Posts Tagged ‘ Christianity ’

River Hills Community Church, Traditional Service – Visited on 8/14/11

It is important that you understand certain things about River Hills.  To the north and east of York County sits a great spider, spinning out its web.  That spider, the greater metropolitan area of Charlotte, NC, spreads its concrete strands of housing development service roads and strip malls further and further from its center, the great glass and steel tower of Bank of America, every year.  Charlotte’s web does not sit idle: its strands snare homemakers from the American Northeast even as we speak, snaring them in aluminum box-houses and the bricked hubris of McMansions in ever greater numbers.

Years ago the web spread over the shores of Lake Wylie, a small body of water that defines the eastern border of York County.  There it snared yet more flies to feed their time and money to the great weaving beast at Charlotte’s heart, in the form of a swirling mandala of new suburban housing complexes carved into the forests that surround all settlements here in the Carolina piedmont.  Of these perhaps the largest, certainly the most visible, is River Hills: a gated community for the middle and upper middle class of York County, a new pole of political and economic power fighting to metastasize into its own school district where the children of the relatively well-to-do need not share classrooms or cafeterias with the greater mass of the county.

River Hills Community Church sits on two plots of land astride the road to River Hills—one must pass between the church’s two complexes to reach the community’s barred gate.  It boasts an athletics center and an expansive sanctuary for the church’s traditional service, and supports at least three worship services a day—two of the aforementioned traditional services, presided over by the church’s lead pastor Bruce Jones, as well as a contemporary service called “Journeys,” led by associate pastor Kenny Ashley.

I attended that latter of the day’s two traditional worship services.  The old sanctuary, where it took place, is a cavernous chamber paneled from floor to ceiling in dark wood.  The ceiling vaults high above the congregation, hung with banners of white and green like some time-lost Viking hall.  Rows of pews fit to seat hundreds sprawl back from the raised altar while a choir loft broad enough for dozens of singers rises behind it.  Behind and above the choir the wooden walls give way to plate-glass windows that fill the airy hall of the sanctuary with natural morning light.

The worshippers who filled the sanctuary for the traditional service that morning represented the long-time faithful of River Hills: retirees in their Sunday best sat shoulder to shoulder in their hundreds, intermixed with a handful of young professionals and parents with teenage children. Magisterial tones from the sanctuary’s pipe organ welcome worshippers to seats they’ve occupied for Sundays uncounted while the pastor and his staff prepare themselves for the morning’s service.

Music forms a strong component of the traditional RHCC service.  Years ago the church hired Kevin Gray, then one of two leading music instructors in the Clover School District, to take over as choir director.  Mr. Gray is a perennially energetic man who directs his choir of at least twenty volunteers with the panache of a seasoned performer.  His dark hair rises to a peaked black spitcurl—Gray has been known to moonlight as a fairly convincing Elvis impersonator in his spare time.  He and the choir perform with undaunted energy throughout the service, and even take a moment aside to accept hymn requests from the audience each Sunday.

Two speakers interrupted the procession of praise music that morning.  The first was a representative of Operation Mayday, a local charitable group attempting to recruit players for a charity golf tournament planned for early October.  The second speaker was Kenny Ashley, pastor of the Journeys contemporary service at RHCC.  Ashley is a big man, balding, who still commands the rough gregariousness of the high school football coach he was before turning to ministry.  He is a man who refers to his God as “Papa,” and describes the religious experience as ‘being broken to God’s saddle.’

Ashley addressed the congregation for a sobering announcement: he planned to leave the RHCC and take his Journeys program with him.  He said that just as he’d felt a calling to become a pastor, he now felt a calling to take his program beyond the bounds of the RHCC where it could become its own organization.  It was a similar refrain to that provided by Matt McGarity of relevant Church, whose organization was also once a part of the RHCC as well and split from that group a mere five weeks before Kenny Ashley’s announcement.

When the music finished the lead pastor finally rose to stand behind his pulpit.  Bruce Jones has the look of someone’s congenial uncle, an older man with a round face and thinning crop of gray hair, drooping jowls hanging about smiling lips.  As he delivered his sermon, the second in a series that strove to explain ‘why bad things happen to good people,’ he maintained the rhythm and energy of a public speaker sharpened by decades of practice.

Though the sermon began by exploring competing theological explanations for the purposes of suffering and calamity in the world, Rev. Jones soon passed into descriptions of two moments when he’d felt the hand of the Almighty directing the events of his life.

