Church Crashing Adventures: Presbyterian

I was raised Plymouth Brethren, and Kennett was raised (new order, modern) Mennonite, so when he suggested we do random Sunday morning church crashing, I wasn't sure at first.  I am not, after all, looking for a church to go to.  

   I am more and more solidly of the mind that church is what we are, not a place we go, a human organization, or something we do.  What "church" is to other people isn't what it is to me, so it was odd to contemplate this little escapade.  Kennett says the Mennonite church experience for him was being told a huge body of stories, both bible ones, and instructive Mennonite parables as well.  He increasingly found that the lack of education, and the disinterest in knowing the historical context and centuries old journey of the Mennonite movement bothered him.  He found it particularly troubling that nobody much seemed to know or care anything about the Reformation, or Martin Luther, or even Menno Simmons.

   What he said to me that really summed it up was "It's all stories.  And I've heard all the stories.  Over and over.  I need something more."  Inquiring mind wants to know.

   He let me pick and I thought "Well, there's a Presbyterian church right nearby, and I learned a bit about Scotland and the Presbyterian church while teaching history, so maybe  I'll pick that one."

   One thing is sure: I was surely raised to disrespect what other churches did, and taught that my church wasn't just a church.  It wasn't a church at all.  It was nothing less than What Everyone Else Was Supposed To Be Doing, But Wasn't.  (Not correctly, anyway.  Clearly) 

   So I'm trained to not be able to accept much of what I'm likely to see in another church.  And my own church experience was quite damaging to my soul, and was far from good for my relationship with God, or, in fact, my own emotional health.  So for me it was a real adventure that Kennett was proposing we do.

I'm apt to be all negative and nothing but (as evidenced by the song that came to me about twelve hours before actually going), so I'm going to start with being slightly positive.  The church was huge.  Tall and pointy and made of stones, like a big rock rocket.  I liked that.  It had stained glass and arches everywhere, and darkly finished wooden pews all laid out in a big arch.  It had huge gold-painted organ pipes in the centre of the rear of the church, and mysterious little stands and basins and things.  The church I was raised in was plainer than a workspace in an office, designed to look completely unlike a church.  So the decor of St. Anders of Stittsville was fun for me to look at.

   Also, once we'd plucked up our courages and walked in the big doors (there was a complete silence, and not a person going in or out which made us wonder if church was really going to happen), there was a greeter lady who gave us a photocopied handout that had our script.  She was very nice, shook our hands and everything, and when we came in, people were sitting around.  And we'd hardly sat down when the minister came out of nowhere, and shook both of our hands, too.  Now that's how to make new people feel welcome.

   Another thing that I liked, mostly because it surprised me, was that though everything and everyone there looked very, very old, including the hymnal, one of the four selected hymns we sang this morning from that dusty, battered old hymnal was by Amy Grant.  A hymn written in 1984 seemed so jarringly current, that it was pretty cool.  The way it was sung didn't sound any different from the ones from the 1700s, though.

   What I liked best was that various work to collect food for the local poor (even if they didn't show up up at church!) and poor people in Africa was part of the service, and the pastor prayed for people with depression, and for people who will surely die today, and for a bunch of other real-world realities like that.  I've not heard much of that.  Prayer for depression, actually called "depression" flat out like that? Not used to that.  A guy at our church used to pray for "those who are ill at ease."  I think he meant they were unhappy.  Not sure.  Mostly we only prayed for old people and their purely physical ailments.  So I liked that bit.

There.  That was my best attempt at positive.  Now I will be more myself: the church could have comfortably seated two hundred people.  There were somewhere between twenty and thirty there, though, scattered at random over the pew area in ones and twos.  And Kennett and I, in our forties, felt really, really young there.  Grey hair was a rarity.  It was all gleaming white cottonball fluff on sweet old ladies, as far as the eye could see.  The pastor himself was only slightly older than Kennett and I were, though.  There were kids, though, as they materialized apparently from nowhere when it was time for them to leave and go have a special kid's thing.  They seemed to be from two families.  Five of them, all told.

   A choir of eight people, including the greeter from the local Wal-Mart, filed in once the large ceremonial, not-to-be-opened bible had been paraded in and placed very ceremonially on a ceremonial stand where it sat unused for the proceedings (the pastor used an iPad instead), and was just as ceremoniously paraded back out again by a stiff-spined guy within maybe ten years of our age who clearly took his job very seriously.  Like Marine pallbearers at a funeral.

   In some churches, there is an altar or something that forms the focal point of everything in the room.  In this church, though, at the very back was the giant organ, with the choir in front of that, and the minister's thrones and lectern in front of that.  (there was a very ornate, tall, gothic-looking wooden throne in the middle, with a smaller one on each side of it.  Our speaker today made use of the two little ones at various points, and never once sat upon the big one in the middle, so I took him to be the mere Steward of Gondor, with the Throne reserved for perhaps a Bishop/Presbyter or something.)

