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

Fire, Brimstone, and Greener Pastures for Religious InvolvementLacking the ready opportunity to visit a unique congregation tour stuck, carless, on campus over break, I instead focus on a field trip that my churchs Sunday School class besidesk one Sunday aurora last summer. Picture if you will a group of white Presbyterian teenagers hopping into a shiny church van and cruising 15 minutes south, into the poorer, blacker reaches of inner- city Memphis (where neighborhood segregation is bland very much the rule). Our destination was relatively near our feature church, and yet worlds apart, too. Ours was the area of stately old homes with well-kept lawns along 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 equally old but far more poorly maintained homes, streets long since denuded of whatsoever trees they may once have sported. We had left our comfortable zone of neighborhood wat ches and block clubs, choosing instead to spend our worship hours in a part of the city instead known for its special police precinct and its multitudinous economic redevelopment zones. Thus did we find ourselves at the Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church. Venturing inside, we all noticed deuce things very quickly we were at once wearing entirely too much clothing to be comfortable in the sweltering heat, and entirely too little to fit 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 distributed bulletins and hearty handshakes to the rest of the group, I noticed that the front of mine read Fragment 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 between my own churchs sanctuary and this. The two, I found, we re similarly austere, but with theirs tending toward items of religious kitsch and our own tending instead towards polished brass. Both lacked stained glass in the windows. I suspected, however, that where our sanctuary was plain in token tribute to the long-dead strict cloud 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 zip against the big blanket of humid air.