrunk and all the people my age are gone.

Now at our sister church, it's a whole different story. Their memberships is in the 4,000+ range, while ours is 200+. And they have so many people my age, that I feel very comfortable there. Our sister church has always been a little more conservative than my own church, but with this new pastor, our church is starting to look like it's going to be even more conservative than they are.

Our one associate minister in the church jokingly said christians are persecuted in SF and someone corrected him and said 'ignored not persecuted'. My only thought to this was 'if you don't want to be ignored in our modern 21st century society, you better not be boring, you better have something to offer people other than whining about how the church is losing attendance and therefore that means persecution."

And this is where my biggest problem is. My church is losing relevancy in my life and I don't know if it's because the minister is a boring sermonist or he's just too conservative for my taste. I don't want church to be irrelevant in my life and I feel bad that I have to leave my home church, where I've been a member now for almost 10 years, so I can have relevant church services.

What really bugs me is the new minister never talks about 9/11 and what it meant-what it means now, never talks about the dot gone economy we're experiencing in San Francisco, never talks about the war on terrorism and it's important to us and to the country, never talks about American Taliban and what this issue means for parents everywhere, never talks about the heaps and heaps of homeless people at our church door and on the street, never talks about the rising unemployment where at least 25% of church membership is employed, etc. He never brings up anything relevant to issues that are affecting my life in one of the most biggest cities in the country and certainly one of the most watched cities in the world.

All he talks about is the bible and that's fine but relate the bible back to important issues now, big issues. The head minister from our sister church came to give Thanksgiving service at our church and he talked about 9/11, airport and airline security and what that day meant to all of us. No, all our head minister and associate minister are concerned about are how the christian church is ignored in SF and how they're going to bring "GOD" to San Francisco.

Well duh! He's already here in other christian denominations, other churchs in our own denomination, other religions and those churches have huge memberships. Some people don't get it. If you want to be noticed, be relevant, be interesting but don't be boring and out of context, out of step with the general society.

And after all these complaints, I still feel bad about wanting to explore other churches. How can I leave my church family, people who you've come to know over 10 years? But I will if they make church irrelevant for me, I will. And to me that's the ultimate evil, most un-christian thing anybody can do to me, make church, religion irrelevant.