How to Find a Church (New 2025)

Welcome to No Compromised Radio Ministry. My name's Mikey Averill. Had a little pause there, coffee pause, and I think that's what they call coffee breaks in Germany. Used to go to Germany once a year, haven't been since 2017, the 500th anniversary of the 95 theses.

Theses.

He wrote one thesis after another until it turned into theses. Mikey Averill here, No Compromised Radio Ministry. Mike at nocompromisedradio .com. Thanks for all your encouragement over the years. I think this is year 15 or 16 or something like that.

Started doing some videos of the podcast playing on Wednesday. What do you think about this as a format? What do you think this as a format? Sunday's sermon is played on Monday on No Compromised Radio.

Wednesday's a new show, Friday's rerun. Do I need to do Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday? I don't know how many of you listen. I mean, if you've listened for 16 years to me every day, there's something seriously wrong with you.

It's like Lance Armstrong said of long-distance bicyclists. Think Pat Abendroth, think Eric Mason, think Mike Abendroth. If you're a long-distance bicyclist or long-distance runner or rower or long-distance paddleboarder, they do that across the Monterey Bay, you're running from something.

It's either that or psychotropics for me. So it's kind of like my dog who's no longer around. She was a Jack Russell Terrier, a parson Jack, not the short-legged Jack. Those are fine, not my style. Long-legged Jack Russell, parson Jack, because I'm a parson.

She pretty much had to be worked out as well or she would be all uptight. She was running from something and running to something that is for certain. What was I gonna say today on the show?

I don't know.

We're just talking about running from things. Oh, what to do for shows. Just trying to think about what to do in the future. I don't really mind doing three new shows a week, but just playing around. I mean, I played around with Duplex Gratia, the new radio show and never went anywhere.

So that's the way it goes. Law Gospel of Primer is online, amazon .com. I think I asked before, but I've misplaced the information. I need someone with some skills to take a Word doc and turn it into an e-book.

So if you can do that, I don't really have money to give you. I'll mention you by name on the show. I've got Sexual Fidelity, Cancer's Not Your Shepherd, Discovering Romans, Law Gospel, Jesus and Cancer.

I'd love to have those as e-books. I just don't know really what to do. And someone said they would help me with branding. They sent me an email and I haven't forgotten about you right now,.

But I forgot about you the last two months.

Sorry.

How to Find a Church When You Are Traveling or Moving

If you wanna find churches, I think we're on two lists and only two, church finders. Founders has us on, thanks to Peter Sammons. Did you know founders is gonna start like schools and seminaries and mission training and who knows what?

I saw the curriculum that Peter's put together, looked great, looks great. And we're on nine marks, I think. Because if you go to a, I don't know, you're out of town, you're on vacation and you need to find a new church, what do you do?

You could type in nine marks or founders. That would be probably the best thing to do. But those just kind of narrow things down. If I was out of town and I needed to find a church and I didn't have those two websites, I would probably type in reform churches near me.

I would look at, in no particular order, OPC churches, Orthodox Presbyterian churches, Presbyterian churches of America. And I would look for reform Baptist churches. And this might surprise you, this might make people mad at me.

But if I'm out in the middle of nowhere and I can't find something, Christ-centered, redemptive, historical, law, gospel, expositional, that kind of thing, I would probably go to Calvary Chapel. Now, let me get back to that.

You can also try to find a U, United Reformed Church, URC church. My friend Dan Borvin is URC. I think Lee Irons, Santa Clarita is URC. And certainly Chris Gordon is URC. So I'd look for those things.

Maybe you could look at Four Cs. Those are more popular here in New England, although there's not that many of them. Four Cs is the congregational church that is conservative. Anything that might say UCC, United Congregational Church, those would be the liberal ones.

Maybe there's an exception here or there. Baptist, I don't think I'd try to find a GARB Church, General Association of Regular Baptists. I don't think I would go for American Baptist Church, ABC. Of course, there's exceptions to all these.

I don't think I'd do Baptist General Conference. Jesus Generally Dying versus Particularly Dying. Southern Baptist Church, you might find somebody good that's gone to Southern Seminary that knows what they're doing, or maybe not.

