Futurechurch

This one isn't likely to make me many friends.  Let me start by saying that I have no specific disdain for religion or religiosity.  Life's hard, and I think people should be free to take their comfort from whatever source they can find it.  That said, I do not personally subscribe to any particular religious belief or practice.  I'm not an atheist, but I'm not a theist either.  This post isn't about religion per se, though I'm sure that some who read it will make it so.

My grandmother's recently embarked on a crusade to save her church.  The dioscese wants to close several small churches in the area and build a new one centrally.  Ostensibly, the rationale is that a) it's an old building and will cost more and more to maintain as it ages while at the same time, b) the population is dwindling, providing less and less revenue to maintain it, and c) the number of priests available to run is is shrinking.  I also suspect (because I'm a jaded, cynical person) that they've had an offer from some greasy developer to buy the land to build a strip mall or a bank or something else equally unnecessary that shall soon become another vacant blight on the Poconos, but of course I have no proof of this.

The arguments makes economic sense to me, and despite my fond memories of the place - when I was small I would pretend that a friendly shark named Mr. Onkers lived in the stream that ran down the hill next to the church; I'd sit on a cool rock in the shade in the sticky summer morning and have long chats with him while my grandmother said the Rosary - I find the logic for closure difficult to refute.

In any case, Grandmama's asked me to do some research on old churches in London, her thinking being to refute at least the 'because it's old' part of the argument. Fortunately, you can't swing a dead cat in this town without hitting several venerable old piles, so the effort hasn't exactly taxed me.  With the kids in school and Michele out for the morning, I've had a bit of time to think about the question of the the future of churches - not of religion itself, but the physical plant used to deliver it. 

Now, I haven't been to church in years, and my experience is limited to the Roman Catholic rituals, so I may not be in the best position to talk about this, but I will anyway.  It seems to me that in this increasingly disconnected world of ours, any delivery method for anything which requires people to actually BE somewhere at a specific time to do something that they aren't absolutely compelled to do is destined for obsolescence.  I might still have to go to the DMV on their ridiculous bureaucratic schedule to get my license photo taken, but I can buy my groceries and do my banking on my own schedule.

As a parallel, I work from home a bit. I could work from home a lot more because my company encourages it. WFH has actually allowed my firm to shed some expensive real estate, plus most people who work from home will work during the time they would normally spent commuting, so the company not only saves money on space, but gets more of my time for free. I'm also more productive, at least with some of the more cerebral activities which don't require me to interact presonally with others, because there are fewer distractions than at the office. I don't work from home more mainly because I don't have a comfortable chair, but also because I like to get out of the house and see people.

It strikes me that maybe the same might be true of worship. It seems to me that, in the same way that my job can be delivered to my house, there are now better ways to support people's need for spirituality than to require them to turn up, showered and shaved and wearing uncomfortable clothes on a Sunday morning to spend an hour daydreaming about golf or tennis or the poolboy and then rush out and try to run each other over in the car park in their haste to get away. Why not deliver worship online?  Why not allow people to worship at their convenience, from the comfort of their home?  Why not make people with religious expertise and teaching available from a central location over the phone or via the Internet? 

I guess one argument (apart from the obvious heretical nature of this idea) would be that going to a physical church at a certain time provides an opportunity for people to interact with each other and to support each other's faith; an agrument which, I must admit, has a certain resonance - the same disconnectedness that allows me to skip the two hour scrum on the tube and be done with work in time to eat dinner with the kids cuts the other way too.  Staying inside alienates me from my neighbors, makes me socially reticent and robs me of the opportunity for broadening my experience. 
 
But couldn't churches - the buildings - then, address this issue by providing a much-needed forum for human interaction, rather than necessarily a place for worship?  In this model, churches wouldn't need as many physical buildings, and those needn't be designed as impractically as they are now - with their enormous open spaces that are costly to build, costly to heat and cool and costly to maintain.  Churches could be multipurpose spaces, or even shared spaces in existing community centers or offices.  They would be more intimate venues, allow people to interact and support each other rather than merely being mass recipients of a one-way message.
 
For my grandmother, this model wouldn't work.  She has her way of worshiping, and that's fine, and I'll help her in whatever way I can.  But I wonder how the model will change to suit the times.  I wonder if churches will evolve?

I Can't Believe it's Butter!

As a kid, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Not that I wanted to be a girl, necessarily, but I was captivated by the idea of living in a log cabin in the Great North Woods.  On my way to the bus stop in the dead of winter, I fancied that I was crunching my way to the milking barn through the new-fallen snow, the blue-black sky pricked with an incomprehensible number of tiny white stars, the cold air turning to ice in my nostrils and the winter sun just beginning to exhale a faint pink dawn onto the eastern horizon.  So when my mate Clive sent me a recipe for making homemade butter, I was overcome with that same pioneering spirit and couldn't resist the temptation to try my hand at churning my own.

I've always been a huge fan of butter.  Conversely, I find the idea of butter substitutes - margarine, for example - abhorrent.  Clive sent me this link because he's been both shocked and repulsed by the quantity of butter I put on my toast at breakfast.  This is why I will very likely die an early but mercifully quick death.

The recipe and the process for making butter are both surprisingly simple - a quantity of crème fraiche whipped in the mixer, followed by a relatively straightforward rinse to remove the buttermilk.  The recipe suggests that three minutes or so should be sufficient to produce butter.  Three minutes being roughly the length of my children's attention span, along with the limited number of ingredients (one), suggested to me that this would be an interesting kitchen project for the children to be involved in.  They are forever crowding around me while I'm cooking, trying to help and causing me no end of irritation.  Here was the perfect opportunity to show them something fascinating - turning a sour liquid into a sweet solid - while indulging their desire to help.  When I told them about the idea, they were falling over themselves to get stuck in.

As it turns out, the estimate of three minutes was somewhat optimistic.  After about twelve minutes of watching the whip go round and round with little productive activity in the bowl, the children drift away to find something more interesting to look at, like lint.  Even my enthusiasm for homemade butter is flagging when the mixture, which had taken on a whipped cream consistency early on and pretty much stayed that way, began to thicken more.  I leaned in to get a closer look when, without warning, the contents separate and the thin buttermilk spatters out of the bowl.  By 'spatter', I mean that it hurled itself around the kitchen in a violent monsoon of watery, sour milk.  The liquid came out of the bowl so hard that it stung my face, like fine saltwater spray off the bow of a speedboat.

Next follows the rinsing process.  This involves mashing ice water into the butter to wash away the remaining buttermilk, which is sour and makes the butter taste a lot like lemon cream frosting.  Now, I happen to like lemon cream frosting, but I don't imagine it will taste very good on my steak, which is where I intend to put my homemade butter later this afternoon.  Mmm.  Butter on steak.  Eat your heart out, Homer Simpson.

The rinse must be performed five of six times to get rid of all the buttermilk, and, as you might expect, the butter becomes harder with each successive dip in the icy water.  By the time the water comes out clear indicating that the buttermilk is gone, my hand and forearm feel as if I've raked all the leaves in Central Park, but it's butter!  Actual, real, honest to goodness butter, just like Laura Ingalls Wilder would have made.  Well, except that I used a Kitchenaid instead of a butter churn and bought my crème fraiche at the Tesco gas station down the street, but other than that, it's absolutely the same thing.

The children are unimpressed.  That's the trouble with kids these days.  No pioneering spirit.