Up out of the South and into the Midwest I drove at the beginning of this month. I crossed from Indiana into Chicago on Halloween evening, into the first cracks of autumnal cold, and spent the next day at the Root and Branch Church in Bucktown. With regard to this project, it was my first stop at a community carving itself out within a city, rather than separating itself onto a piece of collectively owned land. It was also the first Community that explicitly aligns itself with one of the mainstream Western religious traditions (Christianity), albeit not with any of the traditional institutions of that religion.
Now in its third year of existence, Root and Branch is the project of three graduates of the University of Chicago school of Divinity, who now serve as the Church’s three pastors. They are an independent church, unaffiliated with any religious denomination. While co-pastors Tim, Neal, and Andrew all come from Christian backgrounds, the specifics of those backgrounds vary greatly, ranging from Conservative Evangelical to mostly secular. During my visit, I had the opportunity to attend a Sunday morning service, meet Tim and Neal (Andrew was out of town), and other members of the congregation, and engage in a long conversation over a post-service lunch to find out a little more of just what they’re all about.
Intro to the Church
On their website, the church touts itself as being “Old-time soul searching for open minds.” From my short experience, this is an apt description. There is no set standard of beliefs for members, or even necessarily between the co-pastors and leaders, but there is a deep and rich engagement with the traditions of Christianity, and specifically with the Bible (there's the "Old-time soul"). Among members, there are people who come from all kinds of religious backgrounds and hold all kinds of religious ideas - at the service, I met both self-professed atheists and Buddhist Jews. In the search for open minds, all the church asks is that participants feel free to honestly express what they're thinking.
“We want to have a very porous, multi-vocal, space,” Neil tells me during lunch, “but we want it to be centered. And finding that center…I mean, we’re a Church. We’re in the Christian tradition. But we’ve intentionally tried to say, ‘you don’t need to fix a certain identity category to yourself to be here.’”
That said, Neal is also quick to distinguish Root and Branch from being either a purely “feel-good spiritual” space, or the kind of church that reels in spiritual seekers, and then asks them to accept Christ. “We don’t have a hidden agenda,” he says, “like a bait-and-switch, ‘gotcha’ kind of thing.” But, he adds, “we do have these certain practices that are our anchors.”
What’s maybe most apparent from the service (described below), and conversation with the pastors and regulars, is that this is a church consciously, intentionally striving to find the space for religion in the contemporary world. Neil says, “I think liberal religion has not found ways of making explicit in its communal life all the ways of how to be a modern person and be religious.”
So, they’re trying to fix that.
The Service
What follows is a short recap and reflection of the Sunday morning service I attended. I have not, thus far, explicitly described a religious service like this on the blog, though I have attended a few rituals and meditations at the Intentional Communities I've visited. I'm doing so here for two reasons. First, because I found it engaging and meaningful in a way that I think can serve as something of a model for other young religious groups (and, it might be noted, they are conscious of, and pretty excited by their potential to be this kind of model), and second, because it was the first really Millennial service I attended, made up almost entirely of people in their twenties and thirties, which puts it squarely in the parameters of this project, in a way the other services were not.
I walked into the Gorilla Tango Theater on Milwaukee Avenue late Sunday morning (service began at 11am) to the electric guitar playing of Co-Pastor Tim. The congregation meets in the theater for the time being while they consider finding their own space. The crowd was small, about twenty people, although Neil tells me they usually have closer to thirty-five, the smaller number likely a result of it being the morning after Halloween. I quietly found a seat and was handed a small piece of paper with the outline of the service.
First on the list: “Time for contemplation.” Being something of an amateur journalist/anthropologist for this whole project, while the others contemplated, I observed. Maybe the most striking thing was that, in a crowd of twenty people in their mid-to-late twenties and early-to-mid thirties, not a single person had their smartphone out, and no side conversations were taking place. It wasn't a time of just waiting-for-the-service-to-begin. It seemed like actual contemplation was going on. I can’t speak to what anyone was contemplating, but it made for an immediate safe and peaceful atmosphere, without the grandiosity and pomp of many mainstream services. The music was low-key and soulfully played, the melodious thrums of the electric guitar serving as a relatable connective frequency among the contemplators.
After I’d observed a minute, I fell into my own contemplation. Unlike the completely silent meditation I attended on The Farm, I did not feel like this was purely about getting in touch with my own deepest feelings to share. It was also about entering into a present, thoughtful headspace. Connecting spirituality to those struggles of the skeptical, discerning mind.