What else would I look for? Okay, back to the Calvary Chapel. At least if I went to Calvary Chapel, and you might say, Mike, you got saved and first went to Calvary Chapel and stuff like that. Okay, that's true.

But at least there would be some songs about Jesus. Most churches you're probably gonna get that. And there'd be blue lights and fog machines. In some Calvary chapels, I think that's true. I don't know why backlighting is blue or backlighting is purple these days with kind of the wood theme, unfinished wood sideways.

I mean, compared to what we have here at Bethlehem Bible Church that might be an upgrade, but certainly that's old school. I don't know what the new backdrop would be. I don't know, marble, Bitcoin symbols.

And you'd probably, at a Calvary Chapel, have some nice people there. Some of the most nicest, some of the most nicest, some of the nicest people in evangelical churches are at Calvary Chapel. Now, it might be superficial California nice, but that's all right.

Hey, I'm just visiting on a Sunday. And the pastor would probably, in a casual fashion, walk through a passage of the Bible verse by verse. So at least I would be exposed to a chapter of the Bible. Now, maybe you've got a really long chapter like Luke 9.

Maybe they split it up. Some Calvary Chapel split it up. Some smaller epistles, our epistles in general, they'll just do a chapter. So all that to say, if you're visiting and you're out of town, I guess you're out of town, you would be visiting.

If you're out of town sometime, or you're visiting relatives and you're not at your home church, how do you find a church? By the way, that used to be the number one question I would receive when people actually emailed the show.

Actually, at the time I had to have Ray Johnson, he's with the Lord now, I had to have Ray Johnson answer it because he loved NoCo and I thought, well, he needs to be on the team. And instead of just buying equipment, which he did, and he's the guy, by the way, that said, don't ever ask for money.

You need something within reason, I'll buy it. So he bought all the original equipment, paid for ads for us to be on Wretched Radio. That's how I ended up hosting Wretched for quite a, maybe 20, 25 times or something like that.

Todd and I are still friends. We still email each other, to text rather. We texted this week. I said, how are you? And he said, well, everything's fine, you know, dealing, except, you know, dealing with sin.

It's like the pastoral stuff,.

Your own sin, everybody else's sin. And then when we were on the radio show daily here, actual real radio, that's why it's called No Compromised Radio, not No Compromised Podcast, he paid for that too.

So now he's with the Lord and very, very thankful for Ray and his testimony. So back to the point, when Ray used to answer questions, it was, how do I find a church if I'm moving to a new area? To this day, there are still people that I know, really neat people that move without knowing for certain there's a great church and what that great church is and for certain that they're going to go there.

Now, once in a while, there can be exceptions and you say, you know what, I'm in the military and I get transferred. Okay, fine. Sometimes you can say to yourself, well, I'm going to go somewhere, I've already scoped out two churches, listen to the sermons.

When I went there to check some real estate, I met with the two pastors, listen to both live on different Sundays.

Or Saturday nights at four, six, eight,.

Just kidding, I've been there on a Sunday. And so I don't know which one to choose. We're going to go to each five more times and then choose. Okay, there are exceptions. But some people still move thinking, you know what, there's some churches there that believe in inerrancy, that believe that Jesus, you know, is the God-man that was raised from the dead, the eternal son took on flesh and dwelt among us.

And that's kind of all they really think about. You know, maybe a good youth program. Still, I know people, people that have moved away from Bethlehem Bible Church without really thinking through the issues.

They think they're in a town that's big enough that will certainly have good Bible teaching. Now, I'm not going to say we're the only ones in Worcester, Massachusetts. By the way, you see what we're known for now that on the latest social media deal where we're a transgender sanctuary city, the people that were on there saying how we're a sanctuary city for transgenders, that made the news across the country.

Of course, all my friends sent me those links. Thanks. There are not that many churches in the Worcester area that would be reformed or Christ-centered or understanding the law of gospel, verse by verse, high view of God's word, not pragmatic, not sinker-sensitive.