First he told the tale of how, as a boy, he’d jumped from a diving board into a public pool, only to find himself unable to swim.  Jones began to drown as he struggled towards the lip of the pool until he felt what he described as strong hands grasping him and lifting him above the water.  The pastor said that when he’d looked behind him to find who had saved him, no one was there.  Rev. Jones attributed his rescue to the hands of God himself, lifting him from the water to preserve his life towards the fulfillment of some unknowable purpose.

Rev. Jones’s second story hailed from much later in his life, when he was already pastor of the RHCC.  He related how he’d planned to visit a hospitalized woman of his congregation but felt a strong urge, as though from outside his own mind, to visit a day earlier.  When he arrived at the earlier occasion he found he’d come just in time for a crisis: a car wreck wounded several members of a family from his church that night, and Jones described how he spent that evening praying with them and their visitors before visiting the woman he’d originally come to see.

Jones said a call to the hospital the next day brought news that the woman he’d visited the night before had passed on in the night.  Jones attributed this remarkable timing, both in arriving to minister to the family involved in the wreck and to comfort the unnamed woman on her last evening alive, to God steering his actions.  In addition he mentioned that over the course of his ministry he witnessed seven occasions where members of his congregation were miraculously healed of their illnesses by divine providence.

After concluding his sermon, Rev. Jones had one last announcement for the congregation.  After a joking aside that “No, I’m not leaving too,” he let it be known that he intended to step out of the day-to-day operations of the Church to devote his time to his wife, due to return from missionary work in the Philippines soon, and to focus on his pastoring and ministering.

I conducted a brief interview with Rev. Jones after the service.  On the affiliation of his church he said that the RHCC was strictly nondenominational, and held within its congregation members of some 27 different Christian traditions.  On the departure of the relevant and Journeys programs from his church he explained that no bad blood lay between the RHCC and its splintering contemporary programs.  Rather he said that those ministers, McGarity and Ashley, had felt it was time to plant their ministries beyond the bounds of River Hills. He made no mention of any link between his own withdrawal from the RHCC’s day to day operations and his associate ministers’ leaving the church to establish their own ministries.

When asked about the 1st Amendment and the relationship between Church and State, Jones would only refer me to Romans 13, which instructs the believer to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” and leave matters temporal in the charge of secular authorities.

2011
08/28
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relevant Church (sic) at Oakridge Middle School – Visited on 8/7/2011

By the time I rounded the last bend of the circuitous road between Clover and Lake Wylie to find the sprawling grounds of Oakridge Middle School on my left, the hills and forests were already baking under a grueling August sun.   Mine was the only car I saw inbound from Clover, a town perhaps a mile across and a few miles back, home to some wealth and much poverty.  Its heart was left derelict by the textile industry’s decline decades ago.

From the other direction came a steady stream of glossy SUVs and town cars from Lake Wylie, that well-heeled suburb of Charlotte, its shores encrusted with halfpenny mansions, its hills festooned with redbrick shopping centers.  The cars glistened beetle-black in the sun as they swerved into the school parking lot.  I joined them when my chance came, following the signs set up to direct first-time attendees to the far lane.  Moments later I walked among the last of the early crowd headed to that morning’s worship service at relevant Church, filing in under the school’s aluminum awnings shoulder to shoulder with Lake Wylie salarypeople and their teenage children.

The nearer one comes to the main event of a relevant worship service the more visible the church’s staff becomes: teenagers and twentysomethings in neon ‘Event Staff’ t-shirts handing out leaflets and pens and notepads for visitors or waving attendees on towards the service.   That service takes place in what the staff calls the “Cafetorium”, a cafeteria with the stage and acoustics of an auditorium.  Nearly two hundred chairs sat ready for the congregation, while towards the back lurked all the hardware of a modern audio-visual presentation.  Black cords snaked between the camera stand, the computers, the sound system; all attended by fresh-faced volunteers.  On the stage stood microphones, stools and instruments, all the necessaries of a live musical performance.  I took a seat to the back, awaiting what promised to be a professionally managed show.  I was not disappointed.

A service at relevant Church lasts from around 10:30 in the morning till just shy of noon.  Live music portended by the props on stage dominated the first forty-five minutes of the service I attended—in this case a guitarist, backup singer and keyboardist performing contemporary Christian music, the sort one finds at any number of Evangelical summer camps and festivals scattered throughout the country.  The church’s visual projector displayed the lyrics on a screen hung above the band, but only a few voices joined them from the crowd, and only a few hands rose to clap the beat.

