Your brain operates on the edge of chaos

“Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise. . . . Hovering on the edge of chaos provides brains with their amazing capacity to process information and rapidly adapt to our ever-changing environment, but what happens if we stray either side of the boundary? The most obvious assumption would be that all of us are a short step away from mental illness.”

Fascinating article, “Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain,” by David Robson, in the June 29 2009 issue of New Scientist.

I’m neither a new scientist nor an old one, but this article makes me think about that peculiar but enjoyable state of mind one has on the edge of falling asleep, when unrelated images and ideas float in and out of the mind with astonishing rapidity. Perhaps falling asleep makes the neurons pop off at random.

Next up in the Church Visiting series

Argument doesn’t save souls
I attend a midweek morning service at Our Lady of the Snows Roman Catholic Church in Windsor, VT, where I hear a sermon about the futility of casting pearls before swine.

No miracles for you
I attend Martin Luther Chapel in Pennsauken, NJ, where I am told not to expect God to perform any miracles today.

Enter into the silence
I attend St. Thomas Greek Orthodox Church in Cherry Hill, NJ, where I am the only person in the pews for the first hour, see paedocommunion for the first time, and discover that Greek people really, really enjoy being Greek.

Don’t worry; this is in no way an ecumenical event
I attend Covenant Presbyterian Church in Cherry Hill, NJ, where I learn about an upcoming meeting among Christian and Muslim women and hear a sermon on divorce.

Joys and concerns, part three

After vacation I was able to do a little more research about the churches I had visited in Vermont. St Francis of Assisi is staffed by the missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette, of whom I had never heard, so I started there.

La Salette is a small village in France where two children saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1846. First they spotted a beautiful lady sitting on a rock, crying. She wore a rather unusual crucifix: it featured, in addition to the body of Christ, a hammer, a pincer, and a skull and crossbones. She was also wearing a yellow pinafore, “more brilliant than several suns put together.” I love that pinafore! It made me wonder, for the first time, about the possibility of fashion in heaven.

The lady stood up and gave the children a message to deliver to the world. It mostly consisted of warning them against sin and threatening them with punishment if they persisted in evil. She told them that she was trying hard to hold back her Son’s arm, but it is very heavy and she might not be able to protect them much longer. (By the way, I dislike these depictions of the Holy Dysfunctional Family.)

In addition, the Virgin predicted that the next harvest would fail, which it did (European famine in 1847 led to the death of more than one million people). Finally, she confided a secret to each child before she disappeared.

One thing that always puzzles me about Marian visions is that Mary seems to be the only unhappy person in Paradise. These visions often feature a sobbing Virgin, which seems unfair. She suffered enough during her earthly existence, and ought to be enjoying some beatific peace now.

News of the apparition spread quickly, and pilgrims began trekking to the spot. People began to report miraculous healings. In 1847, only one year later, 50,000 pilgrims celebrated the anniversary of the vision. An investigative commission was set up to look into the situation.
The children wrote down their accounts of everything they had seen and heard, including the secrets Mary had communicated, and these documents were sent to the Pope. In 1851 the vision was officially approved by the church. A sanctuary was erected at La Salette, and in 1852 the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette were established.

However, there were doubters. Some French priests and bishops denounced the vision as a hoax. The controversy became entangled in French politics, and following the ins and outs of the controversy is quite difficult unless you understand a lot more about French religious and political history than I do.

In the meantime, Melanie, one of the two children who had had the vision, grew up and became a Carmelite nun. She lived for a while in a convent in England, where she wrote down the secret given to her by the Virgin, and sent a copy to Pope Pius IX. Unfortunately, the text seems to have become lost in the Vatican archives, and has not yet been rediscovered. However, that doesn’t seem to matter, as other written versions of her secret were circulating. In fact, gradually various accounts of the secret(s) proliferated.

The secret given to the other child who had the vision, Maximin, was that England would convert to Catholicism during the final phase of the apocalypse. But the real bombshell was Melanie’s secret. After the First Vatican Council, in the late 1960s, Melanie revealed the secret once more. I guess either she expressed it more clearly than in the past, or else it was the first time a version was made public, because this time the response was more heated. She said her secret was that “Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.” As you might imagine, this was disheartening news for lots of Catholics. There ensued a kind of war of the secrets, in which people began to investigate all the stories about the secrets, as well as the various versions that had been printed over the years. (There are at least ten different editions of the secret, nine preserved and one lost in the Vatican archives.)

