7 churches (and a former church) in Kansas

Dodge City

First Presbyterian Dodge City sanctuary

Cross wall at the back of the sanctuary

Kansas country church

Sacred Heart in Dodge City

Church of the Nazarene in Dodge City

Hesston Mennonite Church

Catholic church in western Kansas

and a former church

when it was a church

and one more: St Cornelius Episcopal Church 

13 Churches we only looked at (and some signs we saw) in Texas

Not exactly subliminal suggestion in West Texas

Even on weekdays when we can't worship with a church, we're looking at churches. Texas is a huge state, and while we were there, we saw a lot of them. 

St Joseph Catholic Church, San Antonio

St Joseph Catholic Church, San Antonio

San Fernando Cathedral, San Antonio 

Remains of the Alamo defenders in San Fernando Cathedral

St Mary's Catholic Church, San Antonio

St Martin's Lutheran Church, Austin

St Martin's Lutheran Church, Austin

First Presbyterian Church, San Antonio

Sunset Canyon Church, Dripping Springs (with "church" sign, which we've so far only seen in Texas)

Sunset Canyon Church, Dripping Springs

First United Methodist Church, McKinney

First United Methodist Church, McKinney

The Chapel at Chestnut Square

Dean with friends at the Chapel at Chestnut Square

First Assembly of God in West Texas

First Assembly of God sign, West Texas

Hill Country Bible Church, Dripping Springs

St Mary's Catholic Church, Windthorst

First United Methodist Church, Vashti

Wayside Chapel, San Antonio

Billboard in San Antonio

Miracle Movie Churches: Saint Ralph (2004)

In the Universal 1941 musical, "Hellzapoppin'", there's a movie studio called Miracle Studios ("If it's a good picture, it's a Miracle!") and "Three Amigos" uses the same joke. So many things need to come together to make a good movie that every one is a bit of a miracle, making this small film, 2004's "Saint Ralph," a bit of a miracle. But as usual, we aren't here to judge the movie but rather the churches and clergy in the film.

"Saint Ralph" is all about the making of a miracle. It also features two priests who take very different approaches to miracles.

Ralph is a 15 year old student at a parochial school in Canada in the early 1950’s. His father died in World War II, and his mother is very ill. When he his mother slips into a coma, Ralph is told it will take a miracle to save her. Ralph sets his mind (and heart) on making the miracle which will lead to lead to his mother’s healing. As he has just begun cross country running, he decides that his miracle will be winning the Boston Marathon.

Ralph’s Religion teacher is also his cross country coach, Father George. Ralph asks about the requirements for a miracle, and Father George tells him that three things are required: faith, purity and prayer. He is told that faith means you must truly believe even though this sometimes this makes no logical sense (the great Catholic philosophers and theologians such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas would disagree). He is told that in prayer he must be in direct communication with God (unlike Mother Teresa who spoke of the dark night of the soul or ever Christ Himself who cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”). Purity is described as being completely free of sin. So Ralph purses not only his running skills but also these three pious elements.

Father Fitzpatrick, the school’s administrator, opposes Ralph’s pursuit of a miracle. Just as Jesus scoffed at those who pursued signs and wonders, he forbids Ralph from pursuing his miracle. His goal for his students is for them to be content with their lot in life, and he doesn’t want Ralph to have to deal with what he sees as the inevitable discouragement of striving for something better, especially the miraculous.

This tension between those who pursue and those who discourage the pursuit of the miraculous is very real in churches. But you might not be surprised to find that the movie leans toward the miraculous -- because that is so much more cinematic. As for the priests, neither really manages to strike the Biblical balance of trusting God’s sovereignty seen in both the natural course of events and in the unexpected surprises we call miracles.

The film does illustrate one other often overlooked bonus of church life: the merit of Mass (or any worship service, really) as a date. Because Ralph is caught in an embarrassing, public act of “self-abuse” (as the film calls it), the father of the girl he is interested in refuses to allow his daughter out on a date with Ralph. But they can meet at church, which they do during Holy Week. They even hold hands during Mass. In my book bars and ChristianMingle.com will never hold a candle to that place where they light candles -- when it comes to meeting that special someone.

-- Dean 

Funny Movie Churches -- Keeping the Faith (2000)

The comedy "Keeping the Faith" seems to answer the question no one had been asking: "What if Starsky and Hutch had taken vows in religious orders rather than becoming cops?" Like the S & H TV show and inevitable movie adaptation, two hip young guys try to change the world for the better -- in "Starsky and Hutch," with guns and badges, and in "Keeping the Faith," with clerical collars and yarmulkes. 

