I haven't blogged about this before, but my church is dissolving its relationship with our current pastor. It's kind of big deal for me, because I really liked the guy and I personally feel that there was a certain vocal minority in the church that didn't give him a chance.

No one is blameless in what happened, but I was left feeling very unhappy with my church. My unhappiness has been coming on gradually for a long time, and the pastor's resignation was the straw that proverbially broke this camel's back.

A friend who doesn't attend anymore said that "when she goes to church she gets a sad feeling, it's not a happy place." I have to agree with her. Sometimes I felt like I was watching a bad train wreck, and I couldn't pull myself away. This is a not a good way to think about one's church.

It's probably going to be about two to three years before my church hires another pastor full time. In the meantime, they will have a steady stream of interim pastors. I hate this kind of instability in a church. The world is just too crazy and stressful, and I don't need the stress of never knowing who will be preaching or worrying about the quality of the sermons.

I made a decision to start attending our sister church. It's a bigger church with two services, and it's four times the size of my current church with over 1,000 members.

We have a sister church, because part of the church's congregation split off during the time of the Civil War. The members who were Confederate sympathizers split from my church, and started their own church. The sister church is still spoken about in hushed tones by some of my church's members as those people who supported slavery.

Our sister church tends to be a little more conservative, and wealthier. Their building is located in Pacific Heights, which is one of the more richer hoods of San Francisco. Since it's a bigger church, they attract quite a diverse crowd and there is actually more diversity in their congregation than in ours because of their size.

And as an added bonus, there seems to be more single men attending there than at my home church. I had a dream last night where my grandparents were in service with me at the sister church. What my very catholic grandparents would be doing in a protestant church is one big mystery to me, but they were there and my grandma was pointing out all the cute single to me. Is this dream a sign or what?

I won't abandon my home church right away; that would be too weird and cruel. I don't know why I have a thing about that, but I do. I don't know why either, because people have left my church before without warning. Just last month, a couple I was in class with for a year just stopped showing up. When I asked around, someone told me that they had decided to leave.

But I do have friends at church, people I've known for a long time and whom I totally respect and admire religiously, politically and intellectually. So leaving is a big deal for me. My biggest fear about leaving the church is my fear that I won't find people at my new church that I respect and admire for their religious, political and intellectual smarts.

But my departure I fear is inevitable. I've been praying about it for a year now, and it is only now with the pastor's termination that I've felt it's time to leave.

It will probably be a year until I transfer my membership, which is the process you go through when you change churches in this denomination.

The sister church has an early service, and I'll probably end up going to two services every Sunday for awhile. It's a ton of church, but I think the back to back comparision of the services will help to either reinforce my decision to leave or show me why I need to stay.

I'll get good consistent preaching at the sister church, and I'm grateful for that at least. I hate churches where the sermons are awful.