The Superior General of the Missionaries of La Salette wrote to the Pope about this latest publication of the secret. He noted, in a tremendous example of understatement, that “it has not pleased the Holy See that the above mentioned work has been released to the public,” and asked that every copy be withdrawn from the hands of the faithful. The Vatican agreed, and put the secret on the Index of Prohibited Books. However, recently many of the documents related to the vision were released from the Vatican Secret Archives.

When I read that, I was momentarily taken aback. Secret Archives? On the one hand, that sounds incredibly cool. On the other hand – huh?

The rationale behind the Secret Archives is actually pretty mundane. Plenty of organizations have time restrictions on when their documents may be read by the public. The Vatican has a general policy of not making any documents available until 75 years have passed.
The Archives are enormous – more than 52 miles of shelving – and the oldest document goes back to the 8th century. (By the way, there are special, more secret archives within the Secret Archive, including the Apostolic Penitentiary, which contains records of indulgences, absolutions, and excommunications. These are never released to the public, of course. It is interesting to think about old files containing the sensational confessions of kings, queens, and emperors – a kind of repository of really, really good historical gossip.

Well, I didn’t expect my first visit to a Roman Catholic church during this year of church visiting to open up such a fascinating bit of history. The story of Our Lady of La Salette seems to me a cautionary tale about endorsing visions of young children who might grow up to become troublesome adults.

Of course, belief in visions are not required of Catholics; they can believe or not, as they choose. I should mention that many notable Catholics have been devoted to Our Lady of La Salette, including Jacques Maritain and at least six popes, so even though this story doesn’t seem particularly edifying to my Protestant sensibilities, there is likely something here that I’m not getting. (A whole lot that I’m not getting, I’m sure Catholics would say.)

The fact is that you could pick out a piece of the history of any denomination that sounds just as odd as this bit of history about Our Lady of La Salette sounds to me. I’d hate to have to defend the entire history of any church group, and the Catholic Church happens to have a whole lot more history, in terms of years and numbers of adherents, than anyone else in the church business – so it makes sense that they would have more wild and colorful stories, like these Marian visions, than anyone else. But peculiarities are probably fairly evenly distributed, per capita and over time, among the entire church. Heck, last week I visited a group that believes that an angel named Moroni appeared to a nineteenth-century New Yorker and told him where to dig up golden tablets full of prophecy, and then visited a group that is responsible for the Left Behind books.

Next I tried to learn a little more about the Congregational Church.

The distinctive belief of congregational churches is that each church runs its own affairs independently, which would seem to make it difficult to make blanket statements about the denomination.

Congregationalists tend to believe that the church operated as local congregations without central authority for roughly the first thousand years of Christendom, although bishops in Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Byzantium, and Jerusalem constantly tried to bring local congregations under their influence. At some point around 1000 AD the bishop of Rome had gained control of most of the western churches, and the Patriarch of Constantinople had gained control of most of the rest of the world’s churches, according to this line of thought.

By the 16th century, though, reform movements in Europe championed by people like Martin Luther, John Hus, John Calvin, and John Wycliffe (were most men named John at that time?) gained momentum, and independent, congregational-style churches were once again, gradually, able to survive – although many of them had to operate as underground, semi-secret societies, and suffered quite a bit of persecution (from both Catholics and Protestants).

Congregationalists are very important in American history. About 35 of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower were Congregationalists fleeing persecution, and this group became known as the Pilgrim Fathers. Jonathan Edwards, often thought to be the most influential theologian in American history, was a Congregationalist (I found this surprising; I had assumed he was Presbyterian, possibly because one of the first things Neil and I did when he entered Princeton Theological Seminary was visit Jonathan Edwards’ grave in the Princeton cemetery).

In 1931 groups came together to form the Congregational Christian Church. They had various styles of worship and some differences in belief, but were united in a belief in local autonomy and rejection of creedal authority. It seems a shaky basis for union, to me – let’s unite as people who agree not to have to agree on anything!

There were a few other shifts in organization; a more conservative group of churches set up their own organization in 1948. In 1957, the Congregational Christian Church merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form a new group, the United Church of Christ.

In the United States today the United Church of Christ has a little over a million members, and about 5,500 congregations. It emphasizes freedom of individual conscience and local church autonomy. Although it doesn’t require belief in the traditional creeds, the United Church of Christ “looks to” confessions such as the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, the Heidelberg Catechism, and Luther’s Small Catechism.

