Ariana's final project "what is a church" on Pilgrim UCC for RLST 2009

1. What is a church? Like many aspects of religion, there are many ways to define it. A church can be a place of worship (usually Christian), the followers of a religion (again, usually Christian), a religious service that takes place in a building known as a church (e.g. go to church ), the clergy as distinct from the lay people, and the list goes on. The church is a symbol of many different things for many different people. A church can be a place of traditional worship and meditation, it can be a house of rock and praise, a social meeting place or a historical landmark. In addition to all of these possibilities, the Christian church has many different branches or ways of following. Just as there are traditional orthodox, Hasidic, and reformed Jews, so are there Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, United Church of Christ (UCC) and other kinds of Christianity. All of these branches have different ways of looking at Christianity. So, a church could be a community of people (usually Christians) congregating in a building of worship, and there are many different types of Christianity. Then how does one go about finding what a church is? Instead of trying to answer this question for all churches, I will focus on the branch of Christianity called United Church of Christ (UCC) and how the UCC faith is expressed in Pilgrim UCC church in Grafton WI.