The music and contemplation went on for maybe ten minutes, at the end of which, Tim and another member of the Church asked the group to stand for some songs. Or, as listed on the program, “Time to Sing Out.” With the lyrics printed on the backside of the program, and the musically talented leaders singing, it was easy to catch the tunes and belt out the words. They were songs that seemed to me to have traditional religious lyrics - "I need Thee every hour, most gracious Lord/ No tender voice like Thine can peace afford-” but there was a vitality to the singing. The songs, I gathered, change service to service, and this keeps their content, even when the language might be called archaic, fresh.
Following the songs was the Announcements, notably placed right in the middle of the service. This is worth appreciating for a second or two, small detail though it may be. Most religious services (that I’ve attended) save Announcements for the end, once the praying is over with, so as to not lengthen the service and lose the people’s attention. And yet, having the Announcements in the middle seems like a meaningful choice, as it places the Community in the heart of the religious service. Since most people walked in to the silent contemplation, it gives opportunity for greetings within the religious context, which enhances the communal aspect of the service.
And then came Pastor Neal’s sermon. It had two parts, both keeping in theme with a day-after-Halloween service. First were some thoughts from Neal about God and Fear. He brought up the ideas of Christian theologian Rudolf Otto, who wrote about aspects of the "numinous," the holy, divine, ineffable. Otto uses the phrase "mysterium tremendum et fascinas," which breaks the numinous into three parts. First, the aspect which is wholly mysterious (mysterium) or wholly Other, something different from what we experience in everyday life, which we encounter (Neal explained) with silent reverence. This is followed by terror, fear, awe (tremendum), that comes from the great, often overwhelming, power of this holiness. Finally, there is mercy, grace (et fascinas), this being God's all-consuming love. Neal suggested that we try to keep our eyes open a little more to the mysterium and tremendum, the mystery and, yes, fear, in order to get deeper, more meaningful senses of the et fascinas. (These kinds of breakdowns of God are extremely interesting, and a blog post introducing some of the ideas I've encountered on this travel is forthcoming...sometime down the road).
For the second half of the sermon, Neal handed out a text from the gospel of Mark. Still in line with the eeriness of the holiday, it was the story of the Gerosene Demoniac, a man who is possessed by a “legion” of demons and lives in a graveyard. This man is shunned by society, cutting and whipping himself day and night. To sum up quickly the text (in case you didn't click on the link): Jesus comes upon this man, and exorcises the demon legion into a group of pigs, who promptly run off a cliff. This draws the ire of the people, who now have no pigs, and Jesus is forced to leave town. But before he goes, he tells the man, the one now freed of his demons, to spread the word about the power of God. The text ends with the man preaching the Godliness of Jesus in the town, and the people left “wondering.” Needless to say, it’s a weird text. But a juicy one too (read it! think about it!)
Neal broke us up into four groups. He explained a common preaching formula surrounding texts, with four parts, and assigned each group one of these parts. The first part is to identify the problem of the text: what's gone wrong here (man possessed by demons, shunned by society, etc.). The second part is to identify the solution in the text (this was my group, and while "Jesus exorcises the demons" is one part of the solution, we found there were still many other textual issues without such clear cut solutions (e.g. why do the demons have to go into pigs? Why do the people "wonder?")). The third part is to relate the problem of the text to a problem in contemporary life, and the fourth is to try to use the solution of the text to posit a solution to today’s problem. After our intra-group discussions, we reconvened and discussed what we’d arrived at. It was a fun, engaging, intellectual exercise in exegesis. While the “preaching message” that we came to was one of working to treat people with mental and physical handicaps better (and working on society to create a better space for such people), the larger message of the exercise, to an observing blogger, was that healthy, no-bullshit, intellectual engagement with the words of these texts was a genuine and legitimate means of worship. Needless to say, I was into it.
The service then headed towards its conclusion with Communion. This included a short introductory meditation by the church’s current intern, in which she spoke openly about the mystery, and, frankly, scariness of this particular ritual. (And indeed, later, over lunch, Neal made a point of thanking her for the acknowledgment of that struggle.)
We ended with one more round of singing, and then breaking into conversations and socializing. The whole thing lasted no more than an hour-and-a-half. From there, we went to lunch.
Concluding Words
While my tradition and texts and history is Jewish, the model of a service that both highlights Community - real Community, where people strive to find deeper, more honest ways of togetherness - and faces head-on the intellectual and spiritual rigors of searching for meaning in the modern world, was deeply refreshing. It was enlivening. Exciting to the soul. Which is, I humbly posit here, maybe what a religious service ought to be.
I'll also say, I found the discussion of biblical texts especially thrilling. And Neal acknowledged over lunch that revitalizing these texts is one of his goals, “The bible is full of really fantastic rich interesting stories, and I think one challenge that I want to set for us as a Community is to unabashedly be excited about that.”
So far, seems to be moving along pretty well.
