The Music of the Machine

I have, of late, been struggling to keep a certain type of music out of my playlists.

The auto-generated "favorites"  that YouTube Music pitches me can get a little stale, as one overfamiliar song after another is served up.  Sure, they're songs I like, but algorithmic recommendations start feeling a little bit like the musical equivalent of Bread and Jam for Frances.  "Sweet Lord Jesus, this again?" I'll mutter, skipping to the next one.

Usually, new additions are welcome.  Only now, I find myself having to be warier and warier around new music, particularly if it feels a certain way.  More and more new music isn't produced by human beings at all, but is instead the result of a short prompt dumped into Suno or some other AI.  I created a few songs myself, back when it was unusual and felt like a fun thing to try.  But I'd rather not listen to it.

As every ad for Suno reinforces, that creation process requires exactly zero talent, as people who haven't the skill or won't put in the work are encouraged to pretend they've made something.  So when I hear a song that exactly matches a particular vibe, I'm on alert.  Machine music takes advantage of our distraction, engaging parasitically with the musical styles we enjoy and crowding out human voices and talents.

Like, say, my listening preferences when driving on a cool summer evening.   I drive with the windows down and the sunroof open at such times, letting the wind play through my hair.  I want stuff that's utterly relaxing, both mellow and sophisticated.   Give me a tree-lined country road paired with a sultry chanteuse purring over a tightly constructed jazz standard, and I'm as happy as a clam.  

If clams liked driving briskly whilst listening to jazz, that is.  It may or may not be a mollusk preference.

So the other day while driving home from church, I heard a new tune that landed perfectly.  Bubbly and playful, with lyrics that danced between English and Japanese, it was just one hundred and ten percent chill vibe.  "Little Sunny Moments," it was called, and I enjoyed it as it hummed away in the background.  But as it progressed seamlessly from verse to chorus and came to a quick and easily digestible conclusion, I began to wonder.

Is this a real song?  

It felt too tight, the vocalizations too sharply defined and breathless around the edges.  Each "Doo Doo Doo" didn't quite have the shape and form of a human utterance.  I'd not really paid attention to it, so I listened to it a second time, tending to the lyrics, trying to come to a determination as to its provenance.

[garbled] is shining in the light. Everything just feels so right. Tiny waves go up and down. Nothing special, nothing big. Little sunny day.

Doo doo doo. Drifting far away.

Doo doo doo. Come and stay. Seagulls dancing in the blue. I just sit and think of you. Clouds are floating like a dream.

If I laugh a little more,

will this day just last forever? Doo doo doo. Little sunny day. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Drifting far away. Doo doo doo. Come and stay.

The lyrics sort of made sense, but were more a feeling than anything coherent, and the garbling of some words and hyperprecision of others felt less organic and more generated. Odds of it being AI? Now at 90%.

And then came the final verse, sung to precisely the same tune as the rest of the song:

Smooth relaxing jazz Bossa Nova.

Similar mood to Quiet Glow.
Soft breathy female.
Soft Doo Doo Doo

Soft Breath Doo Doo Doo
Soft breathy female.
Smooth.

It. Was. The. Prompt.  O Lord have mercy, how perfect.  From behind the wheel, I cackled with delight.   

Somehow, the prompt used by a human to tell an AI what kind of song to make had been accidentally folded into the lyrics, and...this being a low effort sort of thing...they'd just burped the thing out without even noticing.  

"This," I thought to myself, "should be mandatory."  Meaning, at the end of every AI song, the final lyric must be the prompt.

Just so we know.  So it's clear how much effort was involved, and how little humanity.

Each Season Different

This year's been an odd one in my garden.  Some of my old stalwarts have struggled, and promising new growth has been unexpectedly stunted.

The butternut squash which flourish with wild abandon most years haven't sprawled across my yard.  Their great glorious golden flowers and fattening fruit have been half of a typical summer's production.  

My okra, now in its third year, are yielding but dwarfish, standing thigh-high where last year they were now already towering over my head.  It might be the heat, and that we're still a bit behind on rain for the year is likely a factor, my regular watering aside.  Or it might be the soil, particularly for the butternut, where the hugelkulture beds that have always shown the greatest production probably needed a refresher of decaying wood prior to the start of the next season.

My trusty bush beans have also struggled, although that's more a factor of my taking an unexpected nine day vacation right as they were starting to produce.  That first wave of beans was missed entirely.  I don't mind that they went to seed, though, because last year's seed crop was devoured by marauding deer...again, when I was on vacation.

Even the sturdy sunflowers seemed slow to get going, although they're now once again feeding pollinators and beaming down beneficently at passers-by.

The majority of my efforts haven't been optimal.  But there are exceptions.

I cut my tomato planting by 60%, as I was convinced that the bed-density of earlier years had contributed to fungal blight.  Only four plants went in, and they've done wonderfully.  Pico de gallo and caprese and bruschetta have been present in abundance lately, and I'm enjoying regular vegetarian BLTs with sweet slices of those homegrown 'maters.  Also abundant: my basil, which started slow but has rebounded, contributing to multiple rounds of pesto and the aforementioned bruschetta, both of which also draw on my copious garlic harvest.

