The Churchies

When turning on our two-block long, dead-end street, drivers are greeted on their left side with a sizeable, sturdy, one-story, windowless brick building that is surrounded by a parking lot and a driveway blocked off by a waist-high chain link fence. There are no signs or markers as to what this building may be. When we first moved to the street, I thought that maybe it was a minimum-security halfway house, or maybe a really depressing community center. However, there weren’t any police cars, vans or other vehicles around to help identify what might be going on at this building.

So, I began doing what any nosy neighbor would do – I started quizzing our neighbors about what the story was behind that building. Our neighbors let us know that it’s actually a church, but the only way one can attend that church is to be born into it or married into the family who attends. Also, the houses all around the church belong to church members, and apparently some members of the church had gone up and down our street some years back offering to buy up everyone’s house so that all of the church members could live together. Nobody really took them up on that offer, so they apparently have had to make do with the three or so houses they own around their brick fortress.

After living on the street, we started to see the type of people that actually attend this church. They are an interesting group of people who all show up to church during random days of the week (I still haven’t figured out a pattern to their arrival – they aren’t even there every Sunday) in their Audis, Volkswagens, Volvos and vans full of people. All of the women where skirts, have long hair and head kerchiefs; all of the men are wearing dress pants or khakis, white button-down shirts, are clean shaven, and typically carrying around Bibles. Gabe and I play guessing games as to what their faith might be. Are they some sort of Mennonite? A Mormon cult? After watching Big Love and reading Under the Banner of Heaven, I have to say I lean toward them being part of a splinter sect of the Mormon faith, but – although there are lots of women and children running around – there are also quite a few men, and I can’t yet tell if the man-to-woman ratio is greatly skewed to provide one man many wives or not. That will require some additional observation.

Anyways, all of that background is to say that Gabe and I almost ran us over a TON of Churchies this morning. There was a Starline tour bus parked at the end of our street, and there was – I don’t know, maybe 100? – Churchies carrying their suitcases and looking excited to be going on some sort of pilgrimage to somewhere. And, these people are COMPLETELY OBLIVIOUS that we are coming down the street – or, they really didn’t care – and they are all lining up in the middle of the street in their church clothes, happy as clams, excited and not at all aware that anyone else lives on this street who may need to be driving down it to get to work. Thank goodness for the bus driver (a non-Churchie) – he shut his bus door so that no one could board with the hopes that the people would get out of the way so we could drive through. However, those damn Churchies stayed standing in the middle of the street, just chatting and not even making an effort to move. Gabe and I were about ten feet away from them at a dead stop in the Jeep, just staring at them incredulously. Realizing they were making absolutely no effort to get out of the way, we inched forward. Slowly running them over or gently ramming them out of the way seemed more polite than honking at this point – plus it was 7:30 AM, so no need to honk and wake up the non-Churchie neighbors – and they finally parted and got out of our way. Maybe they were really working for the whole “Moses and the Red Sea” effect on purpose? Regardless, it was annoying, and I didn’t feel we needed to be a part of the bon voyage scene for whatever little trip they were about to take.

And, that’s one look at the life on our street with the Churchies. I’m sure they are nice people, but until they learn to get out of the middle of the road, they definitely get a top spot on my “annoying neighbors” list. And weird neighbors list, too.