However you want to, I mean, and there's a lot of people here, a lot of colleges, a lot of folks. And so just because there's a town a certain size, and of course it's harder in New England, right? If there's a town of 200 ,000 in New England and a town of 200 ,000 in Georgia, there's probably a lot more churches in Georgia, although there are probably many of them kind of Southern Baptist-y or fundamentalist-y.

We just make up words as we go, right? That's just, that's all we do.

You want answers?

I do.

I want the truth. That's what I want. So we have to be careful when you go someplace. But if you do go someplace and you're saying, you know what, I'm on vacation, out of town. I didn't pick this for my home church.

We're gonna go to church tomorrow. And as I've said many, many times, you dads especially, but moms, if you're traveling with your children or by yourself, if you're a Christian people, you don't say Saturday night, are we going to church tomorrow?

Now we're gonna have an ice storm here this weekend. Okay, that's a real question. Are we going to go to church? When I mean church, I don't mean the building. Yeah, that's what we say. But are we going to go worship on Sunday?

Are we gonna go to the meeting and worship on Sunday? Shorthand, are we going to go to the meeting? We're gonna go to the meeting house to worship. Okay, forget how we parse all that. I understand, I've been to a few seminaries in my life.

When I like to brag, which I like to brag all the time, but I just hit the hit that thing. When you hit your knee, when you're talking about bragging, you know, that's a sign from God. Don't do that. But when I wouldn't want to brag, I'd say, well, I've been to several seminaries and taught us several.

That doesn't mean anything. All that means is I understand what you're saying. And back to the point here, you like on Thursday night, last night in real time, I would say to my wife and my daughter's in town.

Matter of fact, my daughter, Gracie's in town and she's sick. She'd been to about 10 doctors. And if you want to pray for Gracie, that would be really, really great. Grace Avendroth, you can pray for her.

But I would say to Gracie and to Kim, what do we have going on tomorrow? What are you doing tomorrow? We're trying to figure out the car situation, especially when Gracie's in town to see some of the doctors in Boston.

That means we have two cars, three people. And what are you gonna do tomorrow night? So I think that's tonight is, you know, last night we talked about it and tonight I'm gonna go home, probably work on my sermon a little bit, ride the recumbent bike in the garage, it'll be cold.

And my daughter and my wife are going to see a surf movie that my son's friend filmed. They're going down to Rhode Island to see the surf movie. I think if you've seen one surf movie, you've seen them all, but we just talk about that.

So on Saturday night, you don't say, shall we go tomorrow? Okay, there's a four o 'clock plane flight and you can't do it. Okay, but just regularly, normally, generally, 90 of the time, Lee, well, where are we gonna go?

Not should we go? Are we going?

But where?

Dads and moms, Christians that are single, that's your mentality. Where am I going? The need for the Lord's day. Worship, means of grace, law and gospel. Reminding us about things we already know that's true, but we need to be reminded again, that self-righteousness is bad.

We need Christ's righteousness. Why did Luther preach justification? My faith alone, every single Sunday, because we forget it every single week. Standing before God based on our justification, not on our sanctification.

A desire to live holy lives because of guilt, grace and now gratitude. Holy spirit dwelling in us. Why do we do good works? To honor God, to give him thanks, to adorn the gospel, to be good neighbors, love other people, all those things.

So where do you go? Well, you can look. And so you need to look up. You could go Founders. You can go Nine Marks, OPC, PCA, Reform Baptist. Again, not in any of those orders. URC, Calvary Chapel, Southern Baptist.

I'm not going to go to a Methodist church unless it's a free Methodist church. That would be evangelical. And that'd be kind of fun to go do. I'm not going to go to a Lutheran church unless it's Missouri Senate or Wisconsin Senate.

And if that was the only game in town, I don't mean church is a game, but you know what I'm saying? That would be fun to go do. I could go do that. If you say it's Presbyterian Church USA, not going to do it because while it'd be interesting, I don't want to waste worship on that.

We used to go to California for the Shepherds Conference. And on Saturday, I would take a group of guys. It used to be a big group of guys from five to maybe 15. And we'd drive down to Saddleback, to Paddleback.