           

Brian (Edward Norton) and Jake (Ben Stiller) grew up buddies along with their friend Anna (Jenna Elfman). Then Anna moved away and Brian became a priest and Jake became a Rabbi, but the two guys remained good friends.

As always, I'm here to talk about the churches in the movies, not the movies themselves. I'm also, as a Gentile, going to exempt myself from talking about Jake's temple; except for two things.

1) Jake's bringing in a Gospel choir to help the congregational singing is very cool.

2) Jake dating and having affairs with a succession of women in his congregation is not cool.

So let's look at Father Brian's church with pros and cons. When we first see Brian in the church, it's a rather sad sight. He's an awkward screw-up, creating mayhem with the incense dispenser. But with a passing time montage we see the church grow, with great crowds coming to hear Brian preach. It's unclear whether the growth is due to people being attracted to the cool, contemporary spin Father Brian brings to his ministry or whether it's because women think he's dreamy or a combination of the two. (A concurrent montage shows the same growth in Jake's temple.)

Brian talks about his calling to the priesthood. His mother thought she couldn't have children and she prayed for God to provide. She saw Brian as a gift from God and was thrilled when he decided to go into the ministry (a story that has a Hannah and Samuel feel to it).

We see Brian taking the confession of a young Hispanic man, and I like several things about the way he handles the situation. Brian has learned enough Spanish to use it in his ministry. He's comfortable as a priest talking with the young man about sexual temptation, reminding him that his feelings are natural but need to be channeled in appropriate directions.

One of the major plot lines is Brian's unexpected temptation when Anna re-enters his life, and he feels attracted to her but talks through his feelings and priestly obligations with an older priest (played by film director Miles Foreman), which is healthy. It's really important for people in ministry to have other people who will hold them accountable.

I also like that Brian works with Jake on community projects. In the film, they're planning a karaoke-focused senior center. Though the world doesn't necessarily need more karaoke, it's good to see congregations working together to meet community needs. I believe this can be done on many projects even when congregations have doctrinal differences.

My one big problem with Father Brian is his abhorrent theology, at least as demonstrated in the one sermon we hear.  He talks about what a good thing it is that so many people are coming to church because it shows they have faith. He then makes a distinction between faith and religion. "Faith is a feeling, a hunch, that there is something bigger connecting everything together and that feeling is God." There is a definite pantheistic ring to that idea, rather than Christian. God is not a feeling or a hunch but our Creator, who desires to have a loving relationship with us, as a loving Father with His children.

I do appreciate the desire of the makers of this film to show members of the clergy as real people who pursue God's work for the betterment of others rather than themselves. I just wish Father Brian, in his rush to be relevant in the 21st century, hadn't left behind the best thing about the legacy of the church, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

-- Dean

A Not so Epic Encounter

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Mindy had an awkward incident with a staff member last Sunday. It might not have been worth mentioning, but it does raise issues of our goals and methodology for this project, so...this post.

Usually we try to seat in the back of the sanctuary. We like to be inconspicuous and able to observe all that's going on. And for our statistics at the end of the article we include our count of attendance, so we often need a vantage point to do that counting. Last Sunday at the start of the service, the back rows were roped off, so we took seats toward the front. But a family was looking for seats together, so we moved to an alcove area.

Midway through the service, Mindy walked to the back of the sanctuary to get a count. Later, she noticed an usher was taking his own count, so she went out to the lobby to ask him about it (as we've done a time or two before at other churches). She gave him our card and asked him how many people he'd counted. A staff member joined them before he could answer and asked Mindy what she was doing. Mindy fumbled for a card and the usher offered his. The staff member took both and said she was concerned about worship being disrupted and about the privacy of their congregants (I don't see what an attendance count has to do with privacy, but...). Mindy agreed and explained that we, too, wanted only good for the Church. The staff member gave Mindy her e-mail address and said that she could provide any information we needed. Mindy returned to the auditorium. After the sermon and the baptism, this staff member made an announcement about small groups.

The encounter threw Mindy off for the rest of the service. She felt like she'd been reprimanded by the vice principal. It's odd, too, because in all our other interactions with folks in the church, including a brief conversation with the senior pastor, I sensed a desire to be open and genuine about the ministry of the church.