In all of this, I'm reminded that I am just a suburban gardener.  A weak year for me isn't a threat to my livelihood, and it doesn't carry with it the fear of famine.  It's simply a thing to observe and learn from, part of the wild and joyous variety of God's complex and unpredictable creation.  

Headwinds

I knew, when I headed to church one recent Sunday, that the ride home was going to be a little damp. The forecast was for rain, copious rain, blessed, welcome, drought-busting rain, and with the MidAtlantic humidifier turned up to eleven, there was no question we were going to get a drenching.

It drizzled a little bit on the way there, but when I stepped out to the scooter to head home, it was pouring. I no longer fit into the rainsuit I bought thirty years and thirty pounds ago, but that doesn’t matter. Riding home in the rain on a hot day is like getting free admission to a water park, and I was actually looking forward to it. I stowed my phone and my wallet in my waterproof courier bag, which I put in my scooter’s waterproof storage compartment, and with my torso protected by an excellent raincoat, I set out home.

In light, moderate, or passing rain, scooters are superior to motorcycles. Tuck your legs as demurely as Audrey Hepburn behind the scooter fairing, and you often don’t get wet at all. In light, moderate, or passing rain, that is. Last week was not that. But getting soaked isn’t the primary challenge when you’re on two wheels and the heavens are set to torrential-plus.

Challenge one is traction, as water courses across the road. When the ground is first dampened, things get slick. Then, the issue is flowing or standing water. Have you ever hydroplaned in a car? Let me assure you that hydroplaning on two wheels is a more…interesting.. sensation. You need to be careful of pace, particularly when changing directions, because the direction you go when you hydroplane in a sharp turn on two wheels is down.

Challenge two is visibility. When the rain picks up, you soon notice that the wiper settings on motorcycle helmets leave something to be desired. When you’re on the Beltway and the cars around you are slowing and pulling over, have hazards on, and their wipers are flailing as wildly as a panicked eight year old trying to escape a yellowjacket? When rain isn’t just torrential-plus but torrential plus coming at you at highway speeds? 

This is where doubt begins to enter one's mind.

Whenever we attempt something challenging, particularly if that challenging thing speaks to becoming the grace-filled soul that that God yearns for us to be, there is a moment of enthusiasm, a moment of delight. But then the storm has a tendency to pick up. You commit to a new life, a new path of action or a time of recovery, something that you know will bring you into alignment with a more gracious path.  But the wind howls in your ears that you’re sure you can’t do this, that it’s too much, that it’d be better to be back in the safe prison of your familiar brokenness.

The world around us is filled with powerful things we cannot control, after all, and our fear that our humble efforts will be sunk by those powers and principalities can crowd out our hope.

There’s a story of storm in the Gospel, as the disciples find themselves out on the sea of Galilee. They’ve just left a gathered throng, and between the demands of the crowd and the endless questions of his inner circle, Jesus was spent. He first needed that time away after the death of his cousin John, and after feeding the five thousand, he finally was able to be by himself, and he told his friends to go on ahead across the sea while he went to the mountaintop.

The Sea of Galilee is susceptible to sudden storms that blow up, winds that race across open waters and turn what is typically a flat and easy passage into something rather more significantly challenging. As fishermen, the disciples would have known this, and known how to cope with it. It wasn’t life threatening, or so we are told, and the sea was up, and the waves were high, and the wind was blowing hard against them.

They were handling that, although the going was hard.

What freaked them out just a little bit more was Jesus, as he walked towards them across the water. This is entirely understandable, because it’s unsettling when things step outside of their normal pattern, and a dude walking across the roiling surface of a lake in heavy seas is pretty far outside of the normal pattern.

They are justifiably a little upset by this, and Jesus hollers out to them to calm them down. Peter, hearing him, is still a little doubtful. Hey Jesus, he yells back, if it’s you, ask me to come join you! To which Jesus says, sure, c’mon over.

I’m not quite sure why this was enough for Peter to get out of the boat, but apparently it was. So the story tells us that Peter set out across the water towards Jesus. Now, it’s one thing to be in a boat on the water, and it’s another thing to be right there on the surface of the storm.

Peter panics. He’s suddenly aware of his vulnerability, of all the different reasons this just won’t work, and the water starts to consume him. Jesus comes over, lends a hand up, and the two get into the boat. The winds calm, and the disciples are in awe.

This story is a story of faithful striving when all around us is churn and storm and spray. In those times, faith in our purpose is tested, and doubt comes easy.

We all do that, but those first earnest efforts can be so easily undercut by doubt. We know you need to heal that relationship. We know we need to stop doing that one thing…you know what that is, for you…that has continually sabotaged our ability to show the grace of the Spirit. We know you’re called to something new and wonderful and hard. For a moment, it’s wonderful and euphoric. And then things get harder.

The salt of the spray fills our mouths and blinds our eyes, and we feel our hope bleed away to nothing, and it seems as if we’re going to sink beneath the waves. We falter, we hesitate, and any hope we had vanishes like Eurydice before the eyes of Orpheus.

That’s the point, as Jesus folk, where we need to set aside strangling anxieties and smothering doubts, reach our hands out, and trust in God’s strength and Christ’s grace and the love of the Holy Spirit.