And isn't it interesting? The new pastor there's even worse than the last, in my opinion. And so we'd go down and we'd hear Rick Warren and we would see special music, Celine Dion. I remember one time special music where the lady who was singing had such a low cut top that we couldn't really look, right?

Our guys, I remember Dave Jeffries just looking down on the ground because he didn't want to look and look at a lady with such a low cut top and tight leather pants. I think singing a Celine Dion song.

You know, maybe there was a general deist kind of song, but that's how I remember it. And we would just go, you know what? We wanted to go see what was happening at Saddleback, the largest church in America at the time, but we didn't want to waste a Sunday morning worship service.

So we went on the Saturday. I don't think Saturday services are good. That's another sermon as well, but we didn't want to waste it, right? If I wanted to go to Elevate Church, I wouldn't go on a Sunday morning unless it was the eight o 'clock service.

And I went and then I'd go to a regular service, a means of grace preaching, ordinary means church later. I just noticed there's a church down in Connecticut that I know some of the people there and they meet at another church at 2 .30 in the afternoon.

So if you want to waste a Sunday morning with a bad church, fine, but make sure there's another church to go to so you can really worship. So I'm just talking generally today about churches and finding churches.

So we've done this in the past, but I want to keep going. I would go to the website after I did a search, a DuckDuckGo search, and then I would go to the website. And when I go to the website, and you've heard me say this before, but I will say it again in case this is a one-off for some people.

I'd go to the website and I would click on sermons. I mean, I browse the front page of the website a little bit. Hopefully we'll have our new website up soon.

I saw it.

It's nice, simple. And I would look at the sermons. And what I'm looking for is exposition or titles of sermons. Maybe there's a five-week topical textual series that's really good, the five solas, right?

Or tulip or something like that. But typically I'd say, oh, that guy's in Luke. The pastor's in Luke, Luke six for a few weeks, Luke seven for a few weeks, Luke nine for a lot of weeks. And that would help me understand, okay, just because you do verse-by-verse teaching doesn't mean every problem's solved, homiletically, preaching-wise and all that.

But it's a good start, right? You're just working through passages. That means the pastor's not gonna be afraid of teaching certain things. If it's in the text, it's in the text. And if it's in the text, it's good for us.

And God wants us to know it. I mean, sometimes they can be too myopic. Word studies, this word's used 27 times. If your pastor says that all the time, this word means such and such, and it's used 27 times.

Now, once in a while, you can say that. I mean, James, Jet Tour, how many times does he say brothers? He says brothers over and over and over because this is a third use. This is law as a guide. This is not test of saving faith because otherwise he wouldn't keep saying brothers, my beloved brothers at times.

But anyway, going verse-by-verse. I'm on the website still. I then go to leadership and I can see then their ecclesiology, and it'll say pastor and deacons. Then I think, okay, that's Baptist. It'll say pastor, deacons.

Then I can think, okay, and deaconesses. It will say elders and deacons. It'll say elders, deacons, and deaconesses. And then I know kind of, oh, okay, well, I personally, Mike Abenroth, believe elders and deacons, no such thing as a deaconess.

I know why people do it. At least I think I know why still wouldn't do it. There are qualifications for deacon wives in 1 Timothy 3, that is for certain, but not in office. So I see then where the pastor went to school, if he went to school at all, what seminary.

And then I see how many years ago did he go to that seminary? So if you said he went to Southern Seminary in the early 90s, I'd go, huh, that's kind of interesting because that's when it was really liberal.

Is he still liberal? No, it doesn't really seem like it because I can see his blog and other things. Or if you said, well, Mike Abenroth went to Master Seminary in the 90s. And so shall I expect kind of a typical TMS of the 90s?

Now, maybe the new TMS is a little different. I'm far removed now, but probably, or it could be my own mistake. Just heavy law. How do you call yourself a Christian? Lots of word studies, going too slow.

But since I did go in the 90s, you also might say, well, I'm gonna look at some of the newer stuff because hopefully he's matured. Hopefully his progress is made evident to all. Hopefully since he's been studying the Bible, he's more godly.

