(A version was originally published in Pietisten, Summer 2000)
By Owen Youngman
Homebound families are all alike; but every traveling family tends to travel in its own way.
(I would suppose that this is no longer true in the era of the back-seat VCR-outfitted television and the backlit full-color GameBoy, since now the properly equipped traveling family need never resort to license-plate bingo or cow-counting or indiscriminate chorus-singing in order to maintain order or create interest in a wider world. But I digress, and anyway there are plenty of other people writing about those phenomena – bibliography available upon request.)
Through occasional but Tolstoyan observation, I have come to recognize that the particularity of traveling families also includes the paying of attention to particular kinds of things. Those clans whose members include students of junior-high age note the size of junior high schools; those including runners remark upon the form, good or ill, of sidewalk joggers; those composed of newshounds brake for New York Times honor boxes.
In our family, we noticed churches.
The trip could be 5 miles, or 50, or 500. Sometimes we would get off the highway in order to identify the affiliation of an interesting and/or heretofore unnoticed structure that appeared to be a house of worship. Once investigated and committed to memory, the identity could be revisited by all hands on subsequent drive-bys, especially if the signage was too small or poorly placed to be easily read from the roadside.
A variation on this theme, of course, was to seek out the Covenant church in a town we never before had visited. Done without benefit either of road map or advance phone call, these voyages of discovery ideally ended with a congenial visit with the pastor, invariably pleased by the chance for some shoptalk. (If only we had had access then to a book like “Swedish-American Landmarks,” Alan H. Winquist, Swedish Council of America, 1995, which includes a generous helping of Covenant churches among said landmarks and is well worth the $25 or so it’ll cost you to order it from the Hemslöjd in Lindsborg, Kansas – or from amazon.com, where its current sales ranking is No. 874,390.)
And oh, if an interesting-looking building turned out to be the Covenant church!
Childhood habits are hard to break, and so it is that even today it is the churches we notice when visiting a new location, and the churches we seek out when selecting which landmarks to fit in while exploring. In fact, it’s true even in old locations; one of my favorite Christmas gifts last year was a book of photographs of churches around Chicago, handsome enough to ensure I crane my neck while getting off the expressway to avoid a traffic jam, or make a mental note while not getting off.
And oh, if a landmark turns out to be a Covenant church!
The lure of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s are by no means restricted to preachers’ kids, I freely admit. The California missions of Father Serra, the adobe churches of the American Southwest, the ruined missions of San Antonio; the remarkable National Cathedral in Washington, the austere and imposing Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York – all are on the maps and lists of “attractions,” waiting to be checked out or checked off by tourists and pilgrims alike.
As for myself, I doubtless have missed more chances than I’ve visited churches. I’ve never gone into the Moody Church or Fourth Presbyterian in Chicago; we toured a Mormon temple in Glenview before it was consecrated but drove on by the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City; we didn’t stop at the Princeton, Ill., Covenant church the one time we drove by (sorry, Doug).
What engages me about all these churches, visited or unvisited, is the faith they represent: as conveyed in simplicity or grandeur, as communicated through artistic genius or stolid, solid craftsmanship, they tell of gatherings of God’s people – first to build, then to worship.
How many of them were begun by people who knew they were building for future generations, not their own. How many were raised by people who knew they were memorializing the struggles of past generations, not their own.
We made a brief trip to Sweden last year – staying, as many Covenanters are wont to do, in the Hotel Birger Jarl, owned by, operated by, and co-located with Immanuelskyrkan, downtown Stockholm’s Covenant church and one of the largest in the Svenska Missionsförbundet. We of course went in, finding it just as we had expected after our visit to the church’s wonderful Web site (http://www.immanuel.se; if it’s not a landmark, it’s at least worth a bookmark).
The church we didn’t expect, however, and the one that left the lasting impression, was elsewhere in town, located not on a busy street corner but in a clearing in a park, the open-air museum known as Skansen. It was a rainy late September afternoon, and the park was quiet. Tourist season was all but over, and many of the buildings on the site were closed, their Colonial Williamsburg-/Sturbridge Village-like guides in period garb having gone home for the winter.
The map we picked up at the entrance explained how buildings had been moved here from all over Sweden, beginning in the late 19th Century, by a fellow named Artur Hazelius who was seeking to preserve something of the country’s rural past. It explained what most of these buildings were. Not too surprisingly, one of them was a conventional-looking church, and it was still open.
Another was labeled Missionshuset. It was smaller and out of the way. It was closed. And, a quick cross-check of the park’s guidebook showed, it was a Missionsförbundet – Mission Friends – meeting house.
That old-time travelin’ feelin’ of Covenant discovery set in, and a view of the exterior was not going to be enough. We had to go inside, even though there’d be no preacher to visit with. So after a brief negotiation, and while we waited for someone with a key, we read the legend on a sign outside the front door:
“The meeting-house was erected in 1898 by the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden parish at Svenshult in the province of Östergötland.
“It consists of the main hall, with a little gallery, and a small kitchen which during some periods was lived in by a married couple, rent-free on the condition that they acted as caretakers. It contains benches, a dais with a lectern, an organ and a heating-stove. It is lit by paraffin lamps hanging from the ceiling. . . .
“The first half of the 19th Century saw the emergence of the Free Church movement, which wanted to create congregations that were free of the State in doctrine, worship and finances. With the 1726 Conventicle Act, a royal statute forbidding people to gather together outside the State Church for the purpose of prayer and religious worship, repealed in 1858, the Free Church movement got a new lease on life, there being an intensive building of chapels all over Sweden between 1860-1900.”
Rustic though the red-painted exterior might be, the whitewashed lectern and communion table fairly gleamed even in the dim light of an autumn afternoon. Their prominence powerfully communicated their importance in worship, worship now clearly and freely in the open. So did the Bible verse about the cleansing power of Jesus’ blood, painted on the facing of the small balcony at the sanctuary’s rear – a balcony not unlike those in some of the older, “tabernacle-style” Covenant churches I had seen on childhood journeys.
It was a powerful and moving moment, all the more so for having been unexpected. But then again, should it have been
“The Covenant,” it says on our bulletin folder back here in Illinois, “has often been described as a family of faith.” And, sure enough, every traveling family tends to travel in its own way.