If you are anxious and fearful on two wheels, you’ll freeze or panic, and that doesn’t end well.  There've been times in my life...times of stress and times of hardship...where I've stopped motorcycling, because I could feel my confidence in everything shaken.  But that wasn't what I felt on the road that day.  

I knew that I knew what I was doing.  When the wind drives the rain into you, and your water-coated visor makes visibility like opening your eyes in a swimming pool, there are two solutions.

First, pause, pull over under an overpass, and wait it out.  That works, but I prefer not to do that on the Beltway in low visibility situations if I can avoid it.  It's a dangerous road, filled with incompetent and distracted drivers who don't have a great sense of whether they're in a lane or on the shoulder.

There's a second approach, one that works if the road isn't flooded.   You want to clear your visor?  Go faster.  Don't speed.  Just be sure that the same wind that's blinding you is driving the rain off.  It works, time and time again.  So I forced my way into the storm.

The visor cleared, the beaded rain streaming away as rapidly as it landed. I could see again, as I pulled onto the high occupancy toll lanes, empty but for myself.

The Challenge of Permeability

 

It was a slow summer Wednesday, and I was in the midst of office hours at the church.  I'd worked on the sermon, chatted with some church folks, and done a bunch of prep work for the Adult Ed classes I'll soon be leading in the Fall.

At a certain point, I needed to move around again, so I circulated through the rooms of our nearly 200 year old utility building.  The "manse" currently houses my office, the copy-room, a nice little sitting parlor, two functioning bathrooms, and a number of rooms that are perhaps most generously described as "storage and utility."  In the hotter months, it does get a little warm, lacking AC as it does.  But the structure--state of the art 1827 construction--rests not on a concrete foundation, but on a bed of huge cedar logs, which just set there on the earth below.  That means that in the summer the building "breathes," as the rising hot air draws cool air from below, and I find it...with a ceiling fan...perfectly tolerable well into the upper 90s.

It's blessed with being a permeable space, sometimes a little more permeable than one might expect.

As I wandered into one room on the first floor, my eye was caught by a decoration I'd not seen before.  Did someone put up an artificial vine, one of those greenery decorations one might find in a restaurant of a certain type or a dorm room?  

Nope.

It was wild grape, alive and well and snaking across the ceiling from where it had shoved its way past one of the baseboards.  For a moment, I had a flashback to back when I was writing my first novel.  There'd be mornings where I'd go down into my basement, fire up my PS3, and listen to the music that Gustavo Santaolalla composed for The Last of Us.  The OG 2013 video game is one of the most remarkable and emotionally authentic gaming experiences I'd ever had, and the soundtrack is haunting and lovely.  I'd just leave the opening menu running, and the sorrowful strains of end times music would waft over me as I wrote.  

The menu looked like this:

This is what ruin looks like.  It's more than a little beautiful, in its own way.  But it's cold in the winter, and too hot in the summer, and zombies are everywhere.

My mind being what it is, that got me to thinking about permeability, and what we include and do not include in the life of the church.  Yes, we need to be open, and we need to be able to speak the language of our culture.  Yes, we need to show grace and hospitality, and to be amenable to the growth of the new.  Healthy churches aren't closed off to those things, or to the community around them.  They are places of grace and welcome.

But we also need to take care.

Because some things, let in, will tear our common spaces apart, will open holes through which other decay and rending growth will come, and then what had been a place of Christ's sanctuary and shelter will crumble and become consumed by the world.

It's a question of discernment, I suppose.

To Eat and Be Filled

I approached my recent vacation with a little bit of anxiety about food. The last few decades of my life have been marked by oscillating cycles of weight gain and loss, of being fit for a while, and then having the mass slowly return on a rising tide of IPAs and ice cream.

Going to the beach isn’t exactly the best place to go midway through an effort to constrain one’s once again increasing girth. One might think that being vegetarian would help, but let me assure you that it does not.

Sure, I’m eating a veggie burger, but it’s hard to feel that vegetarian virtue when I’m getting it with a fried egg, fried mushrooms, cheese, and a side of fries the size of the average rabbit.

I’m back to pushing myself to exercise more, which is good for me, and paying more attention to what I eat, mapping out my daily calorie counts against the medically determined expectation for what a man of my height and age needs. In kilocalories, or what we just call calories, that’s around 2,450 a day to maintain life.

The average Spaniard takes in around 2,600 calories a day. The average Japanese, 2,100. The average American? 3,700.  We eat thirty percent more than we need.  And it shows.

Seventy-four percent of the U.S. population is technically overweight. The diet and weight loss industry in this country is a $135 billion dollar enterprise, one that was recently upended by the arrival of GLP-1, which is on track to hit 65 billion in sales this year, with nearly 12% of the population of the United States currently using Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 agonists to constrain and suppress appetite. It’s clearly something that I’m not alone in struggling with. We consume too much, and exercise too little, and when you’re surrounded by an endless groaning table of synthetic deliciousness, it’s hard not to yield to that siren song.

