If you are looking for a book to take with you this summer, you can’t go wrong by picking up this one. It is not beach reading but it will engage you on that plane, train, bus, or car trip (as long as you aren’t driving). Suzanne Strempek Shea may be familiar to you as the author of “Selling the Lite of Heaven” or “Shelf Life.” In this book, Ms. Shea travels around America searching for a new religious home. Her journey is both physical and spiritual. She has determined that the faith she was raised in, Roman Catholic, no longer provides her with the worship community she needs.
Beginning on Easter or “Resurrection” Sunday, Ms. Shea begins at New Mount Zion Baptist Church the year long journey to visit Christian churches, large and small, new and old, lead by the famous and unknowns from Maine to Hawaii. She goes to each church as a seeker with the hope that she will find the one place where she belongs. Along the way, she finds churches she would be happy to return to and churches that disappoint her. Her descriptions of the churches, congregants, and preachers will carry you into each worship place with her. Some places she visits are: Arch Street Friends Meeting House, Philadelphia; First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston; Saddleback Church, Lake Forest, CA; Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago; Mashpee Baptist Church, Mashpee, MA; Harvest Church of the Nazarene, Las Vegas; and Interfaith Chapel, Denver International Airport.
In the end, one year later, Ms. Shea writes that her travels have distilled what she needs in a new church: a warm community that disregards politics and lifestyle; supports and is active in social justice; allows congregants decision making roles (no hierarchy); has a spiritual message “inspired by love rather than fear”; and has art and music. She has not found her perfect church but would willingly return to several that offered “lots of what matters to me.”
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