The denomination gained a little bit of notoriety in 2004, when it aired (or tried to air) some commercials that showed a “bouncer” admitting a white family into a church but refusing entrance to an African American woman, a Latino man, a gay couple, and a person using a wheelchair. After this, the text on the screen read “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” There was also a commercial in which people are shown being shot out of church pews equipped with ejector seats: an African-American woman with a crying baby, two men holding hands, an Arab-American man, and a man using a walker. The tag line for that commercial was “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” (UPDATED: The commercial is on YouTube.)

I don’t remember ever seeing these commercials. They sound a little silly to me, though, because I’ve never seen a church refuse entrance to anyone (such places may very well exist, but I’ve never encountered them). It would take something awfully extreme to get churches to refuse to let someone in the door – brandishing a knife and shouting obscenities might do the trick, but short of that there’s not much you could do to get kicked out. I know of more than one urban congregation that welcomes some bad-smelling, delusional street people into their High Church liturgical services week after week, even though these people are disruptive and sometimes downright alarming. And yet every week the regular members greet them, talk to them after the service, and sit near them. (True, the nearness is precautionary, so that someone will be at hand to intervene should the visitor lose control of his or her shaky hold on reality.)

Of course, the ads were designed to illustrate churches metaphorically turning people away, but even then I’m skeptical. I’ve read that old saying about Sunday morning being the most segregated hour in America, but it doesn’t seem to be so true anymore – at least, not in the churches I’ve seen, and certainly not in the ones I’ve been visiting over the past few weeks.
And though I’m sure there are churches where openly gay couples aren’t welcome, there are also quite a few where they are more than welcome. As for churches turning away people with crying babies – most churches positively cater to young families (even if they prefer that you take noisy kids to the well-equipped nursery during the service). And refusing entrance to people who use walkers – good grief, that group forms quite a substantial bloc in most churches!

There’s one other thing about the Congregational Church that I noticed after my visit. Barack Obama was, until the big controversy over his pastor’s statements in mid-2008, a member of Trinity United Church of Christ. That church was established in 1961 (only four years after the denomination itself had been created). Trinity first met in a school gymnasium, with the goal of founding an integrated urban church – they planned to later merge with a white church, and have two co-pastors, one black and one white. However, this never happened (because of disinterest on the part of local white congregations, according to most observers). Trinity’s congregation languished, reaching a low point of about 250 members (100 of them active) in 1972.

At that time Chicago was a center for militant black religious groups such as The Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrew Israelites (many members of this group considered themselves the only authentic Jews, another surprising take on religious identity). Militant groups tended to argue that Christianity is “the white man’s religion,” and that proud black people should have no part of it. Trinity’s leaders felt that their quest to be a black church within a mainline white denomination was rather quixotic in this environment. Also, they wanted to let people know that it was okay to be both black and Christian.

The interim pastor in 1972, Rev. Reuben A. Sheares II, coined a new motto for the congregation: Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian. (Again with the church slogans! But this one is pretty interesting.) Theologian Martin Marty has weighed in on this slogan, noting that being “unashamedly black” does not mean being “anti-white.” Rather, it is a repudiation of the debilitating legacy and shame of slavery and of segregation in church and society.

Jeremiah Wright interviewed for the position of pastor on December 31, 1971, and got the job. Church historians report that he saw a main part of his job as convincing people that Christianity is not inherently racist, and not for whites only. He wanted to adopt some of the positive aspects of the Black Power message that was attracting so many adherents at the time, but at the same time reject its ideas of separation and of black superiority. The church flourished with Wright as pastor, growing to more than 8,000 members.

It’s a fascinating story. Like most white Christians, I’m not sure how a person gets from trying to show that Christianity is not inherently racist to proclaiming “God damn America” from the pulpit (the video clip that was shown repeatedly when the Jeremiah Wright story broke during the 2008 primary season). But I don’t know the whole story.

What I have been thinking about, though, while doing this little bit of poking around into the history of Our Lady of La Salette and the Congregational Church, is how weirdly often people start out with one goal in mind and end up doing something, or proclaiming something, that seems utterly at odds with their original intention. Those pious children in the French countryside and their supporters surely wished to strengthen and promote the Church, not to create a public relations nightmare for it. And a church founded with the explicit purpose of promoting racial harmony became a symbol of racial strife.

It’s almost enough to make a person believe in some version of those French literary theories about how there is a layer of meaning under each text that runs contrary to the author’s conscious intention. Every text contains its own opposite, and every sign points to its negative doppelganger.

Churches are certainly heavily loaded with signs and significations. Most of us see or hear these signs every Sunday in a sort of uncomprehending fog, partly because there is so much going on there that we just can’t take it all in. According to some theorists, we would also be absorbing the reverse messages at the same time.