As Christians, Mindy and I want this blog to do good things for the church as a whole, not harm. The two concerns the staff member addressed are concerns of ours:

·        We don't want to violate the privacy of people worshiping, especially in a church with a number of "seekers" (people exploring church and faith). We avoid using photos of congregants' faces, though we do sometimes take photos of pastors and the worship team, since they've chosen to be in front of a group of people. We avoid using full names of people we meet while visiting, except when we have explicit permission (usually friends of ours).

·        We also try not to disturb worship. We do, at times, take pictures during the service but we try to keep that to a bare minimum. We have a quiet camera. We usually snap one quick photo and hope it comes out rather than standing up and taking a series of shots. That's one of the reasons the churches we visit look so empty in pictures -- the photos are taken before or after the service.

I'm sure there was another concern that wasn't explicitly raised. I'm sure the staff member was concerned about our motives for blogging about the church. We live in a culture full of agendas and outrage. For all the staff member knew, Mindy was from another church jealous of the success of Epic and anxious to take it down a few pegs, or Mindy might have been someone who views religion as a disease of the culture that needs to be cured.

We live in a culture where a school board may decide to change "Christmas Break" to "Winter Break," and someone will tweet about it, and a talk show host will talk about it, and all of a sudden some poor school secretary receives dozens of screaming phone calls denouncing her "secular humanism."

So I understand the staff member's desire to control the information that goes out about the church. Sadly, it's just not possible unless every cell phone (i.e. camera and audio recorder) of every person is confiscated -- and then you'd have a whole new P.R. problem.

We don't ever want to use this blog to attack a church. We try to be as positive as possible when we write about churches, but there are times when we hear or see something we don't think is so great. When that happens, we recognize we are visiting on only one Sunday and have a very tiny glimpse of the life of the church. But sometimes we still feel obligated to report on negative things. When we do so, we try to report in as straightforward a manner as possible with a minimum of editorializing.

So we'd like to ask you, kind readers, to please never take anything we write as an issue for outrage. We may have got it wrong. And even if we accurately depict something bad, please don't tweet about how horrible some church is, because you (and we) really don't know that church or the people in it.

I'm sure we'll make mistakes as we continue this church visiting pilgrimage, but as we move forward together, let's all try to live out the words of I Peter 4:8: "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins."

-- Dean (and Mindy)

City Churches in April

Recently, while researching for the Movie Churches section of this blog, I watched 1984's "Footloose". The preacher in the film sermonizes on the moral superiority of small towns. There are many people who feel this way. I'm not sure where this idea comes from, because it sure doesn't come from Scripture.

Perhaps the reasoning behind this thinking is that God made nature and people made buildings, ergo: Rural > Urban because there are more buildings and fewer trees in the city. They also might think that cities have lots of evil stuff: bars, strip clubs, universities teaching humanism and art galleries with naked pictures; whereas small towns just have food markets, one room school houses and, of course, churches. People in cities are too sophisticated for church but everyone in small towns goes to church.

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark's book "The Churching of America" says the theory of small towns being more churched than cities is hooey. What do you need for a church? If I'm not mistaken, people are necessary. And cities have more people than small towns. Big cities are more likely to have a variety of churches and often have a greater percentage of church attendees in their population.

More importantly, the Bible seems to take a different view of cities. Jesus spent time in small towns and the country, but He also spent time with the cities. He cared about cities. In Luke 19:41, Jesus weeps for Jerusalem upon approaching the city.  Sure, Sodom and Gomorrah don't come out well in Scripture, but the first sin is in a garden, and the first murder is out on the farm. Heaven, on the other hand, is describe as a city -- the New Jerusalem.

God loves the city, and through the month of April, we'll be seeing what God is doing in four different churches in four different cities.

-- Dean    

Oakhurst Evangelical Free Church

In general, worship at Evangelical Free Churches is rather sedate. Amidst the congregation at the 10:00 am worship service at the Free Church in Oakhurst there were some who worshiped with hands raised, including the senior pastor who raised a single hand. But in the back of the sanctuary, one man danced with abandon. And when each song ended he clapped loudly when others seemed to feel worshipful quiet was the appropriate response.

