Twice on Sunday...

Sunday morning, on the day when I was preparing to officiate at the late-afternoon wedding of Marianne Farrar, my dear friend of 30 years, to Gerhard Rybicki, to whom she had been engaged before she came to the USA as a young woman, and following on the heels of the superb presentation/workshop of Mark Morrison-Reed on The Perversity of Diversity at the District Assembly of the Central Midwest District of the Unitarian Universalist Association, I went to church. Twice.

9:00 AM - Central Community Church, Mattoon IL
CCC was formed in 1923 by members of a few small, separately non-viable groups of Christians who were looking for a non-denominational option in their town. For much of its existence it was reasonably successful at the numbers game and was able to build its current building in 1967.

Central Community Church, Mattoon IL; photo from the church website

In the the 1990s the congregation rather quickly began to decline so that, by the time the current minister, a man of upper middle age, was called in 2005, he was greeted on his first Sunday by just ten faithful members. The church website does not indicate what the sources of support were at that time, but somehow the tiny remnant and their minister engaged in improvement of the grounds and physical plant, including installation of audio-visual equipment. Within just a few years they had an intern minister whom they then hired as associate minister/ music minister in 2009. Also in 2009 the congregation sent mission teams to Jamaica, where they established a congregation closely linked to CCC. A truly amazing turn-around happened for CCC! And today normal Sunday attendance, from two services, is over 600.

All that is not just program notes/ filler. Rather it is important for even this casual analysis of what happens here on Sunday. In the 1980s my wife and I were members of a Community Church in the next town over. There we experienced largely traditional services with hymns accompanied by organ and piano, a choir singing mostly classical and traditional music, and offertories and recessionals played by Luwayne Arnold on the organ. The building trembled as she played! People still mostly dressed up for church. The minister was Lutheran and led the congregation through the liturgical calendar, beginning each Advent. That was my exposure to Community Church. And I left for reasons completely unrelated to the liturgical style before the 1990s decline began one town over at CCC.

I entered CCC right at 9:00 for the first service. A quick look around saw more people in jeans than anything else. I was the only person other than the minister wearing a sport jacket. Some of the older women had on nice blouses. A few of the older men wore short-sleeved sport shirts with dress slacks. But T-shirts were as much in evidence. Clearly the congregation took a casual approach to clothing.

As I looked about further, I saw that young adults were not present in any significant proportion. The largest demographic seemed to be the seniors, and then the middle-aged and high schoolers. Younger children had other classes during worship. I wondered whether young adults simply came to the second service or whether they didn't attend much, as many churches experience.

Despite the modest number of young adults, some of them in the 12-person choir, the worship style was praise band performing and leading songs that are currently popular on WIBI/ WBGL contemporary Christian radio. Each song's lyrics were projected on the large screens placed on either side of the chancel. At the beginning of each, its name and copyright date and recording artist was shown on the screen. None was older than 2005. Most newer. The choir provided backup vocals to the music minister, who played keyboard and was the lead singer, as well as providing spoken transitions between songs. There were a handful of musicians on stage with him.

Except for the energy level coming off of that style of music, the shape of the service was nothing unusual. Had hymns been swapped out for the contemporary music, it would have been a fairly traditional evangelical service. Indeed, if you check out the website, the portion where what they believe is outlined, it is a church with a solidly conservative theological stance.

Though the minister had an over-the-ear microphone and did not obviously refer to notes, he strayed little from the clear plexiglass pulpit while preaching, though he did make use of the technology-enabled freedom at a couple of other points in the service. His sermon was not stellar oratory and had no especially brilliant insights, but he was very personable, referring warmly in his sermon to members of the congregation, and being sufficiently engaging that his sermon was not a disappointment. His text was from Matthew 14, Jesus walking on the water, and he used the homophone of May Day and mayday the distress call to lace the calendar date with the story And he was very friendly in the receiving line afterward. It seems that his personality may be as much a draw as anything he would do in the pulpit.

It is impossible to guess what specifically brought the people back, or brought new people to this church. But other than the absence of young adults, this appears to be a thriving congregation now, despite, or because of, its brush with death. People of all ages present seemed to enjoy the contemporary music, not just the younger people. This first Sunday after Easter, this resurrected congregation seems very much alive.

