IS a drive by church attendance okay?

 Today I am on vacaction but being that I keep walking past churches everywhere I go I still have that friendly reminder from God that he exists, even when I am on vacation.

Today, we went to the grand masonic lodge here in Philaldelphia. Being that I don't have a mouse in my pocket, we means my girlfriend and I. Anyhow we got to the temple about 30 minutes before the tour so we needed time to kill. There was a beautiful church next door and my girlfriend wanted to go in. I have always had issue with this, For me, church is a place of worship, a place to get a message from God and see if you can apply it to the rest of your day or even take nuggets that you can apply for the rest of your life. It just seems wrong to me to go into church for amusement, to get a good visual, like it's a tourist attraction or something. But, I bit my tongue and went in anyways.

When we got in the church there was a sermon going on. This pastor was talking about serving the congregation both as a pastor and as an elder. We went into the curch and sat down and listened to the rest of his sermon before we went to the masonic hall. Boy, talk about two different worlds, in the baptist church there were a few hundred people and 98% of them were black, including the pastor. In the masonic temple they have the pcitures of all of the grandmasters in the history of that particular temple and every single one of them was white, and male of course. No women are allowed as members. Lots of statues of women, even naked ones at that, but no female members or black grandmasters or latino grandmasters or asian grandmasters. Ok, I'm starting to get off point here.

Ok, back on point. The point was that I felt a bit uncomfortable doing a drive by church visist. I mean, is it right to just stop by for a few minutes? It seems like if you are going to attend a church service you should go for the whole thing or don't go at all. But, perhaps not, one time at my home church a pastor of another church came in half way through the service and stayed for the remainder. Granted. he was there to talk business with the pastor about using our space for his congregation but he still came in late.

Back to the sermon. It was nice to go to a church that varies drastically from mine. My church has about 18 people who attend every week on average. My church has no regular black attendees and my church is full of very old people and a hand ful of middle aged or younger folks. And we are not charismatic at all. The pastor has a lot of energy, but there's not a lot of verbal response from our church. No postive exclamations after the pastor says something inspiring. If I were as vocal in my church as the people were at this one people might look at me funny. It was certianly inspiring though. The pastor made a lot of great points one of them being that we ought not gossip about our pastors. He was talking about people who complain about their pastors week in and week out and still go. He was saying that if you don't like your pastor and you don't value them as a leader then don't argue with them get up and go find yourself a pastor that can lead you. He also talked about knowing when it's your time to step up and be an elder and be there for the younger people in your congreagation. It felt great to do a drive by but once again I must ask if that's okay or if we need to repsect the church and what it is there for and show up on time and for the whole thing?