Hey - applying this half-formed half-thought to myself, are my efforts to visit and understand and empathize with many strains of Christianity a sign that I’m not very tolerant?

Nah – that’s crazy talk. Couldn’t happen. I’m the most open-minded person in the world.

I just like some ideas and places more than others.

Really.

No prejudice here. Nothing to see on that score.

Let’s just move along.

Photo courtesy Flickr user cogdogblog

Joys and concerns, part two

Old South Church is only a few blocks away. Neil drops Leslie and me off in front of the church, and drives down the street to find a coffee shop where he can wait for us. Old South is a Congregational church affiliated with the United Church of Christ. Although I was confirmed in a Congregational Church, this is another one of the denominations about which I know very little, and I know I will need to look this up later.

The church bulletin, though, is quite informative. Old South Church was founded in 1768, and was the home to the first legislature of the newly formed State of Vermont in 1768. The original building must have been destroyed at some point, because the building in which we are now meeting was erected in 1798. This building is the “oldest church on its original site in continuous use as a house of worship in Vermont,” according to the bulletin.

It’s a lovely edifice, with white walls and a blue ceiling, nice old woodwork, and unusual and very beautiful stained glass windows. What makes them unusual is that the stained glass is built into shutter-like panels, so that they can be opened, as they are on this morning. Behind the stained glass windows are clear glass panes. So we have both the clear glass windows letting in the light of God, and the lovely stained glass turning our hearts to heaven – a sweet combination of the two main theories about church windows!

There is a central pulpit, and an interesting old pipe organ behind it. I wonder if it actually works, it looks so old. The church can comfortably seat about 200 people, and there are probably a little over 100 in attendance. They have a great bulletin -- very clear, informative, and easy to follow.

The pastor, Rev. Amanda Lape-Freeberg, walks around and speaks to people before the service. She greets Leslie and me, and thanks us for coming. When the service begins, with a welcome and announcements, I am surprised to see a man walking around the sanctuary handing everyone who has something to say a cordless microphone to speak into – the sanctuary isn’t very large, and this doesn’t seem to be a particularly high-tech service –why the mike? Later I learned that the services are recorded for shut-ins, and everyone who talks speaks into the microphone so that the shut-ins won’t miss anything. I came to think of this (the desire to capture everyone’s comments) as one of the truly representative aspects of this church, as will become more apparent later.

The Introit is done as a round – the congregation is divided into two groups for singing “Be Still and Know That I Am God.” It goes off amazingly well, considering that we seem to be your average group of not particularly gifted singers.

The service continues with prayers, a hymn, the confession, moment of silence, and assurance of forgiveness, the Gloria Patri, and special music (a vocalist accompanied by a pianist). Then the pastor calls the children up for the children’s sermon, which they call, in the bulletin, Simply Speaking.

There are seven or eight children, and they sit in the first pew with their backs to the congregation. Rev. Lape-Freeberg asks them to imagine how God might have created the world. She uses three props – a lamp, a water pistol, and a CD player – to illustrate things coming into being. She says “Let there be light,” and someone plugs in the lamp. She says, “Let there be water,” and a confederate sitting in the pew directly behind the children squirts them with the water pistol (amazingly, this does not cause any screaming, just some giggling). She says “Let there be music,” and someone turns on the CD player.

It goes off very well – the pastor is natural and enthusiastic, no one is frightened by the water pistol (which seems to me like the most obvious place for this to fall apart), and the children are attentive and interested. The whole thing takes about five minutes.

Children’s sermons are popular with many churchgoers, but not often with pastors. They are difficult to do well. You have to keep them short, so they must be very well planned. If you get a group of kids who all want to talk, they can go on endlessly (and unintelligibly).

But the more common problem is that children freeze in front of all those staring eyes, and refuse to respond to any of the pastor’s increasingly desperate questions – “So, can anyone think of something God gives us? Anything? Anything at all? . . . . How about food? . . . . How about parents? . . . . . Do you think God gives us friends? . . . . Can you think of anything God has given you? I’ll give you a hint . . . . . . .”

To add to the pastor’s discomfort, children’s sermons are the prop comedy of homiletics. Many adults in the congregation seem to expect the equivalent of Kids Say the Darndest Things, and eagerly look forward to amusing or heartwarming bloopers.

So, someone giving a children’s sermon has to speak and manipulate objects, while simultaneously interacting with a group of children in front of a group of adults. Plus the whole performance has to convey some sort of actual gospel message. It’s no wonder that some pastors dread them.