We came to visit this particular church because it's the current church home of Kevin Lockwood, a former youth group student (his wife, Sarah, had graduated from high school before we met her). After the service I asked Kevin about the man in the back of the sanctuary. Apparently, three years ago he was a recipient of the church's outreach to the homeless. At that time he was without work as well. Now not only is the man working but he's buying a home and has regained part time custody of his son. Speaks well of the church's ministry of outreach.

I recognized the pastor during worship because he had introduced himself beforehand. I guess he was curious about strangers taking pictures of the outside and inside of his church. Pastor Bob has been at the church 23 years. When he came to the church, he was a truck driver. He'd pastored before, but it had been a bad experience and he had left ministry for a time. He came to worship at Oakhurst and was eventually asked to serve as senior pastor.

The worship service opened with the hymn, "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," a reminder that Easter was just a couple of weeks away. The youth pastor led the worship in a mixture of traditional hymns and contemporary choruses (what's called "blended" in the ecclesiological literature). Along with the two guitars and piano to accompany the singing there was a beat box and a hand drum (bigger than a bongo). I enjoyed the worship and was especially happy with the concluding chorus of "Shout to the Lord", a song that often leads me to sing louder than I probably should.

During the greeting time, we met the couple sitting in front of us, who had led the youth ministry of the church a couple of decades ago -- before the church hired their first full time youth minister (there have been three or four since then). Sometimes on these onetime church visits, I meet people I'd like to get to know, but I know I won't. Guess that's one of the many things heaven is for.

Kevin and Sarah's kids joined a good group of children who sang along and motioned to musical accompaniment. The great thing about children's performances in church is no one is worried about getting it just right. In fact, the things that go a little wrong just make it better. After they sang, the kids left for their worship time.

A little later, the overhead had a message to dismiss the kids to children's church. (The overhead also let us know when it was time to be seated after the greeting time. We didn't get a picture of the slide with helpful arrows pointing down in case we weren't sure where our chairs were.)

The sermon was Part 8 in a series, "God's Design for Relationships," and the scripture used was Ephesians 5: 23 - 33. The topic was marriage. Over the last couple of decades, when the sermon topic is marriage, I've come to expect a disclaimer addressed to single people in the congregation, assuring them that since marriage was an image of Christ and His church, they would benefit from the sermon as well. But there was no such disclaimer. Later in the sermon there was an address to singles, advising them what to look for in a spouse. But the call for some to singlehood that Jesus taught in Matthew 19 and Paul in I Corinthians 7 wasn't mentioned. Perhaps it was in other weeks of the series.

Pastor Bob encouraged the encouraged the congregation to catch up on the rest of the series from CDs that were available or from streaming on the church website. He said this showed the internet was good for something. Good to know.

The theme of the sermon was how the husband was to serve his wife and by providing her he would find satisfaction in life. (He referred both to the saying, "Happy wife, happy life" and "If momma ain't happy, nobody's happy".)  He said the "buck stops" at the husband who is the coach, the CEO of the family.

From the sermon notes: "The man who's willing to trust Christ to create that kind of atmosphere and that kind of love in his home will be the satisfying lover of his wife and children." But the pastor pointed out said that marriage and the family were currently under attack from the world ("every day a liberal judge issues a ruling against marriage"). Again from the notes: "Matthew 16:18, 'the gates of hell will not overpower' that home" and "God's promise still remains for the wife who's willing to be subject to her own husband, and for the husband who loves his wife as Christ loves the church!"

He said that, sadly, many marriages that don't follow these teachings "start as ideal, become an ordeal and then people look for a new deal." He said instead we should "Do it once, and do it right!" I wondered how those words would sound to the widowed or especially to those who were divorced.

At the conclusion of the service we heard the happy voices of older children outside the sanctuary door. We went downstairs to the nursery and children's department to pick up Kevin and Sarah's younger kids. They DID NOT want to leave, which as it should be for kids in church.

Stats:

Service Length: 1 hour 32 minutes

Sermon Length: 46 minutes

Visitor Treatment: We were recognized as visitors in the lobby; there was a greeting time during worship, and visitors were encouraged to get a welcome folder from ushers. The packets contained a tract, information about the church, a pen and a visitor card to fill out and drop in the offering later in the service

Our Rough Count: 165

Probable Ushers' Count: 190

Snacks: Coffee and tea right inside the front door of the building

Songs: Christ the Lord is Risen Today,

            Lead me to the Cross

            Cornerstone

            There is a Fountain

         You are my King

         Shout to the Lord

Miles to place:  259 miles

Total California Miles: 6,060 miles