Emily Martin Cochran

One of the best blessings of 2021 was finding a church community that fits us in our current stage of life. While I’ve been a Christian for most of my life, my faith and my theological understandings have evolved as I’ve gotten older (which is part of getting older and growing up!). Part of my spiritual growth in 2021 was recognizing that my beliefs and understanding of the gospel now line up best with the United Methodist Church.

I grew up in a small, country Southern Baptist church, and it was an integral part of my childhood and teenage years. If the church doors were open, we were there for Sunday school, worship service, Bible study, Vacation Bible School, revivals, homecomings, and many other events I’m forgetting. Not going to church was not an option in my family unless you were sick.

My faith was kindled there – I made a profession of faith and was baptized when I was 8. I learned many good things from that church that I value now, including Bible literacy, hospitality, cooking for a crowd, and the importance of service to the community and your neighbors.

However, I never felt like I had a true community there, and that feeling grew in my teenage and young adult years. One reason for that feeling was that there were very few people around my age who attended regularly; after college, I was the only person my age there. Secondly, I was a part of the Baptist Collegiate Ministry at William and Mary, and I had a completely different experience there than I had growing up. I had never before been part of a small group model. We had “family groups” that met, and we discussed our faith and scripture, gave support, and encouraged each other in what was happening in our lives. There was also a “big-tent” mentality – all backgrounds and opinions were welcome. The church I grew up in, while friendly, suffered from the same condition that I think a lot of small-town Southern churches have: people not truly showing vulnerability in their spiritual lives. Sure, we prayed for people when they faced physical health challenges, but people didn’t talk about their mental or emotional health because that would be “airing dirty laundry in public.” It was difficult to know how people were doing, truly, because most people never quite let that wall down.

So after college graduation, when I moved back to Halifax, I knew I needed to find a different church with more people and more opportunities, so I landed on another church (actually where I had gone to preschool). There weren’t very many people my age there, but there were opportunities to serve, and those opportunities brought me so much joy and kept me plenty involved in the life of the church. I joined the choir, played handbells, served on the youth council, directed Vacation Bible School, and helped with Christmas activities. I was sad when I moved to Columbia to pursue my Ph.D. because it meant leaving so many people I cared for deeply. I still try to visit when I’m back in Virginia.

In 2016 when I moved to Columbia, I was nervous about finding a church in grad school. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find one as I had noticed that traits of Christian nationalism and white nationalism were creeping into the evangelical church world that I knew. It seemed like the churches in the Southern Baptist Convention and other evangelical denominations wanted to fight a culture war in which I wanted no part. As Black Lives Matter was becoming more prominent as a movement and after the Charleston massacre in 2015, I heard too many defenses of racism and Confederate symbols in my hometown from people I went to church with (at both churches). When the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, you would have thought the horseman of the apocalypse had arrived given how much evangelical churches panicked. And of course, Donald Trump had begun his run for president, and I was shocked to see people I knew to be faithful Christians throw their support behind him instead of one of the other Republican candidates. In short, I didn’t recognize the gospel or Jesus coming from this world. I had real misgivings about the Church in America, or at least the evangelical church, at that point. I felt like it was driving more people away rather than seeking reconciliation and ecumenical unity.

Despite my misgivings, I decided I would at least visit a church. I googled churches around my neighborhood and discovered Midtown Fellowship. I looked around their website, and its history as a church plant in downtown Columbia intrigued me. I took a look at some of the past sermons and noticed that the teaching was even-handed and thoughtful. I visited one Sunday and could not believe how many people there were in their twenties there! I enjoyed the sermon and the contemporary style of worship. In that politically-charged fall of 2016, I was glad to see encouragement for Christians to take voting and civic engagement seriously from the pulpit. Thankfully, there were no political endorsements for either party or any encouragement to vote based on a single issue.

After a few Sundays, I decided to sign-up for a lifegroup (the small group ministry). I was placed into a group of women who not only were my age, but some lived in my neighborhood, and some were going through grad school, too. I felt the same sense of community and compassion that first lifegroup meeting that I had at BCM in college. I settled into Columbia much more easily due to my lifegroup and Midtown. They supported me when my car got stolen, through my grandfather’s illness and death, frustrating moments of my grad program, and other struggles. They are the reason I met Garner – a friend in my lifegroup set us up at the unofficial Christmas house party! 