The sermon is titled “God the Creator.” Rev. Lape-Freeberg lets us know that she will be referring to God using masculine words and pronouns, and apologizes if that offends anyone. Her point is that most of us believe that God is neither male nor female, but we have to use language to speak about God, and sometimes it is just very awkward to do so without using gendered pronouns, and gendered terms such as “Father.”

I know plenty of good Christians are angry and/or dismissive of attempts to deal with the issue of gendered language in any way whatsoever. Some of them, of course, do believe that God is male, so any attempts to conceal His maleness through language seem to be outright efforts to emasculate Him. He is our Father, they argue, so what’s the deal with gender-neutral language?
Some people think that God is not a sexual being in any sense we can imagine, and therefore neither male nor female, but still would prefer we just stick to the traditional language, because it is customary, beautiful, and inspired. I thought the pastor’s response was reasonable – I’m sorry if my language offends you, but it’s too hard to use any other language in the context of the first chapter of Genesis. Of course, there are people who would be offended by her apology – one of the sorry lessons of pastoring is that you’re almost always bound to offend someone whenever you open your mouth.

The point of the sermon is that we should have a sense of wonder when contemplating God’s power of being able to call the world into being from nothingness.

During the offering there is a musical production – “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” performed by three men (clarinet, saxophone, vocalist) and the Director of Music on the piano. They have what jazz musicians call a train wreck near the beginning of their number, so they simply stop and begin again.

I admire their willingness to perform in front of friends and neighbors, and I truly admire and enjoy the music. You know, we are incredibly fortunate in regard to music. If we lived in any other era except for the recent present, the opportunity to hear a wide variety of great music performed by great musicians would be something quite rare – even for the wealthy and powerful. But now, because we happen to live in this amazing age, we can hear the greatest and most accomplished musicians in any genre whenever we want, wherever we happen to be, just by popping a CD into a player, or turning on a computer or MP3 player. This is a staggering thing.

However, what we can’t hear, most of the time, is ordinary people making music. To me this seems like a bit of a loss. I like hearing amateur musicians. I like it when they perform well, and I sympathize and still enjoy it when they don’t do so well. In this particular case, these men stumbled during the first few bars, recovered with grace and dignity, and played and sang for us – a gift from them to us.

The service is obviously winding down – the only part left before the benediction and final hymn, according to the bulletin, is the Joys and Concerns, which is in many churches a quick listing of good or bad events occurring to the congregation during the week. At Old South, though, as I soon realized, Joys and Concerns are in some ways the heart of the service.
The man with the microphone comes out again, so that everyone can be clearly heard and recorded. People share for at least fifteen minutes, and more than one person speaks with tears – tears of both joy and sorrow. The kinds of things they mention are the stuff of ordinary life – children going away or coming home, sickness and recovery, jobs lost or found, people going on mission trips, etc. It somehow doesn’t strike me as soppy, in spite of the occasional tears – people are just talking about their lives, and they are setting before the congregation their hopes and needs. This would be a hard thing to accomplish in a large church, but it’s one of the strengths of a small church.

The pastor asks Leslie and me where we are from when we shake hands going out the door. This church is accustomed to the occasional summer tourist.

Photo courtesy Flickr user bobw235

Joys and concerns, part one

St. Francis of Assisi
and
Old South Church
Windsor, Vermont
June 24, 2007

We vacationed in Vermont the last week of June – me, Neil, and Neil’s sister, Leslie. So this turned into another two-church Sunday. First we all attended the 9:00 mass at St. Francis of Assisi, and then Leslie and I went to the 10:30 service at Old South Church. I wasn’t able to do any preparatory study before going to these churches (no Internet connection where we were staying), so I just walked through the doors and worshipped with some Vermonters.

St. Francis of Assisi is a modern red brick building. Inside the sanctuary, folding chairs are arranged to seat about 200-250 people and there are probably at least 175 people present. There are few windows, but a large skylight admits light directly over the altar, which is a lovely, dramatic touch. An organ and piano sit to the left. The large crucifix affixed to the back wall features a fully robed, risen Christ holding up his arms in blessing. As is often the case with depictions of Christ, this one is really skinny; he would stand about 7 feet tall and weigh about 130 pounds if he came to life.

