Church

Today I went to church, and it was great. As some of you know, one of the only disappointments I had with Boston was that I never found a suitable church. I more or less grew up Presbyterian, and Boston is so Catholic a town that few people even know what a Presbyterian is. Week after week I would try various Protestant churches, some as far as Wellesley, in hopes that I’d find a new church home. I never did, and I gave up somewhere around final exams 1L year.

Imagine my delight, then, when I found online a Presbyterian church near Metro Center that described itself as all-inclusive and outlined its homeless ministries right on its home page. I found that incredibly telling, that the church’s mission to the needy was so important it appeared front and center, rather than behind a link. To Metro Center I went.

I loved it. It was a small, [FN1] but robust congregation. A man with a beautiful tenor voice sat down next to me and sang the hymns with such sincerity I thought his singing another form of prayer. An elderly woman on the other side of me asked me if I ever had been to that church before, and whether I had met any of their “young people.” The Associate Pastor was a young woman, perhaps even younger than I, whose updates about the life of the church were so thorough and so earnest I was inspired. The only downside was that the preaching was mediocre, and had any of my mentors from Princeton been there with me, they probably would have turned up their noses. Thankfully, I am not so exacting after three years without a church home.

To Metro Center I’ll return.

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FN1. My idea of small is probably skewed. My church in New York had 3,400 members.