Here in this country, we clearly have trouble with food, trouble coping with our fear of of absence and the presence of consumerist "abundance."   Rather than taking just what we need, we seem unable to constrain ourselves. Are we fearful we’ll not eat tomorrow? Are we soothing some broader anxiety about our place in the world, or our futures?

----

The story of the loaves and the fishes is a simple story about our fears and our food, one retold by all of the Gospels, but it’s got a couple of unusual and noteworthy elements. First, it’s really rather amazingly simple. Like so many of the tales that rise from our recountings of the life of Jesus, it’s visceral, a fundamentally graspable and elemental thing, the stuff of the everyday.

The context of the tale in Matthew is one of mourning. Jesus has received the news that John the Baptist, his cousin and a prophet of the coming of the Kingdom, was murdered by Herod. Jesus needed some time alone, and so sought out a place to be in private for a while, taking a boat to an unnamed location.

But Jesus being Jesus, and the word about him humming about in the world, a crowd gathered.

They wanted to hear this prophet, this teacher, this wonderworker, and perhaps to be healed. Again, Jesus being Jesus, he had compassion on them, and healed and tended to them. The day was growing late, and the disciples, seeing the throngs, were eager to wrap things up and send folks on their way. That, and they were worried, because out there in the wild, there was no way they could ensure everyone got fed. Let’s call it, they said, so’s that folks can find their way to nearby villages.

How can we know they’ve got food? We have a little food, sure, but they might not. They are anxious about the gathering, anxious that hungry crowds might lose sight of their message, anxious that there will not be enough.

Which, Jesus knew, there was.

In the face of their anxiety about what they had, Jesus told them: give it away. Break the bread. Cook the fish. Share it with a blessing.

The start of that miracle was the act of not worrying about it, and sharing graciously.

We who have so much poured out to us, and in whom so much potential lies, we need to trust that sort of miracle. This does not come easily for us, particularly as we’ve acclimatized ourselves to expecting more, more and always more, always hungry, never filled.

Some miracles are just right there, ready to happen, just waiting to be seen and acted upon. The joy of life, of growing and giving and sharing from whatever sweetness we have been given? That’ s the deepest of miracles. But first, we have to be able to see it through the thickets of our anxiety, and the depths of our grasping.

The New Seed

Yesterday, once I'd gotten my latest manuscript off to the publisher, I harvested green beans, most of them dried pods.  With a small metal bucket of pods before me, I spent a pleasant few minutes removing the fat finished beans from their crisp outer container.  It's a pleasant way to spend time, as the pods crackle in a satisfying way when you break them open.  I inspected each of the naturally dried beans for size, color, and structural integrity, and it didn't take long before I had twice the seed I'd need for a good-sized planting next year.

After finishing, I helped myself to a healthy snack, homemade pico de gallo and a small bowl of corn chips.  The pico was made the day before, from the good solid harvest of tomatoes in the front yard.  The 'maters have grown like gangbusters this year, and even though I put 60% fewer into the ground, I'm getting triple the yield.  Better airflow and less density (coupled with the dryness) have meant an absence of fungal blight, which I'll remember for future years.

I'd hoped, or so I recalled as I ate, to use some cilantro I'd planted in my herb garden to give that lovely floral flavor to the pico.  But it matured too early, as this summer got waaaay to hot.  After bolting, the plant was done.  Cilantro doesn't like being transplanted, so I figured I'd need to grow from seed if I tried it again.

That stirred something in my mind, so I wandered out to look at the remnants of the cilantro, which was...as expected...little more than dry twigs.  But that "little more" included scores of plump, round, striated seeds, grouped into sprays of a half dozen or so. 

"Oh, right," I muttered to myself.  "There it is.  Coriander."  I knew that cilantro and coriander are the same thing, leaf and seed of the same plant.  But for some reason, it hadn't occurred to me that I wasn't growing cilantro this year.  I was, instead,  growing both: 1) a functionally different herb, and; 2) ample seeds for multiple subsequent plantings of cilantro.

I harvested the plant and returned to the kitchen, where I laid out newspaper and spent another ten minutes teasing the coriander seeds off of their branches. It was, as process, quite different from gathering bean seedstock, but no less gratifying, as the coriander fell with a soft percussion against the newsprint.

One of the great delights of the garden is that it offers up new things, even when one isn't expecting them.

2026 Bethany Sandcastling

Day One:

I always start with something to remind me how to build.  With that in mind, I mucked about with a diamond-pattern as the core element, with interwoven layers and tiered walling with simple carved towers.  My wife told me it was a little bit on the Georgia O'Keefe side of things thematically, which I'd kind of noticed myself.  I mean, Georgia wasn't into angles and linearity so much for obvious reasons, but there were definitely anatomical resonances.  

Thankfully, that didn't seem to be noticed by most passers by.  Although that sixty-something German woman who took numerous pictures of it may have recognized that dynamic, as her husband gave me a knowing nod.  

Day Two:
 

I started the morning with a vision of a mass of ovoid beings, all staring out to sea with their hollow eyes.  But when I began to carve, I realized I just needed to make an octopus.  An octopus!  Keep it simple, stupid.