The priest, in a white robe with thin black stripes, processes up the aisle at the beginning of the service, along with two sweet young girls wearing white robes and flip-flops, and three women in ordinary clothing. I assume the man is Father Paul Belhumeur, listed on the front of the bulletin as the pastor of this church. A pianist, along with two men and two women, leads the congregational singing. I have my usual trouble finding hymns and readings in Catholic services, but I am not the only person who isn’t singing, and the other people who are not singing seem comfortable just standing there listening.

The priest reads the passage from Luke about the birth of John the Baptist, and tells us that today is the Feast of John the Baptist. He points out that this day comes immediately after the summer solstice, and that Christmas is the Sunday after the winter solstice. Thus, the yearly cycle of the sun and the ministries of John and Jesus correspond to John’s saying, “I must decrease, but he must increase.” Neat.

The priest reads a quotation from Patricia Sanchez, and says that today is a good day to reflect upon our own vocations – like John, we are called to announce Jesus. (Hey, I’m thinking about vocation on vacation!) His 12-15 minute sermon is very Christ-centered and clear.
People bring their children to the front with them when they go forward for Communion, and the priest lays hands on and blesses the children who are too young to partake, a very nice custom.

There is a closing prayer and then a closing hymn, but most people walk out in the middle of the hymn. (I later noticed an article in the parish newsletter titled “Why do some people leave Mass early?” Apparently there are Catholic churches in which large numbers of people arrive late and then exit immediately after taking Communion. The article said that this habit arose out of a misunderstanding of pre-Vatican II teaching, and that people should stay until the recessional hymn.) There is a small area in the rear of the sanctuary set up for coffee and refreshments, and I pick up a quick mini-muffin and some literature before leaving.

Photo courtesy Flickr user PhilipC.

The Legos Bible

Finally, what we've all been waiting for: the Bible illustrated in Legos.

You know you want to see this!

Five pounds of bread, Lord?

Community Gospel Chapel

Voorhees, New Jersey

June 17, 2007

Lucky indeed. Just a couple blocks from the LDS church I find the Community Gospel Chapel, which has an 11:00 “Bible Hour.” (Later, after I’m home, I realize that I never would have found this church by looking through the yellow pages, as it is not listed.)

As I enter the parking lot a little before 11:00, I wonder if perhaps the sign out front was wrong; there are only six cars in the parking lot. But I see someone entering the front doors, and I follow.Inside, framed Bible verses hang on the walls of the vestibule. Some very friendly people greet me and urge me to come down to the basement fellowship area, where people are eating. I am invited to eat with them. They are having what looks like picnic food - barbecued chicken, potato salad, and fruit salad.

This is a small but very racially balanced group (white, black, and Asian), and everyone is quite welcoming. I am introduced to just about everyone present. The food is from a church get-together at someone’s home yesterday, and it seems that everyone had a great time.

As people prepare for church, I notice that the women are donning head coverings, mostly black or white lace scarves. I inquire about this, and the woman who first greeted me says that she keeps extras for visitors, if I’d like to borrow one, and I say fine, that would be great. She’s very nice about this; she waited for me to ask, and made a point of noting that I was welcome to borrow the scarf, but certainly not required to wear it.

We go upstairs for the service, and the woman who gave me the head covering sits with me in a pew near the front. The sanctuary is small (seating about one hundred or maybe slightly fewer, I think). The walls are painted a crisp mint green, and darker green curtains hang at the sides of the clear glass windows. The platform features a center pulpit, and American and Christian flags on either side (I haven’t been keeping track of this up till now, but I suddenly realize that almost every sanctuary has two flags up front – usually the American flag and the Christian flag, but sometimes other combinations).

There is an organ on one side of the center platform, and a piano on the other, and a screen has been pulled down in the center, behind the pulpit. An overhead projector beams the words of the hymns onto the screen, but the copying is fuzzy, so the words are a little difficult to see. There is a bulletin of sorts. It is not really a program for the service, but rather a compendium of general information for the month. It tells me that Community Gospel Chapel has a Breaking of Bread service at 9:30 am, refreshment and fellowship at 10:30 am, Sunday School for children at 10:45 am, Bible Hour at 11:00 am, and then a Bible Ministry Meeting at 6:00 pm on Sundays. So I must have entered at the end of the refreshment and fellowship time. There is also a 7:30 pm Hour of Prayer every Wednesday, followed by an Elders’ Meeting, and there is a Men’s Business Meeting the third Wednesday of every month.

There doesn’t seem to be a pastor at Gospel Fellowship. Instead, speakers are listed for each Sunday. Interestingly, the speaker two weeks ago was a man named Wali Ahmad – a Middle Easterner? Today’s speaker will be a man from this congregation. In addition, two people have been named as Emblem Passers for the month. Various women of the congregation are responsible for the refreshments each Sunday.