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After passing through the greeting line, I got in my car and drove over to Charleston, where I had lived for about 15 years. In recent years, I hadn't been there much and found myself unable to find familiar landmarks. There were new buildings and absent ones, the landscaping around Old Main (the administration building of Eastern Illinois University) concealed the building's features from the street, traffic lights were on different corners, and on campus itself, the streets had been reconfigured, so I actually got lost in cul-de-sacs that used to be through streets and through streets where there had been none. Many of the old buildings were still there, but others had been added in unfamiliar configurations. I realized any exploration of the campus would need to be on foot. Too much was different from the street. So I drove toward the church whose second service I had decided to attend.

11:00 AM Salisbury Church, Charleston IL Campus
I'm not sure, but I vaguely remember this church's building as a car dealership, positioned at the furthest edge of the one corner of town that has seen no development in probably three decades. It surely looks like a car dealership. Other than a modest sign at the road, this doesn't look much different than when it was a business. The large lot serves for sufficient parking for a large crowd. The show room has been transformed into a church coffee-shop and foyer. There is an island in the middle rather like an information desk at a mall. The sales and business offices are now the classroom area. And the auto shop that took up the bulk of the building at its rear is now the sanctuary. With not a single window and walls and ceiling painted black, it feels cavernous. The quality of the lighting throughout the sanctuary is rather like the lighting in convention halls, down-lighting that provides putatively sufficient lighting from above without really lighting up the space. Here it is clear that the reason is because the stage is the focus.

Salisbury Church, Charleston IL campus; photo from the church website

Here clothing was even more casual than at CCC. The praise band consisted of 5 male musicians and 1 female singer. There was no choir here. Of the band, one was in shorts, the rest in jeans, and one wore flipflops. Polos, T-shirts, and casual short-sleeve print shirts were worn untucked. The congregation, unlike CCC, was somewhere near half young adults and no significant senior population. Before the service, the minister, a man on the younger side of middle age, made his way through the sanctuary shaking hands and speaking with newcomers and members alike.

The music was much the same as at CCC, except that as the communion elements were being passed, the singer sang a traditional hymn with arrangement for guitars and keyboards. The lighting generally seemed to make this more of a concert than the worship leaders and musicians at CCC engaged in. But it appeared to do something else to - it gave license to more emotional expression. With more hand raising, louder singing along, more body movement than at CCC. Then again, this could simply have been a function of the young adult presence in worship.

With seats all positioned to face the stage, this was not a service where there was much interaction among congregants. But the weekly custom here is to take communion. It is in the form of tiny pre-cut pieces of the bread and individual cups of grape juice. It is passed for each person whose conscience self-identifies as Christian to take bread and juice, which are then consumed by the congregation all together. The minister stressed the importance of the stripped down, bare-bones quality of the ritual. a symbolic with all that differentiates people stripped away. While I might argue with him about how this form of the communion ritual relates to this group's relationship with other Christians, this congregation sees their communion observance as a place where difference is removed.

The sermon was more skillful than at CCC. The minister's topic was related to the congregation's motto, calling on the church to think in the first person plural in relating to Christians of other churches and from the spectrum of denominations, a sermonic exhortation based in the same message that informs their practice of communion.

The website indicates that this church is theologically conservative, being originally organized in 1837 as a United Brethren congregation. Salisbury Church was Evangelical United Brethren until 1964 when they chose not to participate in the merger that resulted in the United Methodist Church. Instead, they maintained their conservative stance as a nondenominational church, whose original campus, where worship is still in the traditional style, is located in the nearby town of Hutton. The sermon demonstrated that this church is not exclusive in its intentions toward other Christians.

As at CCC, the minister appears to consciously engage with newcomer and member alike. After an altar call which was issued as an opportunity to come forward and pray with someone, not as an emotional call to people fearing for their salvation, the last words out of the minister's mouth were, "Let's go... Be the church!" An exhortation that is over the door of the main exit, a motto for all to see as they leave.

It is amazing that two services that are in many ways so similar are so different as a function of the design of the space and the personal style of the minister. Both were fairly conservative places, but in some ways, the conservatism seemed less obtrusive in the less traditional space, even as it was not forceful in the churchy space of CCC.

It would be interesting to know whether the later service at CCC and the earlier service at Salisbury Church had any significant presence of young adults. Is this merely a function of young adult circadian rhythms? Or is it in the culture and style of the church both in services and in its evangelistic approach?