Fast forward to 2020, Garner and I had grand plans to dig into a church community in Rome. While we were long-distance, Garner attended a church (when he wasn’t visiting me) that had a good amount of young people, so we had hoped that once we were married in the summer of 2020, we could jump right in and get very involved in their small group ministry and other ministries. However, the pandemic dashed those plans. One small group that Garner had been part of folded right before the pandemic and then another one folded a few months into the pandemic. Worship services went online (with a couple of outdoor services over the summer). We very much had to grieve the plans that we had. That church did decide to start meeting in person at the beginning of the fall, but we were still uncomfortable with that decision, especially since transmission rates stayed fairly high in our area. We opted to stay online, but, sadly, we felt isolated from the church. We still wanted to meet and get to know people, but because we weren’t comfortable with meeting in person, opportunities were not there. We also recognized there was not much institutional support for the small group ministry, which struck us as odd because the church talked so much about the importance of community.

This church’s theology is also reformed and rather conservative on social issues like race and gender. This initially wasn’t a pressing issue for us. We felt we could potentially be a part of the church if they embraced a “big-tent” philosophy. However, for this church (and this particular denomination), there is an emphasis on orthodox belief. There were several sermons we heard in the summer and fall of 2020 that didn’t sit well with us. There didn’t seem to be room for people to have differing opinions on secondary or tertiary theological issues, and there was much excusing of systemic discrimination as individual sin issues. I believe that Jesus came to give justice to the poor, bind up the hearts of the brokenhearted, and set the captives free, and this extends to the marginalized groups in America. I believe Christians have the responsibility to live compassionately and seek justice for these groups.

However, the tipping point came in January 2021 when the pastor could not condemn the insurrection at the Capitol in his remarks on the subject. This deeply grieved us, and we knew we needed to consider finding community somewhere else because we knew we could not contribute positively there due to such a mismatch between our theologies. 

We were aware of Rome First UMC (Garner had attended the traditional service once when he first moved to Rome), and we noted an art installation of wooden rainbow butterflies on the front lawn with a sign that said: “New Life for All” along with Black Lives Matter signs, which encouraged us to know that it was a congregation that would be welcoming to everyone. 

At this point, Rome First was still doing online worship, so we began tuning in on Sunday mornings. One of the first services we watched included a message from the bishop of the Northwest Georgia conference condemning the insurrection, the deliberate misinformation that led to it, and the invocation of Christian nationalism present at the Capitol. She also reminded parishioners that the same grace God gave to us, we should extend to others because our Christian ministry is one of reconciliation. It was a relief to hear a message from a church that was not parroting Christian nationalism or burying their head in the sand about the state of our nation and blaming our societal problems on individual “sin issues.”

So when Rome First began meeting in person in the spring of last year with COVID precautions in place, the congregation was so welcoming to us (probably because we are relatively “young,” but more people reached out to us than we expected). I was asked about my interests and invited to join in the music ministry, which I have – I joined the chancel choir and the handbell choir this past fall, and it’s been a balm to my soul to sing and make music with others again.

When we thought about joining the church, we knew that the congregation operated in a fairly traditional way. Most of the congregational communities center around the Sunday School model. We knew that was not quite the right fit for us, and we were excited when the pastor floated the idea of “house church,” which is the life group model we loved in Columbia. We talked with the pastor, and he gave his blessing and connected us with a few other adults in their twenties and thirties. Over the last few months, we’ve been developing a new lifegroup. We’re still growing and figuring out how to best live in community with each other, but we are excited that we might be able to grow and be a safe, welcoming place for those who want community in Rome but may not feel comfortable with a church for whatever reason.

I am incredibly grateful to have finally, after almost two years of living here, found a church that gives me a sense of community. I am also really glad that we decided to try out the UMC church again. While I appreciate the good things I learned in the Southern Baptist churches I grew up in, I feel so much more at peace and secure in my faith and my faith community now that I’m in a place that is a purposeful “big tent.” I know that not every member of Rome First shares the same opinions and viewpoints, but I think that is a strength. 

I’m learning more about Methodist history, and I am enjoying the current sermon series, “Who are United Methodists?” In short, United Methodists are people of grace, people of prayer, people of action, and people who love. Over the rest of this year, I hope to grow as a person of grace, prayer, action, and compassion.