The band quieted as a bull of a man took the stage, one of relevant’s associate pastors who introduced himself as Tony.  With the rhythmic cadence of a practiced preacher or a motivational speaker he set up a video displayed to the congregation: an ad, for lack of a better word, for relevant’s upcoming beach weekend for children and parents.  Then he began a brief sermon for the crowd.

The congregation he spoke to was a group of mixed ages: some old enough for retirement or nearly so, many more ranging from their early forties to late twenties, married couples with their teenagers and young children, all dressed for casual Friday at some anonymous Charlotte office park. He reminded them of the economic troubles that beset our country, of the unpredictability of markets and investments that seemed so sound until a few years ago.  To these people, who have either seen their neighbors’ fortunes swallowed by the ongoing economic collapse or who face dire monetary straits themselves, for whom a stable and reliable American future now slips further and further away, he offered a new source of succor.  He said that they ought not to put their trust in retirement plans, investments, stocks or bonds or any other traditional hideaway for their money.

Instead they ought to put their trust in God, and in their Church.  Rather than sink their funds into material investments they should spend it on the one thing they could be sure of—their spiritual home, relevant Church.  They ought to commend their money to the same place they commended their souls. He assured the congregation that God would look after them if they believed and gave of themselves.  The offering bags passed down the rows as the guitarist for the praise band led the congregation in their opening prayer, calling on God to grant them all good fortune.  The whole interlude was a refrain common to certain strains of Evangelical worship, the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’—the idea that God will recompense those who ‘sow’ for the church by donating money by providing good fortune in the future–but only to those who sacrifice their money faithfully, with their whole heart, to his servants.

When the band finished they and the event staff cleared their equipment from the stage as the main event began.  The lead pastor of relevant Church, Matt McGarity, is in the midst of his hale thirties.  Handsome and charismatic, a father of five, he has a face for magazine covers and political commercials.  He appeared to the crowd in jeans and a t-shirt, the microphone of his earpiece glinting in the stage lights.  That day’s sermon bore the title “God’s Wonderbread.”

The sermon itself dominated the rest of the service, an eclectic mix of personal anecdotes and readings from the Old and New Testaments all delivered in a cordial, informal style.  He related stories of two breakdowns he’d suffered on the highway over the years to illustrate humanity’s lack of control over their surroundings.  The theme of that day’s sermon was how God watches over his faithful, as related specifically by the tale from the Book of Exodus of the migrating Hebrews receiving “manna from Heaven” on the march. McGarity explained at length that if the congregation believed thoroughly enough their God would redeem them from times of trouble.  He never mentioned how he himself was redeemed from those car troubles.

At the sermon’s close I witnessed the very first Communion taken by relevant’s congregation in their new location at the middle school.  Rev. McGarity encouraged the worshipers to come up of their own accord to one of four stations set around the seating, where the church’s associate pastors broke flatbread, provided sips from broad goblets, and offered to listen to the prayers of any who wished to bare their souls.

After the service I sat down with Rev. McGarity for a brief interview.  By his own account he spent his early adulthood in the US Marine Corps, serving for six years as a mechanic and sometimes firearms instructor, before leaving the Marines in 2002 to start a family and begin a career in construction.  After a few years in that line of work he described a growing calling towards ministry that culminated in his earning a Master of Divinity degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.  2011 is his third year as a pastor.

August 7 was only the fourth meeting of relevant Church in its current form.  Previous to that relevant was an auxiliary program of River Hills Community Church, just up the road in the heart of Lake Wylie.  McGarity said that he’d begun as an associate pastor at the River Hills church, tasked by its leadership with creating a program to draw in the young and the ‘unchurched,’ as he put it, of Lake Wylie and its surrounds.  Its first worship service in this phase was on Easter Sunday, 2010.  He described how his program eventually drew hundreds of worshippers each week, many of them unaffiliated with RHCC.  Such success convinced him that relevant could stand as its own church.

He then parted from the established RHCC to set up his own independent ministry, and relevant is the result.  On the church’s organization, McGarity revealed that relevant is not a part of any larger church network or denomination.  The church has a staff of around fifty volunteers leaving McGarity the only person involved who draws a pay check from the weekly event, though he mentioned plans to add two or three more paid positions.  relevant currently leases the ‘Cafetorium’ and surrounding halls from Oakridge Middle School on the weekends, and McGarity made no mention of plans to move to another site.

Given his background as a soldier of the United States now become a man of God, I asked McGarity his thoughts on America’s ongoing wars.  He said he believed that the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan “began as wars of liberation,” and that wars waged under such pretexts are just.  Though the occupations there drag on, he feels that there is now a moral obligation for American forces to stay until they establish a lasting peace.

