Visit: Smaller Baptist Church
It sure is hard to visit other churches while continuing to participate fully in the one you attend regularly. Or maybe we just took October off. Either way, we realized that if we were going to try any other places, November 15th would be the day.Since it was rather balmy for mid-November, we walked to Belmont Baptist. Decades ago, this would have been our default church, I imagine: people probably just went to the closest church of their chosen denomination. Nowadays, with liberal Baptists and ecumenical churches and conservatives and non-denominationals, it's no wonder so many folks stay home on Sunday mornings: it's too confusing.
I think Belmont is probably representative of a typical small, relatively conservative Baptist church: mostly old, mostly white, mostly empty. In a way, this disappointed me, since Belmont (the neighborhood) has gone through so many changes and has visions of being hip, bohemian, and progressive, yet Belmont (the church) seems not to have changed with the neighborhood.
I remember visiting Belmont as a UVA student nine years ago and thinking that it was OK but pretty old. Most established/ traditional churches are on the gray side, but Belmont strikes me as a little more skewed toward the upper end of the age spectrum. In fact, Amanda spotted her great-great-aunt a few rows ahead of us, someone she had not seen since her great-grandmother's funeral 15 years ago, yet who, somehow, looked exactly the same. This, along with the fact that Amanda's great-great-aunt used to live in Belmont and still rents out the old family home, led me to my Belmont Baptist Hypothesis: When the neighborhood was a thriving community of working-class folks decades ago, maybe Belmont Baptist was a thriving representation of those who lived here. Now that the neighborhood has changed and the church hasn't, it consists largely of people who have moved away but continue driving in on Sundays. I have no idea if this is true, but it happens in a lot of churches.
Or maybe they still see Belmont as a down-on-its-luck neighborhood, which it certainly has been in the past. Maybe the church members are swooping in to save the neighborhood. They already do some significant ministries for the poor, and they're starting an excellent new one. It's great to see people spending their time doing something good.
Belmont Baptist also gets an A+ on being welcoming. From the moment the door opened and we were greeted with a friendly, "Y'all come on in!", we continued shaking hands well into the beginning of the service. The prelude was informal, with everyone continuing to talk, and after the welcome came the "shake your neighbor's hand" time. Those folks moved all around that sanctuary to shake hands. (UBC tried this a week or two ago, but instructed everyone not to shake hands due to H1N1. Belmont did nothing of the sort, since shaking hands is holy in smaller churches).
One of the members was what I'd call the liturgist: said the welcome, did some prayers, etc. He also probably shook the most hands of anyone there, although he didn't shake ours. He's a resident-turned-Republican-politician who just unseated the Chair of the County Board of Supervisors in a close race. (I believe his platform was essentially "No.") Despite the outgoing Chair's odd stances on some issues and his highly talkative and sometimes argumentative personality, he is a great advocate for transit and transportation, runs a planning firm, and drives an electric truck. I will be sorry to see him removed. So having his replacement lead my prayers really challenged me to worship God in spite of it.
How much should politics affect the church decision? Just because one parishioner is a politician doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad church. Politicians have to go to church somewhere. But I began wondering whether it was the votes of the people in this congregation that pushed the election his way, and exactly how much power he had over them, and it was distracting. I also wondered whether there were people there from across the political spectrum or if he was truly representative of all their views.
We got an e-mail from the pastor on Tuesday. On Wednesday and Thursday, we got phone calls from someone at Belmont. (We didn't answer on Wednesday, not recognizing the name, but I answered it on Thursday. He said it was nice to have such a young couple in church, or something of that nature. The thing is, we purposely did not put our phone number on the visitor card. They must have looked us up in the phone book. That takes dedication... and is a little weird.) Friday, we got a handwritten letter from the pastor. All fantastic, but none substitute for having people roughly our age, roughly where we are in life, greet us personally, and there didn't appear to be anybody our age there.
There were some youth, we think, and there were a few kids, and the pastor knew all the kids' names when they came for the children's time. I'm sure it would be a fine place to raise a kid, but I'm not so sure it's the right place to raise my kid(s).
The choir had a bunch of older women and two older men. (I am forming another hypothesis about the advantages for choirs of more liberal churches, where men don't have to feel that singing challenges their machismo.) I think there were four choir members without gray/white/no hair. The music matched the small-church and older-person style, featuring at least one countrified pronunciation of "dee-vine." The invitational hymn featured a full-on spoken invitation beforehand and was as slow as molasses (O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee? More like O Master Hang On, Wait for Me.)
The pastor is younger, seems really nice, and had some decent jokes. His sermon connected with the older crowd by referencing Sanford and Son (and maybe connected with Amanda, since she grew up watching reruns of it). But neither of us managed to pay attention during the whole talk well enough to be able to discuss what we got out of it on the walk home.
So Belmont, although you were mostly inoffensive, we didn't feel God calling us to return too often. Best of luck to you. And don't listen to that politician guy.
Labels: church
posted by Peter @ 18:23
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