Churchin' USA

In the US we visited two very different churches during staff training. The first Saturday evening I was on Long Island we went to St James', which is part of the Episcopal church (similar to the Church of England back home), for a 'surf n chirp' night after a small service. It was the smallest, cutest church building I have ever been in and the congregation was also small and a real community. It did strike me as odd that we didn't sing at all, but that may have been because it was a short Saturday service. The pastor there had the biggest smile ever and really welcomed us all and the cookout afterwards was deeeelish! So much chicken, man it was great.

 The church we went to the next morning was True North, in a town called Bohemia which is the greatest name for a town ever. In some ways it was similar to my church at home except it was a lot larger in most respects, and they also serve bagels before the service (we really need to adopt this practice in England). I really enjoyed the worship here, one of the reasons being it was loud so I could sing as loud as I liked without feeling self conscious.

As we were walking out, I was looking at the sound desk, which was huuuuge, and told Karen I sometimes operate the sound desk back home and she laughed and said "of course you do Bethan" and I don't know why but I liked that it made sense that I did the sound. It was really interesting going to two very different churches in a short space of time and we had some good discussions about it in our staff devos; having been to two different denominations growing up, I've learnt that it is important to remember that it's the same God in both of those places, no matter how the service is carried out.

After camp was over, we went back to True North on an evening this time and afterwards headed on out to an american diner!! Which was hilarious because we all got our picture taken in front of it whilst the Americans laughed and thought we were ridiculous (as portrayed by Karen) because it was 'only a small town diner'. That night was one of my favourites because church was really great, we all got super excited over our spontaneous decision to go to a diner, we asked our waiter, Mike, to be in a photo with us and I had a gigantic lemon meringue pie.

True North was also the place us internationals said goodbye to Megan, Mike, Matt, Emma and Madison because we left on a Sunday morning and decided to go to church one last time before heading to Ronkonkoma train station. We had to leave during the worship at the end of the service and we didn't think we'd get to say goodbye properly since we were sitting in different places in the church but they all came running out to say goodbye and I gave Megan the first proper hug I'd given her all summer (she's not one for physical contact) and it was good and sad. 

In all of the services I went to, and at camp one time, I was introduced to the Doxology which is a really beautiful short hymn and it sounds really lovely all sung together. So a quick shout out to the doxology, yo.

Bethan