Coming Later This Week to Spiritual Fringe
More from my conversation at lunch with Neal and Root and Branch members. Including questions of why anyone might find it worthwhile to engage deeply in one religion, or one set of texts, as opposed to another. And some thoughts on “resonance,” another major buzzword I’ve been encountering out here on the fringe.
Now in its third year of existence, Root and Branch is the project of three graduates of the University of Chicago school of Divinity, who now serve as the Church’s three pastors. They are an independent church, unaffiliated with any religious denomination. While co-pastors Tim, Neal, and Andrew all come from Christian backgrounds, the specifics of those backgrounds vary greatly, ranging from Conservative Evangelical to mostly secular. During my visit, I had the opportunity to attend a Sunday morning service, meet Tim and Neal (Andrew was out of town), and other members of the congregation, and engage in a long conversation over a post-service lunch to find out a little more of just what they’re all about.
Intro to the Church
On their website, the church touts itself as being “Old-time soul searching for open minds.” From my short experience, this is an apt description. There is no set standard of beliefs for members, or even necessarily between the co-pastors and leaders, but there is a deep and rich engagement with the traditions of Christianity, and specifically with the Bible (there's the "Old-time soul"). Among members, there are people who come from all kinds of religious backgrounds and hold all kinds of religious ideas - at the service, I met both self-professed atheists and Buddhist Jews. In the search for open minds, all the church asks is that participants feel free to honestly express what they're thinking.
“We want to have a very porous, multi-vocal, space,” Neil tells me during lunch, “but we want it to be centered. And finding that center…I mean, we’re a Church. We’re in the Christian tradition. But we’ve intentionally tried to say, ‘you don’t need to fix a certain identity category to yourself to be here.’”
That said, Neal is also quick to distinguish Root and Branch from being either a purely “feel-good spiritual” space, or the kind of church that reels in spiritual seekers, and then asks them to accept Christ. “We don’t have a hidden agenda,” he says, “like a bait-and-switch, ‘gotcha’ kind of thing.” But, he adds, “we do have these certain practices that are our anchors.”
What’s maybe most apparent from the service (described below), and conversation with the pastors and regulars, is that this is a church consciously, intentionally striving to find the space for religion in the contemporary world. Neil says, “I think liberal religion has not found ways of making explicit in its communal life all the ways of how to be a modern person and be religious.”
So, they’re trying to fix that.
The Service
What follows is a short recap and reflection of the Sunday morning service I attended. I have not, thus far, explicitly described a religious service like this on the blog, though I have attended a few rituals and meditations at the Intentional Communities I've visited. I'm doing so here for two reasons. First, because I found it engaging and meaningful in a way that I think can serve as something of a model for other young religious groups (and, it might be noted, they are conscious of, and pretty excited by their potential to be this kind of model), and second, because it was the first really Millennial service I attended, made up almost entirely of people in their twenties and thirties, which puts it squarely in the parameters of this project, in a way the other services were not.
I walked into the Gorilla Tango Theater on Milwaukee Avenue late Sunday morning (service began at 11am) to the electric guitar playing of Co-Pastor Tim. The congregation meets in the theater for the time being while they consider finding their own space. The crowd was small, about twenty people, although Neil tells me they usually have closer to thirty-five, the smaller number likely a result of it being the morning after Halloween. I quietly found a seat and was handed a small piece of paper with the outline of the service.
First on the list: “Time for contemplation.” Being something of an amateur journalist/anthropologist for this whole project, while the others contemplated, I observed. Maybe the most striking thing was that, in a crowd of twenty people in their mid-to-late twenties and early-to-mid thirties, not a single person had their smartphone out, and no side conversations were taking place. It wasn't a time of just waiting-for-the-service-to-begin. It seemed like actual contemplation was going on. I can’t speak to what anyone was contemplating, but it made for an immediate safe and peaceful atmosphere, without the grandiosity and pomp of many mainstream services. The music was low-key and soulfully played, the melodious thrums of the electric guitar serving as a relatable connective frequency among the contemplators.
After I’d observed a minute, I fell into my own contemplation. Unlike the completely silent meditation I attended on The Farm, I did not feel like this was purely about getting in touch with my own deepest feelings to share. It was also about entering into a present, thoughtful headspace. Connecting spirituality to those struggles of the skeptical, discerning mind.
The music and contemplation went on for maybe ten minutes, at the end of which, Tim and another member of the Church asked the group to stand for some songs. Or, as listed on the program, “Time to Sing Out.” With the lyrics printed on the backside of the program, and the musically talented leaders singing, it was easy to catch the tunes and belt out the words. They were songs that seemed to me to have traditional religious lyrics - "I need Thee every hour, most gracious Lord/ No tender voice like Thine can peace afford-” but there was a vitality to the singing. The songs, I gathered, change service to service, and this keeps their content, even when the language might be called archaic, fresh.
