we found a church (or it found us)

I have just moved from Florida to the Silicon Valley area for a couple of months. Finding a community of Christian faith to be part of is very important to our family. For a couple of weeks, we were attending a Lutheran Church near our house. But something amazing happened.

Before I started working, we visited a homeschool support group picnic. As I was explaining to a homeschool mom that I was going to start working for a company that makes laser for refractive eye surgery, she pointed out that there was another homeschool mom whose husband worked on something like that too. It turned out to be the same company. The next week, I met Jonathan.

Our families have a lot in common. We both have three children. Both our wives use Sonlight curriculum for homeschool. He invited me to his church (Grace Community Covenant Church) in Palo Alto. The church is almost all Asian Americans of various varieties. There are many families and children. We were struck by how hospitable the church seems to be. The people who attend this church seems genuinely happy to be there and everyone seems to help out in different ways.

My family have not attended typical Sunday service for three years. We have been a part of a house church in Orlando. It was quite hard to just sit on the pew and listen. I felt tempted to raise my hand and voiced my opinion or questions during the sermon. More on the house church experience in another post perhaps.

One of the reasons why we started attending GCCC is because Jonathan told me that the church's leadership really have a concern for building up a genuine community. This coming Monday, I am invited to visit a leadership meeting to relate my experience on the housechurch. I am still thinking about what to say. I hope the Holy Spirit will guide my thought in the next few days.