Planet Altered, Chattanooga

Today our urban ministry class visited two locations in Chattanooga, Planet Altered and the H*Art Gallery. Planet Altered is a self-defined "community creative arts center" that offers a fair-trade gift shop, an art gallery, and a community space room dedicated to art classes and, on Saturday afternoons, a non-traditional, non-denominational, artistically-guided Christian worship service. The H*Art Gallery is a gallery that exhibits art created by homeless people.

At Planet Altered, we met with founder Linda Sines, who said she felt led by God to establish this space for art and worship in the middle of Chattanooga. Although the driving force behind her establishment of the center is her Christian faith, she told us that most of the community doesn't even know that the center is Christian-based -- intentionally. Her goal is to reach out to "non-traditional" church-goers, and so she keeps the overt Christian imagery and language to a minimum -- billing herself instead as a "community center." The back room hosts art workshops and a program called Cafe Grants, a community gathering and soup dinner where artists are given an opportunity to talk about their art (painting, singing, etc) to an audience of 35 people from the community who each pay $10 for the evening, and the community votes on which artist to give the $350 from the evening to. Planet Altered hosts these gatherings once a month for five months (from October to February). But on Saturday afternoons, it hosts a worship service.

The fair-trade store in the front of Planet Altered.

But as Linda will tell you, the worship doesn't look like your traditional church service. The main focus of the service is creating "worship art," communal art projects that the gathered community works on together. There are some readings from the Bible, but no set liturgy, and no music.

"We don't use music," Linda explained, "because people tend to think of music as 'doing the worship' for them. They go and hear a beautiful choir sing some music in a church, and they think that's worship. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to see what else could do the worship."

Linda talking to members of our class in the "back room" space.

She showed us examples of some of the art they'd created in worship: three mask-like faces hanging above the coffee makers, painted in brilliant colors, that had been created the Sunday after Katrina, as a meditation on the passage from 1 Kings 19 when Elijah encounters God at Mt. Horeb (God was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the "still, small voice" -- or, more accurately translated, the "sound of sheer silence."). Or the rose created from coffee filters, emerging from a charred, burnt heart. (The group didn't believe the rose was truly made of coffee filters until I got up and looked closely at it and reported back that indeed, it was made of coffee filters.)

Linda kept using words like "experiment" and "facilitate" to describe the way she led worship, and I watched the faces of my seminary colleagues grow somewhat puzzled.

"But, so, do you have, like, a liturgy?" someone asked, trying to figure out how someone could possibly lead worship without a set structure and ritual.

"No," Linda said. "It's different every week. There's always the component of scripture reading, and an art project, and some kind of interaction with the community, and sharing of how God is moving in everyone's lives. But I don't plan the worship, per se. Sometimes I show up and I'm not sure what's going to happen. I think we get so caught up with planning in churches sometimes that we don't leave room for the Holy Spirit to do its work."

I looked around and noted blank or hesitant looks from many of my colleagues.

"So how do people know about the service?" someone else asked. Linda explained that it was largely by word of mouth, and that she did not advertise or list the service in any newspapers.

"But... why wouldn't you want to advertise? Why wouldn't you want people to know what you're doing? How are people going to know about it?" someone asked, looking consternated.

"God brings people here as they need to find it," Linda said. "We're not about trying to promote ourselves, but just about seeing where the Holy Spirit guides us."

Art supplies storage above the large sink in the "back room."

Finally someone asked the elephant-in-the-room question: what the heck was this lady's religious background or affiliation? (She surely wasn't Episcopalian, seemed to be the underlying assumption.)

Linda told us that she was raised by missionary parents, in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, but that she considers herself a non-denominational Christian and she doesn't like the "arrogance" that is often manifested between different denominations.

I could almost hear a collective "hmmm" from the gathered group of future Episcopal priests. At a coffee shop later, some of my colleagues said that what Linda was doing was great for a sort of alternative space like she had, but it would "never work for Sunday morning."

I wonder about that, though. Why wouldn't it? Just because "we've always done it" this other way? Maybe it would work for Sunday morning for some people -- for people who aren't going to the traditional Sunday morning services we continue to have as an homage to the past?

Our class will be going back to Planet Altered later in the term to actually experience one of Linda's Saturday worship experiences. Unfortunately, that's the day I'll be running my half-marathon in Nashville, so I'll miss the group's reactions to whatever they experience. I'm hoping I'll be able to go back on another Saturday to experience it myself.

Hearing Linda talk reminded me of my experience with a Monday night interfaith devotional gathering hosted by a group of local Baha'is in Decatur, Ga. That gathering was an intentional sacred space where there was no agenda, but an open time of sharing scripture, song, and story from our various traditions. In many ways, it felt more holy and Spirit-filled than anything I'd experienced in an Episcopal liturgy -- with the exception of maybe a few moments at St. James's in Cambridge (my first Episcopal parish). I was reminded of how much I appreciate these kind of alternative spaces for worship and how boring and stifling I can find traditional, repetitive liturgy (in fact, it was for that reason that I left the Lutheran Church in which I was raised -- much of the worship there felt like empty ritual to me). Although I do feel a certain sense of "at home-ness" in the Episcopal Church, this experience of encountering someone doing something different and some of the obvious uncomfortability or uncertainty of my (future) priestly colleagues reminded me of just how "not at home" I can feel in this tradition as well.

*Disclaimer: All "quotations" of people in this blog post are re-created after the fact from my (rusty) memory and are not meant to be taken literally as the EXACT words these people spoke. And my apologies to any of my colleagues whose expressions I may have misread during this class... this reflection may be more about my projections than anything else!