   With such splendiforous gold organ pipes, and microphones here and there, and a choir and minister in robes, I expected some kind of majestic, deafening Hallelujah Chorus to happen.  Actually if you sang, it became hard to hear the organ or the choir much at all.  They were incredibly distant, tentative and quiet.  I wasn't aware of any attempts at vocal harmonies.  Unison singing, as best as I could hear.  The sweet old lady behind me had on an eye-watering amount of lilac toilet water, and for her part, she sang all the songs firmly, with just the one note.  I'm not sure which note it was, but it never once sounded like the correct note.  Had to hand it to her from trying, though.  She sang the heck out of that one note, and never missed a word.  I couldn't hear the organ over her at all.

   The proceedings started off with the ceremonial bible being paraded in, and then church began.  For about fifteen minutes, church business was discussed, including that this tiny congregation had decided there needed to be another four elders.  The procedure for voting (you could vote for just one, or for all four, or for as many as you'd like of the four) was explained, with a few attempted jokes tossed in and examples of the ballots waved about.  Details about future church events and money issues and so on were also discussed.  Then we were told to quiet our minds for worship.

   For a Plymouth Brethren person, "worship" always means communion, but like most churches, there was none to be had this morning.  The first hymn was "Tell Me the Old, Old Story."  It really set the tone.  The sermon was on "The Radical Word," and the whole service presented basically the same message: "radical means old.  There is nothing wrong with tradition.  There is much pressure to change, to do things differently.  There is no reason to do that."  It seemed obvious that this church had pretty much no one under the age of sixty there, so it clearly meant what it said.  It was willing to not "serve" potential congregants from the Baby Boom generation on, and is quite willing to gradually die out, so long as it doesn't have to change.  It's most of the way there.  The extra-curricular events advertised in the photocopy this month are pretty much all quilting-related.  Oh, and  Elsie McTavish displaying her beeswax artwork.  Nothing wrong with that.  I can't imagine it would have been "for me," were I a teenager there, though.  But there wasn't a single teen there, so I guess they're just doing what works for them.

   I was listening through a particularly specific "lens," to mix metaphors.  I was listening to "see" how much of the time was spent up in talking about them, and how much about the Lord Jesus Christ, or God.  The service didn't manage to quite avoid mentioning Jesus Christ and God the Father and the Holy Spirit a few times in passing, but it was pretty much 95% about being Presbyterian correctly, and 5% stuff that directly addressed God.  Being Presbyterian correctly was about hearing proper teaching, about learning, about studying the bible and doctrine.  The photocopied handout script with our "lines" in it, said "Being able to read the Bible faithfully and intelligent is an important academic skill and commitment."  Hard not to be snarky about a lapse like that missing "ly," given the sentence it was in.  The whole focus was very much about not changing.  It was very much "the old, old story."  But they never said what the old, old story actually was.

   The ideas that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that he came to earth, lived a life, suffered and died a death, resurrected, and has saved us from Hell were not mentioned in any way.  It was all a contrast between keeping on keeping on, and the folly of change.  So, to this jaded Plymouth Brethren person, it was like they kept saying "it's terribly important to study the bible," and I waited in vain to hear anything actually from the bible, apart from a couple of cherry-picked verses about the importance of "the scriptures" and how bad things get when people change.  I counted, and the name "Jesus Christ" was mentioned three times, the Holy Spirit referred to once, and the cross, heaven and hell not once in the hour. 

   Now that's a pretty narrow lens to listen through, I realize.  But it was hard not to be judgmental about this.  (My mother was more Brethren than I, her first question being, once she knew I'd gone to this church so foreign to our own church culture, "Did he mention the blood?")
  The people were nice, they were in solidarity about the importance of the bible and proper, decent Christian living, but service really, really didn't ever get into the bible or Christian living at all.  The hymns and prayers presented the importance of worship without actually doing it. The hymns were mostly about us not being worthy to worship, rather than actually addressing God Himself directly at any point, let alone worshipping Him.  In particular, the pastor several times while "praying," spoke about God in the third person, which is, I always think, a dead giveaway that you're talking about, rather than to Him, and therefore aren't really praying, but are lecturing on the importance of this or that. 

   In many ways, it was very, very different from a Plymouth Brethren church service.  One thing I definitely recognized as familiar, though: the room was full of old people, disgruntled with "where this world is going," stubbornly refusing to engage with it and hating the very idea of change.  The message was "Do Presbyterianism/the bible/life right.  Never mind what this world is doing.  Do what's always been done.  You know.  Like we do it." 

   I'm afraid the experience cemented my view of church as being a commercial for something, rather than an enacting of the thing itself.  That it "sells" Christianity to Christians, without actually talking about Christ, about who he was and what he did, about him living and dying or anything like that, very much at all.

   But I'm pretty jaded.