Something about all this seems tantalizingly familiar, but I can’t place it. Gospel Chapel, Breaking of Bread, Bible Hour, Emblem Passers, the framed scripture verses, no paid ministers, no offering, head coverings – what denomination is this? I ask my hostess, but she tells me that they are not members of any denomination, just Christians. That also sounds familiar.

A black man leads us through some old-fashioned hymns; we are accompanied by an older white woman on the organ and a young black man on the piano, who seems to be the son of the song leader. Later the young man does a nice solo on the organ.

The sermon is delivered by a man who tells us that he is 75 years old and owns a plumbing business. He is wearing an American flag tie. He takes us through a large number of Bible texts – this is a sermon in the “Bible aerobics” style, where the congregation is asked to follow along by lifting a heavy Bible onto their laps and then flipping rapidly back and forth among dozens of verses. Almost everyone has brought his or her own Bible, and many are enclosed in those big leather or plastic cases that are popular with many Christians.

The almost weightless scarf on my head is astonishingly heavy; I’m constantly imagining that it has slipped off or gone awry, and reaching up to twitch it imperceptibly closer. For the first time in nearly forty years, I wish I had a bobby pin – and suddenly realize that I haven’t so much as seen a bobby pin in almost forty years. Do they still exist? They were ubiquitous in my childhood; every woman and girl had supplies at hand, in the bedroom, bathroom, and stuffed into purses. All vanished now, at least in my world.

In addition, I seem to be hyper-aware of the lacy black film on the edges of my peripheral vision, and have to consciously avoid checking the position of this apparition, which seems to shimmer and appear and disappear, depending on how my eyes are focused. The weight of this mini-hajib is much greater than I had expected, at least psychologically.

I’m sorry to report that I am not entirely sure what the point of the sermon is. It is long (about 40 minutes), and covers lots of territory. I have found this rambling style typical of non-professional preachers, so this is not surprising. At any rate, what really gives me pause is that at one point the speaker mentions that he was saved at the age of eight, and baptized by MacKintosh. He pauses at this point, and says, “Not the famous MacKintosh – I’m not that old! – but I think it was his son.” Aha – this is a Brethren church, I bet!

Early in our Christian lives Neil was very interested in the Plymouth Brethren. He even owned the complete works of John Nelson Darby, the Plymouth Brethren preacher who first came up with the doctrine of the Rapture. (The Rapture teaches that Christians will be whisked off the earth and into heaven during the end times, just before the Great Tribulation. This is the basis for the popular Left Behind series of books.) I didn’t read nearly as much theology as he did, but I absorbed a good bit of information about the Brethren.

No offering is taken - another characteristic of Brethren churches. At the end of the service I return the head scarf to the woman who lent it to me, and she urges me to come downstairs and take home some of the leftover food. I follow her downstairs, where a man is packing up the supplies, and he loads up a plastic bag with whole wheat and whole grain breads and muffins, and insists that I take it. I leave the church amid many friendly wishes and good-byes.

My impression of the group is that they are a happy, dedicated, close-knit bunch. Even though they wouldn’t agree with much of the theology of, say, the Bible Presbyterians, they share other qualities of that group, such as their determination to lead a life that is “in the world, but not of it.” (Until you’ve tried doing this, on any level, you don’t realize how difficult and yet rewarding it can be.)

In the last eight weeks I have experienced various modes of following Christ’s command to eat the bread and drink the cup. I’ve had thin round flour-and-water wafers, pieces of ordinary white bread, and pita bread. I’ve drunk wine and grape juice. I’ve taken Communion via intinction. I’ve gone up to the altar, and I’ve had the elements served to me as I sat in my pew. How many different ways can the church re-enact this sacrament? (Brethren would not use the word sacrament, by the way.) If God is trying to say something to me via the symbolism of the bread, I’m ready to listen. But what is it? All I know is, I’m driving home with five pounds of bread (five pounds, Lord?), and thinking about these very foreign and yet very familiar Christians with whom I’ve just spent the last hour.

At home, I checked the entry for Plymouth Brethren on Wikipedia. Plymouth Brethren originated not in Plymouth, England, but in Dublin, Ireland, around 1827. But they first became well known in Plymouth, and that’s why the name stuck. There are two main distinctions among Brethren, the Open Brethren and the Closed (or Exclusive) Brethren.

