Small is beautiful

A story in Sunday's Houston Chronicle, about local churches providing services grief-stricken NASA employees, mentions the Lutheran congregation I attended when my family lived in the area, during my high school years. During my time there in the 1970s, the church was a small church with a liberal pastor in a denomination about to grow extremely conservative. Today, the same congregation has managed to remain fairly moderate, but they've grown into a near-megachurch, as their January newsletter shows. It really boggles my mind all the stuff they do. A close examination of the photographs in that newsletter gives you an idea of the kind of strait-laced people that live in that suburb. (I can't call it a town; there is no town, only an enormous sprawl of suburban houses and shopping centers wedged between the NASA facility, a lake, Galveston Bay, and a former Air Force base. The whole time I lived there, while going to high school, I was so eager to get the hell out of there and on to university life in Austin.)

The church I attend in San Francisco is tiny by comparison, though relatively affluent, and so liberal we got kicked out of the more liberal branch of the Lutheran church for supporting gay and lesbian ministers. Our programs are so few in number and so small in comparison to that suburban church. And even though several people join our congregation every year, it's only enough to prevent loss through normal attrition. We never seem to get much bigger or smaller, and it's been that way for the 20 years I've been going there. Sometimes I get a little frustrated with the place and attracted by my friend Sara's church, an Episcopal establishment where they have slightly wild liturgy and more people interested in contemplative prayer. But I can't shake my Lutheran identity.

I'm going to get more of a chance to hang out with the Anglican side of things. We just got a new "interim pastor" who is actually an Anglican priest -- from Canada.