This seemed to delight the tiny people, which in and of itself is a reason to have taken that route.  A six year old girl with bright red hair was the first to approach with boldness, telling me that she and her four year old sister thought it was great.  Later, she brought her mom to see it, leading her by the hand and pointing it out with tiny person enthusiasm.   When Mom seemed a little distracted, the strong willed little redhead said:  "Mom!  Appreciate it!!"  Which I, myself, definitely appreciated.

As the Beatles song about an Octopus and his Garden kept humming through my head, I returned in the afternoon to construct a fence and a gate.  As I started, a nine year old girl who had been previously admiring the octopus accidentally fell into it.  Having taken out a few tentacles, she seemed utterly mortified.  Meaning, she was actually tearing up as she stammered an apology.  I told that sweet soul that sand was the easiest thing to sculpt with, and that it would be no trouble at all to fix things up.  It seemed to cheer her up.

My middle aged bones and tendons just weren't up for another consecutive day of squatting and shoveling, so I took Tuesday off.  

Day Three:

Wednesday, I returned refreshed, and began another classic castle.  The central tower was first, delta-shaped and with four "windows" all the way through:

I returned to the house to hydrate and slap on sunscreen, and then it was back to the beach for a few hours to build out the main stage.  The little gatherings of tiny people watching started up as the latticework walls took shape, which is always a pleasure.  The castle took shape, tiers upon tiers.

Then, a break, lunch, and a nap, at which point I returned again.  In the interim, family members who'd been down there reported requests from passers-by to take pictures with it.  That included a beach security patrol guy, who I chatted with for a bit.  He told me the castle was a "public service," which I suppose it is.

The beach in late afternoon empties out nicely, so a little more ornamental sprawl becomes possible.

As night fell and a full moon rose, I wandered down to the beach again to see the ruins.  The front side had washed away, but the main ramparts were still standing in stark silhouette against the moonlit sea.  

Day Four:

The following day, a delegation of small people gathered as I was setting up, and inquired as to my plans for the day.  Having put it off in favor of an octopus on day two, I wanted to experiment with a simple form I'd not mucked about with before, a schmoo-like ovoid.  That, and we had an outing planned, so I'd be at the beach for less time.  What I ended up with was a small assembly of the critters, in various sizes.  

When asked bv passers-by what they were, I'd suggest that they were the sort of sand-spirit that might come hopping up to you on a beach in a Studio Ghibli film.  This didn't seem to help folks much.  "Are those coconuts?" asked one earnest mom.  I told her they could be if she wanted them to be, which was true.

Towards the end of the day, several hovering kids peppered me with questions about them.  One boy thought they looked like guardians of some sort, and I agreed that they might well be just that.  A slightly older girl wanted to know if they'd survive the incoming waves, and I said they would not, after which I talked to her about the impact of the moon on tides.  She's not learned this yet, and she was excited to find out a new thing.  The first boy then suggested that they should all have names, which the kids all agreed was important.  One was Bob.  Another Christopher.  The largest, on the far right, was named King Gerald, on account of him being the largest.  

Day Five:

On the last day at the beach, I figured I'd pitch up my annual "Bethany Beach" lettering, which I've been doing for years.  It pairs nicely with a family picture, eh?

As I was about halfway through, a small voice rose from a passing group.  "Hey!  I remember that from last year!"  About five minutes later, I heard the same thing from an elderly gentleman.  Nice to know one's work is part of a stranger's remembrances.

This one tends to be a bit of a crowd-pleaser.  The new readers, perched on Dad's shoulders, sounding it out.  The genuinely gobsmacked ten-year olds.  The gaggle of teen girls.  A group of college bros passed by grinning, with one of them loudly declaring that it was the "xxxxing xxxx."   The young women who brought and retrieved our rental umbrellas.

The number of folks stopping to take pictures (either with family members or just of the sculpture) significantly increases.  The letters seem a marvel to folks, although they're not particularly challenging to construct.  

Pretty much every year I do this, someone will in jest suggest that perhaps I should set up a stand and charge admission.  Which is in line with the well-meaning souls (kids and adults alike) who'll ask if I'm a professional.  We've all seen what the professional sandcastle artists do, and it's in an entirely different league.  

I just do do it because I love to do it, which is the best of all possible reasons to do anything.

Smaller than We Think We Are

Back when I was in seminary, some wise old souls of the church taught that one of the primary markers of a spiritually unhealthy congregation is a fundamental dissonance between the story they tell the world about themselves and the actuality of their lives.

A church that claims to be one thing, when in reality it's not that at all?  That's a church that doesn't understand itself, and that has lost its way.  The church that says "we're a family," but when you spend any time there, you realize the only way that's true is if you're talking about the Manson Family.  The church that says "we're welcoming," but offers up only cold silence and a circle of backs to visitors at the fellowship hour.  The church that says, "we're inclusive," but by that means only that they're as open-minded as a doctrinaire Maoist, or the church that says," we're bible-believing," by which they mean they've created zealous rationalizations for ignoring 93.2% of Christ's teachings in favor of a cultish theofascism.

Sure, no church is perfect, and sometimes the story we tell about ourselves is aspirational.  We say not who we are, but who we yearn to become, that we might by declaring it over and over become that thing.  Recovery works that way, for example. And when we look to ourselves, we carefully curate our observations to show only those things that affirm that ideal self image.

