Fire, Brimstone, and Greener Pastures for Religious Involvement :: Free Essays Online

Fire, Brimstone, and Greener Pastures for Religious InvolvementLacking the ready opportunity to chat a unique congregation while stuck, carless, on campus over break, I instead focus on a field trip that my church buildings sunlight School class took one Sunday morning last summer. express if you will a group of white Presbyterian teenagers hopping into a shiny church van and cruising 15 minutes south, into the poorer, b misser reaches of inner-city Memphis (where neighborhood segregation is still genuinely much the rule). Our destination was relatively near our testify church, and yet worlds apart, too. Ours was the field of honor of stately centenarian homes with well-kept lawns along oak- and elm-lined streets, homes filled with the genteel, white urbanites of the city. A mere handful of blocks to the south, however, lay a land of equally old but far more poorly maintained homes, streets long since bare of any trees they may once have sported. We had left our homey orde r of neighborhood watches and block clubs, choosing instead to spend our worship hours in a part of the city instead kn avow for its special police precinct and its uncounted economic redevelopment zones. Thus did we find ourselves at the Tabernacle missionary Baptist Church. Venturing inside, we all noticed two things very quickly we were at once wearing entirely too much clothing to be comfortable in the sweltering heat, and entirely too little to fit in with the ataraxis of the congregants assembled. And yet we were welcomed with open arms. We had arrived, the Reverend Rogers L. Pruitt emphasized as we filed into the sanctuary, on a very special day. As he distributed bulletins and hearty handshakes to the rest of the group, I noticed that the front of mine read Fragment Day. As I looked around the modest sanctuary, I wondered what the service had in barge in for us. The sanctuary was bare, and the pews hard. I mentally tallied a comparison between my own churchs sanctuary an d this. The two, I found, were similarly austere, but with theirs tending toward items of religious kitsch and our own tending instead towards polished brass. Both lacked stained glass in the windows. I suspected, however, that where our sanctuary was plain in token tribute to the long-dead exact streak of our Calvinist tradition, theirs was bare because it could not economically be otherwise. And the lack of air conditioning Memphis summer heat is unbearable and pervasive, and a crown overhead does nothing against the big blanket of humid air.