Following the songs was the Announcements, notably placed right in the middle of the service. This is worth appreciating for a second or two, small detail though it may be. Most religious services (that I’ve attended) save Announcements for the end, once the praying is over with, so as to not lengthen the service and lose the people’s attention. And yet, having the Announcements in the middle seems like a meaningful choice, as it places the Community in the heart of the religious service. Since most people walked in to the silent contemplation, it gives opportunity for greetings within the religious context, which enhances the communal aspect of the service.
And then came Pastor Neal’s sermon. It had two parts, both keeping in theme with a day-after-Halloween service. First were some thoughts from Neal about God and Fear. He brought up the ideas of Christian theologian Rudolf Otto, who wrote about aspects of the "numinous," the holy, divine, ineffable. Otto uses the phrase "mysterium tremendum et fascinas," which breaks the numinous into three parts. First, the aspect which is wholly mysterious (mysterium) or wholly Other, something different from what we experience in everyday life, which we encounter (Neal explained) with silent reverence. This is followed by terror, fear, awe (tremendum), that comes from the great, often overwhelming, power of this holiness. Finally, there is mercy, grace (et fascinas), this being God's all-consuming love. Neal suggested that we try to keep our eyes open a little more to the mysterium and tremendum, the mystery and, yes, fear, in order to get deeper, more meaningful senses of the et fascinas. (These kinds of breakdowns of God are extremely interesting, and a blog post introducing some of the ideas I've encountered on this travel is forthcoming...sometime down the road).
For the second half of the sermon, Neal handed out a text from the gospel of Mark. Still in line with the eeriness of the holiday, it was the story of the Gerosene Demoniac, a man who is possessed by a “legion” of demons and lives in a graveyard. This man is shunned by society, cutting and whipping himself day and night. To sum up quickly the text (in case you didn't click on the link): Jesus comes upon this man, and exorcises the demon legion into a group of pigs, who promptly run off a cliff. This draws the ire of the people, who now have no pigs, and Jesus is forced to leave town. But before he goes, he tells the man, the one now freed of his demons, to spread the word about the power of God. The text ends with the man preaching the Godliness of Jesus in the town, and the people left “wondering.” Needless to say, it’s a weird text. But a juicy one too (read it! think about it!)
Neal broke us up into four groups. He explained a common preaching formula surrounding texts, with four parts, and assigned each group one of these parts. The first part is to identify the problem of the text: what's gone wrong here (man possessed by demons, shunned by society, etc.). The second part is to identify the solution in the text (this was my group, and while "Jesus exorcises the demons" is one part of the solution, we found there were still many other textual issues without such clear cut solutions (e.g. why do the demons have to go into pigs? Why do the people "wonder?")). The third part is to relate the problem of the text to a problem in contemporary life, and the fourth is to try to use the solution of the text to posit a solution to today’s problem. After our intra-group discussions, we reconvened and discussed what we’d arrived at. It was a fun, engaging, intellectual exercise in exegesis. While the “preaching message” that we came to was one of working to treat people with mental and physical handicaps better (and working on society to create a better space for such people), the larger message of the exercise, to an observing blogger, was that healthy, no-bullshit, intellectual engagement with the words of these texts was a genuine and legitimate means of worship. Needless to say, I was into it.
The service then headed towards its conclusion with Communion. This included a short introductory meditation by the church’s current intern, in which she spoke openly about the mystery, and, frankly, scariness of this particular ritual. (And indeed, later, over lunch, Neal made a point of thanking her for the acknowledgment of that struggle.)
We ended with one more round of singing, and then breaking into conversations and socializing. The whole thing lasted no more than an hour-and-a-half. From there, we went to lunch.
Concluding Words
While my tradition and texts and history is Jewish, the model of a service that both highlights Community - real Community, where people strive to find deeper, more honest ways of togetherness - and faces head-on the intellectual and spiritual rigors of searching for meaning in the modern world, was deeply refreshing. It was enlivening. Exciting to the soul. Which is, I humbly posit here, maybe what a religious service ought to be.
I'll also say, I found the discussion of biblical texts especially thrilling. And Neal acknowledged over lunch that revitalizing these texts is one of his goals, “The bible is full of really fantastic rich interesting stories, and I think one challenge that I want to set for us as a Community is to unabashedly be excited about that.”
So far, seems to be moving along pretty well.
Coming Later This Week to Spiritual Fringe
More from my conversation at lunch with Neal and Root and Branch members. Including questions of why anyone might find it worthwhile to engage deeply in one religion, or one set of texts, as opposed to another. And some thoughts on “resonance,” another major buzzword I’ve been encountering out here on the fringe.
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