If that drives us to become the community that God is calling us to be, then it's a blessing.  If that so masks the reality of who we are that we're functionally delusional, then nothing we do will be grounded in reality, and we will fail.  This is true for persons and communities, churches and nations.

As a Presbyterian, I wonder at this often, as I watch my denomination to continue to shrink.  The latest data on that decline was shared recently, as the research wing of the PC(USA) offered up their annual snapshot of where we are.

Where we are is getting smaller at a slightly slower rate, which is what passes for good news these days.  Total membership shrank by 2.6% in 2025, with just under 27,000 fewer Presbyterians year over year.  One hundred twenty-seven congregations closed last year.  Nearly 70% of PC(USA) churches are officially now small churches, meaning they've got fewer than 100 members.

There was another familiar stat presented, one that was of particular interest.  As the article in Presbyterian Outlook stated:

The distribution of members among the denomination’s congregations continues to show that small congregations make up the bulk of churches, but most Presbyterians belong to larger congregations.

And then we got the following handy dandy little low-res chart:

I don't question that it's an accurate representation of congregational membership rolls and size distribution.  As far as the denomination is concerned, the membership roll is the number that matters.  Per capita is what butters the bread, eh?  Fair enough, but there's a potent little caveat to these numbers.

Here, I recall what the congregational researchers I've read over the years had to say about membership rolls and congregational size.  

Membership rolls are a notoriously unreliable measure of the true size of a congregation.  As a metric, they're filled with clutter and debris, with "members" whose engagement is marginal at best.  Kids who moved away.  Families that attend once a quarter.  Dear old friends who do come enough that you can't bear to boot 'em from the list.  Showing up every other year still counts as a member, right?  I mean, to my small church pastoral heart it does.  I'm always delighted when someone I care about whose presence I miss walks through those church doors.

If you want a better sense of the church incarnate, though, you look at worship attendance.  How many souls regularly and materially engage in the core unifying event of that congregation?  

That's the reality of the thing, the essence of who participates and who does not.  And that number is lower, typically tracking at around thirty nine percent of total membership, with higher participation in smaller membership churches, and lower participation in higher membership churches. 

If we sized congregations by attendance, things would look different.  The whole chart would reweight itself nontrivially upward.   A majority would still attend larger program-sized and corporate-scale communities, undoubtedly, but that majority would look less like a clear supermajority.  I don't have access to the data, but if I did?

We are, I believe, smaller than we think we are.

There is nothing in the world wrong with that.

In Defense of the Humble Footnote

Yesterday, after a several week long push, I finished a draft manuscript I've been working on for the last several years.  It's bubbled along beneath the surface of other projects, going through one unreadable iteration after another, and I've scrapped and reworked it at least twice. 

Fear Not, Little Flock is a book of encouragement and exhortation, meant to offer up a little bit of steel for the spines of small congregations.  There are plenty of Jesus MegaCenters out there, and having an alternative where life together functions on a human scale is a blessing.  It's due to my publisher in a month, so it'll be there well ahead of schedule, which is how I prefer to treat my editors.

I'll be writing more on the topic over the next little bit, I'm sure.  But what was on my mind, as I finished up, wasn't small churches.  

It was the humble footnote.  The manuscript has footnotes, and I don't know if they'll make it through the process of editing.  It seems unlikely.

This is a bummer, because I love footnotes.  

Footnotes...those little superscriptural markers that lead you to explanatory text or bibliographic information at the bottom of a page...are entirely out of style in the contemporary publishing industry.  The editorial herd has moved on.  First, it was endnotes, where that little number or an in-text citation had you flipping to the back of the book and futzing around to find the deets.  

Then, as was the case with my last two books, the new "style " was to not provide any superscriptural marker in the text at all, and to instead slap a chapter by chapter list of bibliographic references on the hindquarters of the book, with only page numbers to connect you to the actual reference.

I have no idea why this happened, but it's two steps backwards.  Endnotes are an inferior UI.  The "Tramp Stamp," or whatever the heck it's called when endnotes have no direct marker in the text?  That feels like it's just there for liability purposes, as it offers no meaningful opportunity for reader engagement at all.

Footnotes, particularly when coupled with a complete bibliography, immediately connect the reader with an informational metanarrative.  As you encounter resources or other writing that has informed your author, it's right there in front of you.  It's not "distraction."  It's openness of process, and immediately raises reader awareness of the textual foundations of a work.  It is, for author and reader alike, a superior way to convey information, by an order of magnitude.

But it can be more than that.  Footnotes are also a lovely place for an authorial aside.  You can share a related story or reflection.  You can snicker sotto voce in the wings at something in the main text, like you're Statler and your reader is Waldorf and the main text is Gonzo's latest failed routine.  Those marginalia add delight.

So why was this change made?  Why the shift in style?

Is it that we've lost the technical prowess in printing to manage doing footnotes?  Of course not.  Best I can tell, the change was made to save the costs of more complicated typesetting as the publishing industry has withered and retrenched and withered and retrenched again.  Mucking about with footnotes really does make the process of changing physical type more time consuming, and the additional labor required costs money.  It's collateral damage from industry decline, an inelegant adaptation rather than a step forward.

