Travel as Church

Or at least, fulfilling the goals of church

A Forest Marsh with Travelers on a Bank (The Travelers); c. 1628/1629 - 1682; Dutch; Jacob van Ruisdael; Source: National Gallery of Art

CEFR Level B1-C2

What is the goal of church?

There are many answers to that question. Here are a few:

• Guide people in rituals that the group has decided are ways to honor/praise/worship/connect with God

• Provide an environment where a person feels like they have encountered God

• Create opportunities for people to share their experiences with God (testify/give witness)

• Teach people what is in scripture and how that tradition understands its application

• Offer a community where people with similar interests may become friends, but will generally be friendly acquaintances

• Encourage people to live according to standards that tradition has decided are admirable

If those goals are a form of defining “church,” then what qualifies as a church experience?

Can travel fulfill the goals of church?

I was traveling recently through western Virginia and eastern Tennessee. I stopped in a tiny mountain town for supper at a strip-mall diner. As I entered the diner, a sticker next to the door half-caught my attention. It was something about praying for America.

There was a time in my life when I would feel like I was a secret cousin to whoever put that up. We’re both Christians! Now, stickers like that make my gut clench because my experience has been that people who announce their religiosity are the type of people to do so with underlying beliefs that are likely to be detrimental to my comfort. I still consider myself a practicing Christian, just not the type to announce my praying or to expect everyone I meet to have convictions equal to my own. I certainly don’t expect non-Christians to live by my convictions. 

I had half a thought to find someplace else to eat, but a nearly simultaneous thought said that if I didn’t patronize a business because of a hint at their beliefs, then I would be acting out of the gut-instinct bias that leads to sexism, racism, and all the -isms that bring harm to people. What if that sticker was there when the diner moved in and they haven’t had time to scrape it off yet? What if putting it up is the most effective way to keep people from “witnessing” to people entering the diner? Benign or subversive scenarios may be unlikely, but without knowing more, I shouldn’t make a judgement. Plus, in this part of the country, my options were a bar, a fast-food place where I never eat, or a diner like this one. The chances of finding a diner without any sort of religio-political association were slim. 

While waiting for my food, I caught up on reading. I looked up occasionally to see if the food exiting the kitchen was for me. Then I realized that I had yet to see any person but white people in the town, including the parking lot and diner. (I later looked up the town’s demographics. 92.1% white. 2.8% Black. I won’t link to the source because my experience isn’t worth calling out the whole town.) Between that and the sticker, I wondered how we would be treated if I were traveling with my husband, who is a Black man.

I don’t want to read too much into this one data point. Throughout our marriage, we have been treated well. If anyone has had a problem with us, they’ve either been too polite to let it be seen or we’ve been too dense to notice. On the other hand, the US is messed up right now and I’m uncertain what people will feel permission to do. 

In Tennessee, I stayed with a host family - a friend of a friend of a friend. I hadn’t met them until I showed up at their door to spend the night. I was there for a week. I was prepared to be as close to a ghost in the background as I could be. They were prepared to cook me dinner every night and talk with me in the mornings and evenings. When I left in the mornings, there was always a bag of grapes or homebaked cookies for me to take with my lunch. When they saw a picture of my husband, the response was “he’s handsome” and “I hope we get to meet him.” There was no cooling of hospitality. If anything, the conversations were more honest and touched on more potentially controversial topics.

What’s all this got to do with church?

A sticker on a diner door made me uncomfortable and worried about the emotional safety of a loved one. In churches, phrases disparaging others can have the same effect. For example, I come from a church tradition that is suspicious of academia (at least anything other than Bible college), preferring to be “led by the Spirit.” I would argue that Jesus would never dismiss someone’s ideas just because of who they are. Less theologically, no one ever seemed to remember that I have the level of secular education that they spoke about so scornfully. More generically, no one seemed to think it was a problem for the preacher to make derogatory “jokes” about women or to talk one Sunday about how women are equal and can serve in ministry in any position and then the next Sunday rave about the wonders of motherhood and “Women are great! Women are mothers! Don’t worry if you don’t have children; you can be a spiritual mother!” (contrasted to “men are great because men do exciting things! And sometimes men are fathers, which is great, too. But men! Men are great because they’re men!). 

In churches where certain people are treated worse, even unconsciously, simply because of who they are, it becomes difficult for the rituals to feel like worship, for the environment to be conducive to encountering God, for me to feel comfortable sharing my experiences of God. This discomfort means that while I may be in a community, it is harder for me to be anything more than a friendly acquaintance. I probably disagree with what I learn the community thinks is acceptable behavior for a Christian. In short, I’m clearly an outsider, even if it isn’t obvious by looking at me or in casual conversation. That feeling of being an outsider who would be socially at risk if people knew more than the surface facts about me is the same feeling I had at the diner. In a negative sense, the diner and the church were the same. In both, I had to turn to God for direction and comfort and security because I didn’t have cues that the people around me would be safe. 

In contrast, in churches that never speak dismissively of people, the rituals feel more like reasonable acts of worship. An encounter with God is more likely to be because of the experience, not in spite of it. I feel free to talk about my experience of God. I see a community where friendship might be possible. That’s a similar experience to what I had with the host family. 

This section is a broad generalization. Even in churches where I didn’t fit in, I still had positive experiences. In one of those churches, I was supported in spiritual growth and I still have dear friends from there. Without one of those churches, I don’t know how I would have emotionally survived the hardest 10 years of my life to date. All that can be true and it can also be true that those churches thoughtlessly promoted dismissive ways of talking about some people. Similarly, in churches where I feel more accepted, there are problems; they just aren't problems of denigrating people.

So, how is travel like church?

In travel, there might not be formal rituals performed or witnessed by a community, but there are opportunities to see evidence of God. I certainly saw God’s loving character in my host family’s hospitality. In travel, there may be opportunities to share how you have experienced God. Travel may show you how a community understands scripture, such as the sticker on the diner’s doorway. Travel also creates opportunities to form friendly acquaintanceships that may become friendships.

Through travel, I saw an example of good intentions that made Christianity look bad and an example of hospitality and kindness. To use church language, I was exhorted in the faith and gave thanks to God. If the goals of church are met outside of a formal church service, then is that experience church?