Finding a Church at Seminary

One of the things that new seminary students and families who move to seminary face is the search for a new church.    It can be an intimidating task.  Here in Saint Louis  there are twelve PCA churches with a Saint Louis address, and at least that many more in the greater Saint Louis area.  Add to that some good churches in other denominations, and the search for a church home can be daunting. In fact, there are students here who have been here a year and have not yet settled on a church.


We didn't want to be in that state of flux for that long.  We decided to do a few things to facilitate finding a good church home.  The first thing we did was decide that we were not going to look for a church with good scholarships for their seminary students.  If we happened to land at a church that did offer financial support for seminary students, great.  But that was certainly not the goal.  Secondly, because I am under care of the James River Presbytery, we wanted to stay in the PCA.  With those two things in mind, we began to talk with people that have lived here for awhile.  We told them about the type of church that we were looking for and visited churches based on their suggestions.  Finally, we decided that we would land when we found a church that fit, be it the first or twenty-first that we visited, provided that the church had the marks of a true church.


It would have been easy for us to be dissatisfied and to keep looking for a church that was exactly like the church we left, but you will almost never find that.  When we visited Covenant Presbyterian Church we found God-honoring worship and we heard the Gospel clearly preached.  Each member of the church was assigned to an elder to facilitate pastoral care.  The people were welcoming.  We were invited to a cook-out for seminary students, and the kids liked the nursery.  We decided to make Covenant our church home for the next four years, and have been blessed immensely during our first few months there.  We sincerely miss our church at home, and we are gladly keeping our full membership there, but we praise God that he has given us such a warm and wonderful body of believers with whom we can worship while here in St. Louis.

"Cor meum tibi offero, Domine, prompte et sincere."