But with most publishing now fully digital, that logic no longer holds.  Physical typesetting has been supplanted, once again for cost saving purposes, yet still the style remains. 

It has become yet another way fad trumps function, an "advance" that makes life harder, and whose industry-driven logics have nothing to do with the author-reader connection, reader engagement and education, or the reason books exist.

Other than that, I have no problem with it.

On Congregational Demise

 

And here, talking against the winds, so to speak, I must enter, along with my lamentation, my objection. You may say that I am just another outdated old man complaining about progress and the changes of time. But, you see, I have well considered that possibility myself, and am prepared to submit to correction by anybody who cares about community, who can show me how the world is improved by that community’s dying.

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, p. 274

Charn Sunrise

Low down and near the horizon hung a great, red sun, far bigger than our sun. Digory felt at once that it was also older than ours: a sun near the end of its life, weary of looking down upon that world. To the left of the sun, and higher up, there was a single star, big and bright. Those were the only two things to be seen in the dark sky; they made a dismal group. And on the earth, in every direction, as far as the eye could reach, there spread a vast city in which there was no living thing to be seen. And all the temples, towers, palaces, pyramids, and bridges cast long, disastrous-looking shadows in the light of that withered sun. Once a great river had flowed through the city, but the water had long since vanished, and it was now only a wide ditch of grey dust.

"Look well on that which no eyes will ever see again," said the Queen. "Such was Charn, that great city, the city of the King of Kings, the wonder of the world, perhaps of all worlds. Does your uncle rule any city as great as this, boy?"

C.S. Lewis, THE MAGICIAN'S NEPHEW

How 'Bout Them Apples

On one recent afternoon, I was sitting in my kitchen puttering away on a nearly-finished manuscript.  Progress was being made, but the pleasant distraction of working by a big bay window looking out to the street can limit how much gets done.

I notice every passerby, as my peripheral vision catches every neighbor out walking their dogs, every salesperson wandering door to door.

What caught my eye that afternoon was a mother and daughter as they slowed down at the edge of my yard to notice one of my two apple trees.  

The taller, deep green Honeycrisp nearer to the house has yielded, in the past five years, exactly one perfect apple.  It doesn't flower much, and never quite seemed to recover from the trauma of having most of its branches torn off as a sapling.  That damage was done by a young buck deer scraping the velvet from new antlers, and I wasn't sure it would survive.  What few flowers it produces now are out of sequence with the other tree, and are the farthest thing from fruitful.  This year, it produced one withered apple, a sad little object no larger than the tip of a thumb.  

But then there's the dwarf Fuji I planted nearer to the sidewalk to crosspollinate with the Honeycrisp.  It's not as heavily leafed, and stumpier, but is nonetheless going like gangbusters year after year.  Even after I pruned away full third of the new apples back in the spring, the branches droop heavy with growing fruit.

It was the Fuji that the daughter noticed, and she excitedly pointed it out to her mother.  They stopped, and considered the tree.  The girl asked an question, and her mother answered her.  "Yes, that's an apple tree," I could see her say.  A huge smile spread across the girl's face, as her eyes danced across dozens of apples.  The sparkle in her eyes translated into excited little jumps, as she pointed and counted the apples with such energy that her little body needed to leap a bit.

It is possible, I realized, that she might not have seen an apple tree before.  There aren't any others in our neighborhood, not visibly in a front yard, at least.  Or perhaps she'd gone apple picking, but never ever seen an apple tree while simply out walking. 

Years ago, before those apple trees were planted, before I'd even begun my first tentative attempts at gardening, I'd often wonder at how it is that America's suburban neighborhoods are so devoid of fruit and harvest.  

Now, it's not just the sweetness of those apples that I enjoy, but the pleasure that others take in their existence.  

Bringing It Down Carefully

It's been a pleasant week up at my father-in-law's house in Western Maryland, one filled with reading and hikes and puttering about on the lake.  The weather has been hot by Western Maryland standards, enough that the minisplit AC that had to be put in a few years back was working overtime, with fans set up to distribute that one unit's cool air through the rest of the upstairs.

That heat has meant that I've been using the mornings to get things done outside, focused on whittling away at one task in particular.

About twenty yards up the heavily wooded rise behind the house, I'd been long eyeing a deceased hardwood tree.  It died perhaps five or six years ago, and stood about seventy feet in height.  It weren't jus' dead.  It was really and sincerely dead.  The wood around the base and most of the way up the tree was unrotted, hard, and had "cured on the vine," and for the last few years I've figured it would offer up about a weeks' worth of evening fires in the hearth.

My goal, for this trip: finally bring it down, buck it into rounds, and schlep those rounds down the hill to dry and cure.  I've done that with two other deceased trees on the property, and at that height, it's just about at the top end of what my modest 18" homeowner-grade electric chainsaw can manage.