As you might guess from the names, Open Brethren let anyone attend their meetings, and Closed Brethren tend to have a members-only system, although the differences can seem small to an outsider. For example, Open Brethren might say it’s fine for anyone to attend a service, but outsiders cannot take Communion (which is just like plenty of other churches). A few Exclusive Brethren congregations might forbid outsiders from attending any part of their service, but others operate pretty much the same way as the Open Brethren churches in that regard. Open Brethren groups are usually autonomous, whereas Closed Brethren groups have stronger connections with each other. One of the main practical results of this is that a member who has been “disciplined” by a Closed Brethren group might find it difficult to take Communion with another Closed Brethren group, which will honor the decision of the first group and refuse to let the disciplined brother break bread with them.

Another difference is that some Open Brethren groups will cooperate with other churches; for example, they might allow their youth to participate in a youth group event at a conservative evangelical church. Closed Brethren groups are much less likely to participate in ecumenical activities. All the groups look askance on symbols, and would be unlikely to have a cross displayed in their meeting halls. They would be really, really unlikely to display a religious statue or picture. The only “decoration” that is viewed favorably is framed Bible verses, and you’ll find these in Brethren meeting rooms and homes. I’ve cross-stitched and needlepointed my share of Bible verses for just such purposes.

Like the Mormons, Brethren do not believe in a paid clergy. Instead, assemblies are governed by groups of elders (men only), and some groups even worry that the title of Elder sounds a little too much like clergy, and just call the people who make decisions “leading brothers.” Other groups have found it necessary to find someone who can be paid to take on full-time preaching and teaching duties, but even in those cases they call such men something like a “laboring brother” or “full-time worker” rather than something that sounds more churchy, such as pastor.

Brethren place tremendous emphasis on the Lord’s Supper, and celebrate it every week, usually in a special one-hour service, sometimes called the “Breaking of the Bread” or “Remembrance Service.” They typically call the bread and wine emblems. I find it quite interesting that this group, which probably places more emphasis on the Lord’s Supper in terms of time within the service devoted to it that any other group, also holds strongly to a non-sacramental view of the elements – that is, they are memorialists, who believe that the elements (or emblems) are symbols of Christ’s sacrifice and not actual conveyances of His presence.

Folks on the other side of the question (who often self-identify as believers in the Real Presence) usually think that memorialists hold a less exalted, less respectful, and just generally less worshipful view of the Lord’s Supper, but in actuality you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who emphasizes its importance more than Brethren congregations.

Remembrance Services are usually arranged much like Quaker services; there is no formal liturgy. Rather, men (women are usually not allowed to speak) will speak, quote Scripture, pray, or begin a hymn (with no musical instruments allowed) as they are moved by the Spirit. Toward the end of the hour someone will pray over the bread, break it, and begin passing it around. The quiet, prayerful congregants break off pieces and eat them individually. The same system is used for the wine. (Brethren tend to use wine rather than grape juice, but they might allow grape juice for someone who has had problems with alcohol.) I hope this congregation will allow me to observe their Breaking of Bread service at some point in the future, when my year of visiting churches is over.

The influence of the Brethren has been quite disproportionate to their tiny numbers and relatively recent arrival upon the religious scene. It’s rather difficult to estimate numbers, as most Brethren fellowships do not keep membership rolls; in fact, in many cases you can’t actually “join” a Brethren church; you just show up and fellowship, or you don’t. They are famous for support of foreign missionaries, and a surprising number of Christian leaders have Brethren roots. Then, of course, there’s that whole end times/Rapture thing, which has influenced huge swathes of the evangelical world.

I found a Plymouth Brethren discussion forum on the Internet, and poking around there I learned that they seem to be concerned about the same things as most other churches. For example, there are predictions that the group will be out of business within another twenty or thirty years, due to dwindling numbers. Roy Hill, a chronicler of Brethren history, notes that in the 1950s there were about 1800 Brethren assemblies in the United Kingdom, with around 100,000 or so attendees. By 2003 there were only about 1100 assemblies and 40,000 attendees. There’s a bit of lively discussion on the forum about why women are not allowed to speak in assembly meetings. For example: “There have been times I have been moved at a Breaking of Bread service to share a song or even just to read a scripture and I can't share because I lost the lottery in gender. Yet I get to listen to men who have no idea of what they speaking of.”

So it happened that I visited two very different types of restorationist churches on this Sunday, an LDS church and a Brethren church: one denomination big and famous, the other small and obscure (and also adamant about not being identified as a denomination). I’m becoming increasingly glad that I am visiting all these churches. This project is turning out to be more interesting than I had imagined.