I mean, I won't blame Master Seminary for this at all. I'm sure I scolded people and that's on me. That's 100 on me. The tenor and tone of how I preached. Some theological nuances aside, that's on me.

So do you think when Mike is 65 and has had cancer a couple times, 16 days in the hospital, almost dies of COVID, studying the scriptures, spirit of God dwelling in him, do you think he's going to be a little bit different than the 90s?

I hope so. I hope so. So as I look, it doesn't mean you have to have an old pastor. I like old pastors. Well, I like young ones too, but it's like, okay, I'm just looking when he went to seminary and where did he go to seminary?

Right, and I can kind of track it out a little bit. He went to Dallas Seminary in the 80s. Well, he's gonna be kind of a non-lordship, anti-lordship guy. He'll be thinking about lordship salvation and non-lordship salvation and anti-lordship salvation more along the Arminian lines.

I think all three of those kind of think about sanctification from an Arminian perspective. Of course, there are differences here or there. We could argue that, but if he's Dallas guy, I'm thinking he's a non-lordship guy who thinks through the Arminian lens of dealing in sanctification versus Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 35 about sanctification and what about good works and all that other stuff.

So I'm just looking and I'm seeing what they do. I'm seeing worship services. The other day, I looked at a church here that was local and it said, you'll be out of here in 50 minutes and maybe 55 or something.

I'm just thinking, I don't say that. Communion services are longer. We have communion once a month here. Maybe we should do it every week, but for now, and that's how it's been for 35, 40 years here at church, once a week, and I'll just work through.

I'll see what's going on with articles. I'll see what's going on with links. I'll see if the pastor's published anything. And then I'll click on a sermon, scrub ahead to 20 minutes in, forget the intro.

And I just wanna see the guy, see how he looks. I don't mean if he's handsome or not, what he wears, although sometimes I think people just underdress. I'll see if he's wearing a Geneva gown, right? And then I'll just start listening.

And I mainly listen for this. Is he preaching the text? Is he underneath the text authority? And how is he coming across? Is he for me, the congregant, or is he against me? That is to say, is he wanting my best?

Is he trying to encourage me along? Is he acting like a father? By the way, fathers rebuke, fathers reprove, fathers get after. I have a friend, at least we used to be friends, and he didn't like it that I kept saying, don't scold people online, because 1 2 Timothy 4, verses two and following talk about preaching the word, and part of preaching was reprove, rebuke, exhort.

Here, this is sin, you do the sin, and exhort, come alongside, parakaleo. But that's not, you can be nice, and you can be a human father and reprove and rebuke without being a jerk, without being a aggro scolder.

Without being perceived as, I'm just against you. We are under shepherds. Jesus is for the people in many ways. Think about it. Mediator, advocate, prophet, priest, king, head, captain, savior, justifier, sanctifier, glorifier, redeemer, reconciler.

Making propitiation for. Jesus is for his people, is the pastor for his people. Try to encourage, yes, point out sin, call them to repentance. Bruise reeds, smoldering wicks, yes. If you preach the Bible well, but you're a scolder, and you don't care about reeds, and you'll just bruise them, I don't wanna listen.

That's why I said earlier, I regularly would go to a Calvary Chapel if I can't find a church. You can go to OPC churches and find scolders. PCA, maybe not as much, especially half of them have that kind of Tim Keller feminine thing going on.

Reformed Baptist, lots of scolders, but then you go up to Exeter, New Hampshire to D. Scott Meadows and think, he's kind, he's for me. He talks about sin, he's direct, he'll deal with repentance, but he's for me because he's echoing the sentiments of the Father and the Son.

And when I say sentiments, I don't mean God has passions, but I'm just speaking analogically here. So how do I find a church? Those are some of the ways I find a church. And I hope that's been helpful.

And by the way, if you're at a church and your pastor's teaching you the Bible, and he's for you, and he's not scolding you, would you thank him? Say, I praise God for you. Would you pray for him? I'm sure you do.

Thanks for listening. My name's Mike Gabenroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry.