A TALE OF TWO CHURCHES

In Part I of my posts on "WHY I GO TO CHURCH," I mentioned attending two church services on Sundays.  The reality is I attend two different Episcopal churches on any given Sunday. The first is the Episcopal church my family attends, Christ Episcopal Church in Yankton, South Dakota and the second church I attend is thirteen hundred miles away in New York City, Trinity Wall Street, which offers videos of all of its worship services and much more.

CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH



I've already talked about how we came to be members of this small congregation.  Christ Church as we call it, has about one hundred members.  If forty of them show up on any given  service, it's a good day.  Christ Church, like many Episcopal churches in this country is a historical church.  It is the first church to be established in the Dakota Territory back in 1861 and has been conducting regular worship service in its current edifice since 1882.   Check out its website: http://christepiscopalchurchyankton.com/

The church building has been well cared for and its historical and original architecture well maintained. It is particularly known for its unique, eclectic stained glass windows.  The structure was made from locally queried chalkstone which was then covered with locally made red bricks.  The interior has a ceiling of dark pine or walnut wood, the floors of light oak.  All the furniture, pews, and woodwork were locally made from pine by a local craftsman.

The church was designed in a traditional Anglican cruciform structure, including a wooden reredos separating the choir from the church's nave.  The church can seat one hundred fifty people.  All the wood and soft colors provide the church with a particularly warm and inviting ambience.

This church also possesses a aural beauty.  It's original pipe organ was an Odell organ that was replaced in 1959 with a five rank Moeller pipe organ.  The original seventeen ornate façade pipes of the Odell organ still embellish the organ chamber.  The organ's console was recently upgraded to a solid state, fiber optic system, that has resulted in a much better use of the organ's five ranks. The organ has both warm and majestic tonal qualities that render it suitable for Anglican hymnody and liturgical music.

The Church also was gifted with a 1920's Steinway Piano four years ago that has been kept in excellent playing condition and I try to play it at some point in every Eucharist service.

I've taken time to describe this church in order to give you a sense that this is a very beautiful place to worship, pray, and to meditate in.  It's an honor and privilege to be this congregation's organist and music director.  The challenge of such a beautiful place, however, is to not get too caught up in the physical or aural beauty or its historical significance which is easy to do.

This church has a sense of itself that comes with being around for so long.  This can be a strength, but it can also be a weakness if that sense turns into a club mentality.   Like many Episcopal congregations, Christ Church is a mix composed of old moneyed families, well-educated professionals  of various types who are active in the community and the state along with poorer families. Our diocese is over fifty percent Native American who represent some of the poorest people in our state and in our nation, and our congregation reflects this to a lesser degree than the diocese as a whole.

After joining this congregation, I became aware that I was, in many ways, more Anglican in my liturgical and musical tastes than they were.  In fact, I was somewhat dismayed and disappointed that they obviously did not know their church's own musical heritage or all that interested in getting to know it.  Their tastes in hymnody were very Midwestern protestant.  I have been able to slowly change this since being their organist for the past sixteen years.

After a nasty kerfuffle over placement of the Steinway piano, related to a demonstrative intransigence on the part of those who refused to remove several "historical" and largely unused pews to accommodate its greater functionality in worship services and which intransigence was the obvious result of what happens when worship of a church's beauty and its past gets in the way of the church's function and purpose in the present, we left the church.  I won't go into the details, but the result was when we returned, others left.  It was a messy time and churches can be messy places.  Hopefully, those who left will rethink their leaving also and come back.

As a result of all that bother, I believe our little congregation has become a more open and inviting place. We have become more contemplative; having a Centering Prayer group that meets weekly, a weekly meditation group that studies and practices Buddhists meditation, and an early Sunday morning service called Serenity which uses meditation and contemplative prayer, along with lectio divina, a monastic contemplative practice to discern the meaning of a passage from scripture.

We practice open communion, in which everyone present is invited to partake.  We have practioners of healing touch who are available once a month during one of our Eucharistic services to pray for and over people who approach them.  We are an inclusive congregation in an area where churches tend to be far more conservative, even some Episcopal churches.  We are in many ways a true community church. People who attend our Centering Prayer, meditation groups, and Serenity services are members of other churches who don't have what we offer or who clearly identify as being "Nones."

This little congregation has a big heart that struggles to keep its head above water and from going under financially or going by the wayside as a result of aging out. We have a very active sense of lay ministry in our church in addition to our non-stipend deacon and our priest who decided to go part time in order to help the congregation financially.

In many ways Christ Church represents the challenges most rural communities are facing, dwindling congregations and financial resources, along with clergy shortages. These challenges, however, afford churches opportunities that they did not see before.  In order for any church to survive it needs to have an informed laity involved in active ministry, and this little congregation gets that.

I think Christ Church is developing a renewed sense of self that is based on the teachings and ministry of Jesus in the light of other traditions.  It's developing a sense of inner beauty that comes with being contemplative, open-minded, and open-hearted.  It is the place where I take my responsibility and culpability in being a Christian seriously in my service to this congregation as it's minister of music and a member of its worship team.

