Let’s hear it for summer, and the pleasures of leaving those pesky home chores for a while to take in some kind of elsewhere, to see how others struggle with their chores—or maybe loll on their front stoops. Just about wherever you go that’s really away, you’ll draw something from the change, see something with a new twist.
Depending on what kind of existence we’re accustomed to, each of us takes a journey with a particular slant in our vision. When a pastor’s wife hits the road, for instance, she’s apt to notice churches more than, say, fire stations or post offices. It’s how we roll.
It would be imprudent of me to speak for all pastors’ wives, and let’s not forget the growing number of pastors’ husbands, but I’m guessing that most of us, wherever we go, are pretty observant when it comes to houses of worship and other signs of religious life.
And sometimes just an actual sign along a busy road is good enough. But I get ahead of myself here.
Last July at around this time, out in Wyoming, I was taking in panoramas like this:
Except in a handful of designated spots where they congregated to feel awe, people seemed beside the point. And so, frankly, did any buildings. Nature was clearly in charge of the vast and rugged splendor, perhaps working in tandem with an Almighty. This, to me, remains one of life’s great mysteries; a place like Wyoming really paints it anew.
This summer’s road trip with my son, through a swath of the Northeast, yielded some nice rolling farmland in Ohio and long stretches of forest punctuated by small towns in central New York. For a dose of the spectacular, we peered down into the gorges that are right in the middle of the Cornell campus.
Churches there were aplenty, too, of course, in all shapes and sizes. The ones on the college campuses we visited had a kind of hushed quality, with the green lawns around them tranquil.
But somehow it was just a jumble of signs at an intersection – a place definitely lacking in natural beauty—that sticks with me the most.
My eye went first to the “Family Church” sign, which seemed to be just floating there, looking so thoroughly generic. There was no actual building anywhere around that resembled a church. I know this kind of church-anywhere phenomenon has become more common, with congregations springing up in all kinds of places. So, fine. But can this actually be the name of a distinct denomination? You’ve got to admit that “Family Church” sounds a tad, well, redundant—something like “Place-for-Learning School” or “Fish Aquarium.” Aren’t they all supposed to be for the whole family? Well, maybe not the ones on the green college campuses so much, but still.
When I landed on this website, http://fcintl.org/mission/, I found that information was spare:
Family Church International officially launched in early 2013. Our goal is to bring the Word of God to the northeast U.S. and the world.
According to the Bible, God has a blessed plan for your life.
Now, besides questioning whether there can be a pre-ordained road map for anyone’s life, I was wondering about the “international” part. It’s not so easy to see where else in the world these churches are located, but the site definitely shows a hotbed of activity in western Pennsylvania and New York. By now it was pretty clear: I was in Evangelical territory, right outside the Wegman’s Supermarket.
i could go into the derivation of the word “Evangelical” and how it’s apparently been taken over in recent years by a certain segment of the populace with a distinct political agenda. But I’m not really qualified to comment on all of that, just picking up tidbits now and again. I can say, however, that when I was gazing at that sign, the national news had just been featuring a Pew Research survey that found how Evangelicals were in fact going strongly for Trump, even though his embrace of the Bible is not among his most salient qualities. And additionally, how the percentage of the vote that will be Evangelical is likely to be about identical to the percentage of the vote that will be No-Religion—or “None.” It’s tempting to see those two segments cancelling each other out, but one never knows.
Going back to the picture, you’ll see that another faith, one that goes back well before 2013, is part of the scene, too. It turns out that the “Family Church” is actually located right in the “The Amish Buggy.” But wait, the store doesn’t actually sell buggies at all, but furniture that, according to that website, can fulfill “all your decorating needs.” Or maybe it used to, and now the Evangelicals took over, I’m not sure.
What a hodge-podge is our American life, as seen from the roads anyway, when it comes to religion and most anything else, too. And I’m not even including the other sign, the one way over on the left: “Need A New Mattress?” Since it wasn’t clear where to go for that, and we didn’t really need one anyway, we continued on, in our car that was not a buggy– mother and son, 2/5 of a family, trying to keep our own plan for at least that evening, in our own little world, as blessed as possible.
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