When I moved out of home when I went to university at 18, the first thing I did was find a church. That church ended up being the one I went to for a couple of years, and the minister there even came to Melbourne to officiate my wedding.

That was a local Anglican church, and the minister was someone who had known my family for a long time. I was welcomed right away and felt at home. They needed some volunteers to help with the youth program and I put my hand up. When I was struggling for money, I worked as a cleaner for a while (that job didn’t last long as I’m not a very good cleaner!). I was immediately welcomed in to a community.

When I got married, we moved away from that church and joined another one. This wasn’t too close to home, however it was one we were welcomed. This was also an Anglican church and was the one my parents were married in! People from all over the city attended and we made some great friends.

We made the decision to move again, to the other side of the city to be closer to work and family, and ended up attending the church I grew up in, and where we were married. We attended there for a few years before moving further out, this time with small kids.

The church we started attending, it was mostly me and the kids, was also an Anglican church, and was the one my Oma had been to. While there, I was struggling with post-natal depression. The community there really wrapped its arms around me and the kids, supporting us in so many ways, from someone praying with me every week, to welcoming me and the kids to playgroup, to helping clean the house when we failed an inspection (that is a whole other story).

When my marriage broke up and I moved back with my parents, we found a new church. For a while we attended both an Anglican and Presbyterian church on alternate weeks before finding one that we all enjoyed.

This pattern continued until about 7 years ago. We moved outside the city and I couldn’t find a church that suited our needs. The kids didn’t feel comfortable in them, then my younger kid had a pretty large health issue and attending was too hard. Lockdowns in 2020 meant we were able to livestream the church we had been attending back in the city… but even that stopped. It got to the point where I had to choose between attending a church first thing on Sunday, or looking after my health and sleeping. My health won out.

Recently, I moved again, and have started attending church again.

It is an Anglican church, and really small. Best part is that it starts at 11am, so I don’t have to choose between my health/sleep and attending church. It’s also walking distance from my home, so I get to walk there each week.

For me, part of being in a church is the community, and it needs to be one I feel comfortable in. It needs to have good, solid teaching, not moralising, and it needs to have people I can talk to, along with being welcoming. I know that there are some people out there who say you should attend church no matter what, but, for me, if I really don’t feel comfortable there, then I know I won’t attend… this is one reason I don’t like the mega churches, I find them complete sensory overload! More on that later.

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So here goes. Let’s start at the beginning.

I grew up in a Christian family. My parents met at church (the story goes that mum hid dad over the head with a hymn book, I’m sure there’s more to the story, but that isn’t my story to tell). Every Sunday, we would go to church, wherever we lived.

As far as I can tell, the first church I attended was St Jude’s in Carlton, Melbourne, but I have no memory of that. Then we moved to Gellibrand, then Buchan, then my parents were missionaries in Nepal for three years before we settled in North Clayton in Melbourne, and started attending Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Oakleigh.

We were never part of a particular denomination. St Jude’s was Anglican, I know we went to a Uniting church when we lived in Buchan, then in Nepal we were part of the local church of missionaries there, which was a mix of different nationalities and backgrounds. Growing up, I was never aligned to a particular church denomination. Instead, my parents encouraged us to look for Biblical teaching, and part of this was encouraging us to read, question, and discuss the Bible and what we were reading.

We would have daily devotions from various family Bible study books and learn the stories of Jesus. There wasn’t a lot of moralising, it was more important to learn the stories and understand them. My dad told me once that they did this in the hope those stories would stay with us so we could use them as we grew and explored life. Those stories were presented in so many different ways – from reading the Bible to listening to them in church, to performing plays based on them, to singing, to other things that I can’t think of right now. The importance was on the story themselves.

Because we weren’t brought up with a lot of moralising, I didn’t understand the idea of ‘purity culture’ and what many other traditions say about the role of women.

I was also brought up in a church that had a vibrant culture of lay people, and we were encouraged to get involved from a young age. This included doing readings, prayers, welcoming people when they arrived, and being part of the music team. As a teen, I would also get preschoolers to help with lighting the candles each week. As I got older, I also taught Sunday School. There were also many women who got up to preach and had leadership roles in the community.

This upbringing had more lessons than simply the messages of faith. They taught me that I was important, that little things mattered, and that gender was no barrier to leadership. I can remember leading a service on my own for the first time when I was 18. That was a really proud moment for me.

This also taught me that faith is more than something you believe, it is something you can get involved in, something that is active and alive. It was also something personal, that it’s not just something my family did, but something for me, something personal. It’s also not something tied to a denomination or particular tradition.

As I grew, I found a personal faith. I was baptised by my own choice when I was 13 and Christianity became a hyperfocus for a while. Even after that hyperfocus died away, my faith remained. Along with faith, the church community was also an invaluable support, but more on that later.

I may have grown up in a faith community, but over time, my faith has become that, my faith. It’s not something that my parents forced on me, I could have chosen to leave once I left home, but I chose not to. My faith and the church community played a big role in my adult life, even as I was struggling through life as an undiagnosed AuDHD person.

There’s part one, keep an eye out for more.

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