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There's a show on television called Wife Swap, in which two women switch homes and families for two weeks. It took me less time than that to figure out the fascination, which is that it allows us to see other people at home when we're not there. All we know of other people's private lives are fictional depictions, and the sometimes stories other people tell. But watching Wife Swap, all is on display. Quotidian minutiae in profusion. Absent Wife Swap or Sundays in America, we run the risk of thinking that the way we do it, is the way it's done. Forced to look at other people's parenting or paper towel consumption, their pastor's pulpit antics or provincial piety, we start to look at how we do things in our kitchens, in our sanctuaries.
And Shea is telling us our story too. Her opinions may not be our own, but oh, we have opinions—let us not pretend otherewise—and we never go to church without them. Once Shea sets us to comparing, she doesn't stop with style, she says we best look at substance too. Of her visit to Saddleback Church, she writes "I don't care if the pastor tithes 99.9% or wears his pajamas. I just want the experience to hit home intimately." She knows the act of entering a church is the act of looking for something.
Shea freely shares her church-bought thoughts: Rick Warren preaches "the love of a New Testament God, without all that legendary heaven-splitting anger and judgment. One who just wants us to love everyone." But at Saddleback Shea must taste a "heavy side dish of disappointment in an otherwise pleasant morning … the fundamentalist viewpoint, seeing gays and Jews as doomed, believing a woman's right to choose is wrong." Mars Hill Church in Seattle likewise fails her test, "hammering out the same old hate." Shea names one church as helpful and heartening, and wonders: why are these two attributes "so rare in the house of the Lord." She has a decided penchant for pastors who manage to "get through a sermon without using the fear factor or advertising any exclusionary doctrine." (God forbid a deity might be given to opinions, particularly ones that presume to differ with our secular cultural moment. This is America. Like I say, we all got us opinions.) People want to be told that they're okay, just the way they are (as though there were no common knowing in the human heart, no certain knowledge, that something is amiss. But I opine.)
Shea is an able prophet decrying the consumer in the church marketplace, where it is common practice to test-fly churches. At the Times Square Church, she is put off by the glitz and staginess, but she writes, "Don't care for one story? Try another. Enjoy the music in this one? Then you might love the show that's two doors down."
Church is rarely a walk in the park. Except, of course, when it is. The book concludes with a story of a onetime atheist who says she needs no church, because she always feels that she is in God's house, and religion only "distorts God's true message that love is all there is." Shea concurs. In fact, perhaps her own most profound experience of blessing comes as she sits in the Denver airport chapel, alone but for one rosary-praying Catholic. (Other people: who needs them, with their smells and their tacky outfits and their opinions?)
That solitude notwithstanding, Shea in the end defines the qualities she would require in a church of her own: a welcoming community with no interest whatsoever in her politics or lifestyle, a church intent on social justice, with little to no hierarchy and congregants empowered to decide, "a spiritual message inspired by love rather than fear, and all this in an art-filled space that rings with awesome music."
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