Finally, as with every other pastor, I asked Rev. McGarity about his view of the relationship between Church and State.  He took that opportunity to expand upon the relationship between his church and the middle school in which it operated.  He made it clear that his interaction with the school system was entirely monetary, that “we (relevant Church) never impose” their beliefs on its students or faculty.  His arrangement, he said, would be the same between the school and a Jewish temple or Muslim mosque.

As a final aside, I’d like to thank the Saturday group at the coffee shop in Lake Wylie who, if they are reading this, know just who they are.  I doubt I would have found relevant Church without their useful tips, and I look forward to more discussions with them in the future.

2011
08/21
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Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity – Visited on 7/24/11

This week we have a special report: a recounting of my experience at a service of the Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity in Charleston, South Carolina, home of my alma mater the College of Charleston.

The Church of the Holy Trinity is a one of a kind structure, particularly in low-country South Carolina.  Like buildings throughout South Carolina it is primarily built of red brick, but its similarities with other Charleston institutions end there.  The church’s dome dominates the eye, a vast upturned bowl of verdigrised copper, bracketed to the approaching worshipper’s eye by bell towers with matching copper caps.

The church’s grounds are extensive.  To one hand it hosts the Charleston Hellenic Center, a sort of community building for the area’s Greek-American population.  To the other lie the lawns and spreading trees of the church’s modest park, which boasts an exquisite work of art: a pane of sculpted glass, lit from beneath and enfolded in stone and brickwork, depicting the Virgin Mary holding her child, Jesus.  At night the work shines with a luminous blue-green glow quite unlike anything else in the city.

Inside, the Church of the Holy Trinity is itself a work of art.  Gilt paintings in the classical Orthodox style adorn every wall, some of them built into shrines to which the parishioners give moments of reverence.  In the early morning the sanctuary is cool and dim, lit only by sunlight slanting in through the church’s many stained glass windows and flickering candle light.  Each window is itself a remarkable work of art depicting angels and Orthodox saints in exacting detail.

The roof of the sanctuary is the church’s vast dome, and the beautiful murals worked into that arching ceiling capture the eye of any visitor.  At the center of the ceiling is the face of Jesus, framed by a golden disk and surrounded at the cusp of the dome by the painted images of angels bearing censers, torches and golden implements of worship.  Below the dome are the painted cameos of saints and images from the Orthodox Church’s history, all wrought in the classical Orthodox style.

The service itself would be only faintly familiar to those raised in Christianity’s Protestant traditions.  Every aspect of worship is circumscribed by ritual and tradition, many of which are over a millennium and a half old.  Beginning as early as 8:45 and continuing unflinchingly till noon or later, the priest, his acolytes and the church’s altar boys sanctify the worship space with censers, chants and ritual circumnavigations of the sanctuary bearing their rods, staves and mirrors.

The priest stands apart from the congregation in the marble-floored space before the exquisitely carved curtain walls of the church’s central altar, robed in white and gold, often bearing a smoking silver censer and accompanied by the acolytes in stark black and the altar boys in gold.  It seems the priest’s every turn of phrase is accompanied by the voices of the choir, a small body of three or four who are nonetheless exquisitely trained—and necessarily so, for they must sing for over two hours to complete their duties for the service.

The vast majority of the service I witnessed went according to a centuries-old pattern of prayer, song and ritual gesture that the priest assured me afterwards was little changed since the conquest of Constantinople, still the seat of the Greek Orthodox Church, by the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmed II in 1453.  A brief period is given over to the priest’s personal remarks to the congregation, commenting on the scripture read out towards the beginning of the service by an acolyte, but otherwise the service is a trilingual hybrid of Greek, Latin and English performed according to strict and time-honored tradition.

As the usual priest was on vacation on the weekend of my visit, the service I observed was presided over by Father Regis Alexoudis of Wilmington, NC, who accepted my request for an interview after morning’s worship finished.  I asked him a few questions over strong, black coffee in the Hellenic Center, brewed by the parishioners themselves.

My first question, as a relative stranger to the Greek Orthodox tradition, regarded the American Greek Orthodox Church’s relationship with the tradition ecclesiarchal seats in Europe and the Middle East.  Fr. Regis informed me that though American churches have a certain amount of leeway they are officially missionary posts of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.  America’s Greek Orthodox priests, though far removed from their church’s traditional lands, remain part of a hierarchy that culminates in the Patriarch of Constantinople, a position that is at least 1,600 years old.

