Church in Suburbia

"We've been on so many retreats lately," said a Glenview, Ill. housewife last week, "that I'm beginning to feel like retreating myself." The kind of retreat she was talking about--a program full of organized "activities"--would not have been recognizable to most U.S. Christians of a generation ago. But her Glenview Community Church, and the faith it fosters, is symptomatic of a kind of Protestantism that is burgeoning in the suburban nondenominational churches all over the U.S. The International Council of Community Churches now has 217 members, estimates that there are at least more than 1,500 other community churches in the U.S.--many of them, like Glenview, dedicated to the new-time religion.

Glenview Community Church has no simple pastor with assistants but a "team ministry" of four clergymen, all equal in authority. Their church is a believe-as-you-like, worship-as-you-please fellowship of searchers, and the ministers' language often sounds less religious than sociological. Christians should develop a "relationship with God," enabling them "to live out their potential"; an eye must be kept on "fringe individuals"; the church is "developmental-task-oriented" and its beliefs are "anchored but open-ended."

The open end is filled with dozens of beaver-busy organizations in a daily boil of dances, pageants, picnics--holding "buzz sessions," helping out with "sicking" (i.e., sick calls) and organizing "casserole brigades." There are hunting and fishing groups, a men's discussion group named The Carpenters ("they try to face real realities"), a Woman's Association, a boys' hot-rod group, "family festivals," camps for all ages, a radio program, a chatty church newspaper, ten choirs ("SING! SING! SING!" says a recruiting pamphlet). In a recent sermon, one minister ruefully quoted a newcomer as saying to another: "I guess I'll have to join that damned church to get acquainted."

Real Fellowship. Glenview Community Church is 17 years old, and when Congregationalist Minister Robert Edgar went there in 1941, it had only 50 members in a community of 2,000 people. Today the community has mushroomed to 16,000, and the church estimates its adult membership at 2,000, with an additional 1,500 who have not yet joined but take part in church activities. Some 2,200 youngsters engage the full-time efforts of two of the four ministers--Methodist-ordained Clinton Ritchie, who handles the teenagers, and Baptist-ordained Theophilus Ringsmuth. who concentrates on the youngsters below the seventh grade, also has "primary responsibility" for the families of his moppets.

Concern for the young begins in the "cradle room" for children from two months to three years. The big red-bricked, white-columned church building has a "cry room," where parents can take restive children and continue to watch services through a huge plate-glass window. Beyond the cradle and cry rooms, youngsters are drawn into a constant round of activities from canoeing instruction to communion classes. Most remarkable of these are the retreats. At a "winter changeover" retreat a few weeks ago, 70 eighth-grade boys and girls piled into two buses--along with skis, sleds and skates--and headed for a three-day stay at a Y.M.C.A. camp on Lake Geneva, Wis. Counselors organized them with jolly efficiency ("9 p.m., Vespers; 9:30 p.m., bed-warming; next day, 7:30 a.m., hit the pavement! 8 a.m., breakfast, snow fun, etc.").

What Pastor Ritchie calls "directed meditation"--with film strips and recordings--included such programs as "How Honest Are You?" and "Do You Dig Friendship?" Recalls Ritchie: "We sat down right in the middle of the confetti and paper hats. A single candle was burning. We sat for ten or 15 minutes, thinking about what the old year had meant to us and what the new year could mean. We thought about the meaning of the candle itself. That was God's love--it made our friends visible to us even in a darkened place. As we looked at the candle, it made a fellowship out of us."

Fellowship is so much the order of the day that the opposite feeling needs artificial demonstration. At one retreat, by way of making teen-agers "live problems," Ritchie selected a group who did not know each other and left them out of things for hours--so that they would understand the experience of loneliness.

Self-Service Communion. Ritual at Glenview is elastic, but in general there are three phases to each service: "Adoration to God," including an opening hymn; "Communion with God," including reading of the Scripture, an anthem, silent prayer and the sermon; "Dedication to God," including the offertory, doxology, recessional and benediction. Glenview's communion is as free as its theology (i.e., God, Christ, the Bible, each understood as the individual sees fit). Communion tables are set in the chancel, and parishioners come forward and serve themselves. "Christ is the host, and we are guests at his table," says Pastor Edgar. "We partake without human intervention."

Glenview's ministers are sensitive to the criticism that their brand of religion is theologically thin, too much concerned with fun and games. Says Pastor Ringsmuth: "The average conception is that a suburban church sees religion as a way to get you something. But suburban churches are concerned with things far deeper than this, because people in prosperous Suburbia discover that their real wants aren't satisfied by material things. They look for answers to questions like who they are, what they are doing here, what kind of a relationship they can have with their Creator. Only in Suburbia, where so many material dreams have come true, can a church face real probing like this."

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