TRINITY WALL STREET



 

I mentioned in my earlier posts that being an organist has led me out of and into churches.  Trinity Wall Street in New York City is one of those churches.  The reason I and my family became acquainted with Trinity Wall Street is because Christ Episcopal Church was in the process of upgrading its organ and I was tasked with looking into several options regarding this process.  One of the options was replacing or supplementing the current pipe organ with a digitally voiced organ or a digital voicing component to enhance the current pipe organ we have.

In the process of doing some research on-line about digitally voiced church organs, I ran across the fact that Trinity has such an organ as a result of  the event of 9/11in which the debris that fell from the twins towers covered Trinity, which is located nearby. The tremendous amount of dust rendered Trinity's Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ unusable and necessitated a quick replacement which came in the form of their current digital organ built by Marshall Ogletree Associates, Inc. 

Since we were headed to New York to visit our youngest daughter, my wife and I decided to go to Trinity to check out the organ.  I knew of Trinity, but had never visited it until a warm summer day in 2012.   I believe we attended their 9:00 AM service.  We arrived early and the choir made up of the men of their choir was rehearsing shortly after we arrived.  Being in Trinity reminded us of being the cathedrals we visited in England.

I had my misgivings about digital organs because there is a certain feel or sound-feeling one gets from real pipe organs, but I also have a digital keyboard at my home that I love and I have played digital organs before and know that this is an area that is getting better and better at voice sampling and reproducing actual pipe organ voices. I wasn't disappointed with Trinity's organ, but that wasn't what caught my attention. 

What caught my attention was the warmth of the people, the mix of people, the friendliness and a sense of welcome that pervaded the place.  At the time, Trinity was the focus of protests against Wall Street and the church made it known that they were not behind the perceived corruption that was being protested, but Trinity has its own properties and was deeded land by the English monarchy in 1696 and owns some very prime real estate in the area.

Regardless of the protestors, the service that we participated in was not only beautiful, but moving.  We had the pleasure of hearing one of the best preachers I've heard that Sunday, their pastoral care priest, Dr. Mark Buzetti-Jones, and since that time I have listened to other wonderful preachers and priests who serve this unique congregation. 

There is a sense of inclusion at Trinity that I have not felt elsewhere.  It's a place of color, of all colors, Black, White, Yellow, Brown, you name it is there.  There are straight people and gay people, old people, young people, rich people, not so rich people, middle class people, and poor people.  People living in lush apartments and people living on the street.  It's a church on the move; literally.  People come in an out of the church during the service and the service continues amidst any distractions.   

Above all it is a church, a congregation with a sense of purpose and a sense of responsibility and culpability about being Christian.  It takes being Christian seriously and it speaks truth to power in a way that other congregations don't.  It's not afraid to openly talk in a homily or sermon about the issues of the day and goes far beyond preaching to study those issues in ongoing seminars, inviting experts in various fields to come to their church and present what they have to offer, to better inform their congregation and anyone interested.  Many of these sessions are videoed and archived on their website, https://www.trinitywallstreet.org/. 

I fell in love with Trinity, and when I found out that their services are videoed, I became a regular viewer.  My daughters fell in love with Trinity also.  They may not be regular church goers, but when our oldest daughter visits our youngest, Trinity is on the agenda as a place to go.  Their music ministry is outstanding and deeply awe-inspiring, from choral selections to organ preludes, postludes, and improvisations. The beauty of worship is clearly evident in this place.

Undoubtedly, Trinity is a church with the financial means to carry out a number of ministries.  It doesn't deny that.  It is a giving church in so many ways, locally, nationally, and internationally.  It feeds the hungry with weekly meals and is constructing housing in its neighborhood to help address the homeless population in the New York. It is quite obvious that beside their extensive ordained clergy resources, there is a very active and involved lay ministry.

I look forward to watching the videos of the weekly services every Sunday, after attending Christ Episcopal.  When one is an organist or worship leader during a Sunday morning service, one doesn't fully worship in the way one does when sitting in a pew.

I like the way that Trinity does not edit their videos.   They are well done, but they show the service as is; with any hiccup or mistake that might occur.  It makes it all so real and family-like for me because being an organist I understand hiccups.

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Trinity reminds me of Christ Episcopal Church.   They are a family, just as Christ Church is.  I'm not naïve about churches.  Like a family there is always a certain amount of tension and drama in the works.  People walking out, slamming doors and people coming back in.  I should know.  I'm one of them.

Like families, you don't get to choose who's a member, but you do have a responsibility to love those who are part of your family even when there are times you can't stand to be in the same room with each other. Then there are those moments when you fully get why you're part of this messy family; that you are needed and that you need the other members of the family.  Churches are very much like that if they are truly loving places.

I wanted to present this post as way of giving some of my readers a little more background on where I'm coming from.  I think this may be important in discussing the concept of religious singularity.  What I've said here, I have no doubt that people in other churches and in other theistic religions can attest to; the sense of family that is derived from their places of worship.

Since I am a Christian, I will talk about my religious experiences and my thoughts about Christian practices in a way that will hopefully resonate with those of other theistic religions.

I believe there is a thread of commonality that is universal to all theistic religions, but is often ignored in order to preserve a sense of identity.  My purpose in talking about religious singularity is not remove anyone's religious identity, but rather show a way of speaking a common language without forfeiting identity.

Until next time, stay faithful