On the Greek Orthodox Church’s relationship with other religious groups in America, Fr. Regis would say that his denomination recognized other Trinitarian Christian groups—that is, other groups who follow the doctrine that the Son (Jesus), the Father and the Holy Ghost form the holy trinity, the three coexistent aspects of their deity.  According to Fr. Regis, it is the Greek Orthodox Church’s ruling that the Mormon faith is a cult, not another Christian denomination.

Finally, like the other clergymen interviewed so far here at Churchspotting, I asked Fr. Regis’s opinion on Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment.  Like other religious leaders interviewed so far he voiced his belief that government should operate according to Christian principles without specifically advocating any particular branch of worship, though I imagine his definition of those principles would differ from that held by Rev. Baynard of Clover Evangelical.

Of all the worship services I have observed so far on behalf of Churchspotting, this was easily the most aesthetically spectacular.  I encourage any readers travelling through the Charleston area to take the time to visit the Church of the Holy Trinity, at the corner of Coming and Race St.  The entire church is a work of art, and one you should not miss.

2011
08/14
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Clover Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church – Visited on 7/10/2011

A warm, muggy, overcast morning.  The Clover ARP is a slender creature of red brick, its black iron fences enclosing a modest wood and plastic playground for the congregation’s children, its spires soaring above the low two-story buildings of downtown Clover, its doors spread open beneath the shade of spreading trees.

Inside, one enters a sanctum suffused by the golden-mellow glow of morning sunlight streaming in through stained glass.  The walls are smoothed by slick white plaster, its ceiling’s curves picked out by great, time-stained beams of centennial wood that hint at the church’s lengthy history.

This was an irregular service for the Clover ARP: its pastor and much of its congregation were away at an annual church camping trip, leaving the sanctum half-full, its pews wide and naked.  Without its regular staff to prime the church’s organ and audio devices, the service’s several hymns proceeded in mumbled, half-heard quiet.

So many absences lent the proceedings in the Clover ARP this morning a tired, slightly mournful air.  Much of the church’s resources are dedicated towards its youngest members: testified by the aforementioned playground, as well a whole complex of rooms behind the sanctuary designated as Sunday schools and day cares.  An entire alternative service is normally held simultaneously with the main worship on Sundays specifically for the children, but with so many absent such activities were cancelled.  Young couples and their children make up a considerable proportion of the Clover ARP’s membership, and without them its services have only a scattering of elderly couples and childless adults to crouch sparsely on its benches.

In lieu of the usual pastor, this morning’s sermon was led by Mark Witte, a seminary graduate currently living in Columbia, South Carolina.  He is a strikingly tall man, lank and lean, well educated but still young and fresh from his own instruction.

The morning’s sermon was his own creation, built on a reading from Ephesians 5:15-20. He enjoined the congregation to act as exemplars of their religion, likening their status as role models to how his own great stature as a child made him the object of his teachers’ and guardians’ reproach when he and his childhood friends made mischief.  He taught that the congregants must adopt this role quickly, for each moment spent at the business of the world was one not spent in the service of their faith and god.

Mr. Witte took the time to sit a brief interview with me after the service.  He and his young family are bound for Tampico, Mexico in the near future, where he will teach at a seminary school for the American ARP’s Mexican sister-church.  On the interface of Church and State, he held that the American constitution’s enumerated inalienable rights are, though influenced by Christianity, derived from rights permitted to all people, regardless of their particular creed.  The freedoms granted by “our unity in Christ,” mentioned repeatedly during the morning’s sermon, were by contrast the sole province of the faithful, and refer more to the next life rather than matters temporal.

Further, he explained that the Establishment Clause from the First Amendment of the US Constitution provides freedom of religion, not freedom from religion; specifically, that there should be no coercion towards any one faith, but that the machinery of the state should be operated in accordance with, to use his term, “Judeo-Christian principles.”  Those who push to divide Church and State completely, he said, are in effect promoting their own religion: they are “angry against god,” and so promote their own beliefs against the Church out of that anger.

On his spiritual peers in Mexico, the representatives of the Catholic Church, whom he must certainly encounter during his time in that country, he would say only that many in Mexico have not truly heard the Good News.  There was a difference, he said, between those who attend worship services because they are “cultural Christians,” and those who go to worship the living god in their hearts.  Many in Mexico, he said, were cultural rather than spiritual Christians, whose practices he was set to rectify.

Mr. Witte remarked that the true issue in Mexico was corruption, specifically the worship of money over concern for spiritual and moral matters.  On the wealth and income inequalities within the United States, he said that “to those whom much is given, much is expected,” and remained confident that those who misuse the great wealth God has given them will receive their due justice one day.

2011
07/31
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