My
family went to church on Sunday mornings, and Sunday evenings, and
Wednesday evenings, and on some holidays, and any other day Mom or Dad
had a Jesus jones. Our vacations were in a tent, everybody into the
station wagon, but even when we were camping, my parents always found a
church on Sundays. Little-kid me would mutter under his little-kid
breath, Jesus, even on vacation, always Jesus.
On one of those trips, when I was maybe ten, maybe 12, we went
camping near Nowhere, Montana. When we drove into some small town for
provisions, there was a church with boarded-up stained-glass windows and
2x4s barring the front door. It was closed, permanently — something I’d
never seen before, and it boggled my brain. You never saw buildings that used to be churches, because churches never went out of business. Churches were forever.
Not any more, apparently.
In the news a week or so ago, it was reported that most Americans are
no longer members of a church, synagogue or mosque. Maybe that’s what
I’m seeing in the mildly urban neighborhood where I live, where several
churches have closed.
One is simply shuttered, and has been for years.
At another, the word ‘Closed’ was painted over the sign in front, and eventually that church was renovated into office space.
A third church stood vacant for a year, and then re-opened as “a
celebration of the Chozen-ji tradition of Rinzai Zen,” which seems to be
sort of a religion but sure as hell ain’t someplace my dad would park
the station wagon and bring the kids on a vacation Sunday.
I’m writing all this because yesterday, on my daily walk around the
neighborhood, I moseyed down a street where I rarely mosey, and saw that
a church had been not merely closed but demolished. It had been a
fairly large church, too. Now it’s a pile of sticks and bricks.
Four churches down, within walking distance of my home (if I was willing to walk a few miles, which I’m not).
If you want to worship, there’s still the Methodist church behind my
apartment building, and the Unitarians a few blocks from here, and a
Baptist outpost by the park, and the African Methodist Episcopals near
the grocery store, and an unbranded but active church in the strip mall,
and other churches a few blocks on either side of that strip mall — and
that’s just what I remember, from here in my chair at home.
Of course, God also speaks 24/7 on radio and TV, everywhere across
this nation, so America certainly isn’t Godless. It’s still an endless
smorgasbord of God. Too much God, if you ask me. If there’s been a
downtick in church membership and a few fewer churches, well, Jesus
wept, but I won’t.
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