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.

I've spent all day building a home page on my ISP and added a link on the right called "Writing Pieces". There you'll find stories I've finished or stories I'm working on. The only story up there is the main one I'm working on called Crazy Eddie. It's about a woman who comes home to find her boyfriend stuck in a pool of blood. In the story, she goes to the desert to figure it all out and I'm at the part where she comes back and is having a conversation with the cop assigned to her case. It's in total free write stage so it's like raw as blood dripping steak. I hate to edit until the story is finished and I plan to finish it this month.

I included stories in previous posts but I'll separate them out to this new home page I built soon.

Okay, so far it looks like my archives aren't disappearing along with my posts like there were earlier. I had such a good post written earlier, so let's see if I can do this again.

No movies today. This morning I just realized I've been out every night this week so today is really my only free day. When you're out every night of the week, it's amazing how messy one's apartment gets. This is my day to clean up, put things away, decompress and just generally hang out.

I turned down a free ticket to some one-woman show tonight but that was okay. One-woman shows are usually like over extended standup routines and they're either really bad or really good. Most of the time bad. I wanted to get caught up on my Oscar movie watching this weekend, but I have until Palm Sunday March 24 to watch them all, so it's not like there's any kind of rush. But I did rent Ghost World so I'm still on track.

Seeing The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring again was great. I was able to concentrate on the special effects, costumes, makeup and the characters more. It never fails but every female friend who's ever seen this movie eventually ends up saying to me, 'Who was that blonde'. Legolas is such an elf hottie and his looks appeals to such a diverse group of women. Personally, I think it's because he's a brown eyed blondie. Such a rare coloring for men, that when you see one it stops you dead in your tracks. But he does have a very pretty face. He's so angelic looking or at least what you've been taught to believe is what angels are supposed to look like. Does this mean it's every girl's dream to have sex with an angel like Jane Fonda in Barbarella? And by the way, that angel boy was a hottie too.

It's cold out and not rainy like the weather forecasters said it would be, but I'm staying in and watching TV. The best thing about daytime TV watching on Saturday is the plethora of schlocky TV movies. There's a vampire movie marathon on AMC and right now some bad 80's movie called Fright Night is on. It's a got a really bad sound track full of synthesizer music, which means they're probably using old Prophet sythesizers, an 80's company that got bought out by I think by Sony. Madonna used them on her first reconds and the Prophets were used to make the helicopter noises in Apocalypse Now.

Roddy McDowall is in this movie and he's his dapper swishy if not a little freaked out self. It's hard to believe how many movies that guy got himself cast in, isn't it? Gotta love those Hollywood connections.

Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula is on next. A guy friend loves this movie for its very fine rack action scenes with Winona Ryder and that other girl and their diaphonous nightgowns. Gary Oldman is very good in this movie, but then he's good in everything. And then there's Keannu Reeves. I'd let him bite my neck any day, he's such a hottie.

I've been fooling with my blog page trying to add better links for the archives. It's hard when you're like me and you have little or no knowledge of html, but there are some good posts in the help section on how to do things so I use those.

I had an earlier post but I lost it when I tried to publish it. A friend of mine who's a website genius, having been paid to design sites for JC Penneys, Penzoil and Michael's, told me that java script is unstable and I've been using java script to redo my archives. I think I fixed the problem but I'll have to test and find out.