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

Fire, Brimstone, and Greener Pastures for Religious InvolvementLacking the ready hazard to visit a unique congregation while stuck, carless, on campus all over break, I instead focus on a field turn on that my churchs Sunday School class took one Sunday morning die hard summer. Picture if you will a group of etiolate Presbyterian teenagers hopping into a shining church van and cruising 15 minutes south, into the poorer, blacker reaches of inner-city Memphis (where neighborhood segregation is whitewash very much the rule). Our destination was relatively near our own church, and withal worlds apart, too. Ours was the area of stately old homes with well-kept lawns a extensive 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 every bit old but far more poorly maintained homes, streets long since denuded of any trees they may once have sported. We had left our well-heeled zone of ne ighborhood watches and block clubs, choosing instead to spend our worship hours in a part of the city instead known for its special practice of law precinct and its multitudinous economic redevelopment zones. Thus did we find ourselves at the synagogue 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 paroxysm in with the rest 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 dis tributed bulletins and sociable handshakes to the rest of the group, I noticed that the front of mine read break up Day. As I looked around the modest sanctuary, I wondered what the service had in store for us. The sanctuary was bare, and the pews hard. I mentally tallied a comparison in the midst of my own church s sanctuary and this. The two, I found, were similarly austere, but with theirs tending toward items of spectral kitsch and our own tending instead towards polished brass. Both lacked stained ice in the windows. I suspected, however, that where our sanctuary was plain in token tribute to the long-dead strict 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 roof overhead does nothing against the big blanket of humid air.