After taking a few minutes to sharpen, oil, and adjust the chain, up the hill I went with axe and wedge and chainsaw.  Within five minutes I'd hewed out the directional undercut, and begun the back cut to bring it down.  Being a suburbanite, I don't get to do this often, so it's always done 1) in the most straightforward and traditional way and 2) with as much care as my scatterbrain allows.  I know my limitations, and my propensity to forget things, like fully securing the chain-oil plug so's it doesn't goop oil down my pants.  Not that I've ever done that.  Ahem.

Bringing down a tree requires one's full attention.

Vibecoding might be a thing these days, as we offload our cognitive tasks to AI.  But Vibefelling a tree?  That too easily turns into an existential error, the sort of mistake that costs you property damage, a limb, or a life.  

So I consider and then create the undercut mindfully.  Where's this going to go, exactly?  I want to set it down not just as far away from the house and parked cars as possible, but also where it'll do the least harm to the healthy trees around it.  It's worth careful consideration and reconsideration.

As I'm putting in the back cut, I slow down right at the end.  Were I an experienced arborist working with excellent equipment, this would be less necessary.  But when you're engaged in an unfamiliar, infrequent, and risky task, take your sweet time about it.  I've felled fewer than a half-dozen trees in my fifty seven years of life, so I watched the cut like a hawk.  Has it begun to fractionally expand, the barely noticeable beginning of that long final fall?  I want to be a few strides away as soon as that movement begins, in the event I've misjudged something and the trunk steps out, heading in an unplanned direction.

I cut and checked, cut and checked.  Finally, that movement began, the clean line of the backcut expanding at a barely discernible rate.  I pulled the chainsaw blade, and stepped back as the expansion increased.

It all went as planned, and down it came precisely where I'd intended, with a satisfying crackling followed by a deep ground-shaking whump.  The tree, life long gone from it, was now ready to be sectioned out, bucked into rounds and split for the fire in winter.

When we realize a thing needs to be brought down, it's best to do so with care.  If you rush in, full of blind confidence and bravado, you're likely to do more harm than good.

Strange Division

It’s been a while since I struggled to understand division. It was third grade, if I’m recalling correctly, when I’d come trudging home from Timberlane Elementary School with a backpack full of math worksheets requiring me to do exciting things like divide 567 by 32, rounding up to the tens place.

Once you knew your times tables, it wasn’t so hard, but it took a while to get there, bludgeoning my way through exercise after exercise until I finally got it.

I had a peculiarly similar experience a few months ago, as in my fifty-seventh year of life I finally realized I had no idea how the Dow Jones Industrial Average actually worked. I peruse the business news daily, and for years thought I had the basic principle down. The Dow, which is used to measure the economic health of a nation, is a number you get to by adding together the dollar value of common stock in thirty selected blue chip companies. That gives you the dividend/numerator. This, you divide by a divisor/denominator….in this case, 30…to get an average. Because, you know, that’s how averages work, or so I remember from later in elementary school. That measure of economic health has risen meteorically in my lifetime, going from 800 in 1969 to over 50,000 now. For a long time, I assumed the soaring DOW had to do with two factors: 1) that stocks were gaining value and 2) that the dollar was losing value through inflation.

But I was wrong.

That’s not how it works. Not at all. I was right about the dividend, but clueless about the divisor. When the DOW began, the divisor was the number of stocks in the average. But the folks who run the Dow have gradually adjusted that divisor downwards over the last 75 years, to create a narrative of “continuity.” So instead of dividing by thirty, which would give you an actual average, or by 1, as was the case in 1987, the year I graduated from high school, you now divide by point one six. 

Point one six.

And when you divide by a number that’s less than one, what happens? All of a sudden, you’re multiplying!

This, conveniently enough, gives us the story of endless growth. 

Growth, as any parent or gardener can tell you, is a fundamental part of life. That’s the core narrative of our economic culture, that things must always be more and be better and bigger and more powerful. It’s what we’re taught to revere, taught to value, and it’s the story that defines whether our lives have worth or our lives do not. It is the defining moral purpose of the culture that birthed us, and in which our identities are formed and shaped.

It’s fiercely seductive, and I’m not immune to the siren song of bright and shiny things.

But that story of ever rising power and wealth isn’t entirely true. What is the DJIA but Standard and Poors telling the tale of a government that prints more and more money, and businesses that print more and more stocks to absorb that new money into the portfolios of the privileged?

More notably, for those of us who follow Jesus, how much does Mammon's peculiarly self-serving mathematics shape how we live out our lives as disciples?

Who's Your Daddy

Once or twice every year, I rent a car for pleasure.  This last January, it was a huge Chevy Tahoe, which I used to blast my way through the snow that paralyzed the MidAtlantic for a few days.

The itch has been going again recently, that desire to try something different, to do the Obvious Midlife Crisis thing and rent something radically different from our trusty and perfectly practical Hondas for a few days.

It being the weekend of Father's Day, I settled in on a Beemer, a BMW 840i Coupe with XDrive.  It's a handsomely sleek broad-shouldered thing, the sort of vehicle one would expect to be driven by a gym-sculpted CryptoBro or the trust-fund offspring of an oligarch.  

A small church pastor behind the wheel?  It's a little anomalous, I'll admit. 

It's sleek and shiny, with fat tires and a modified exhaust that snorts and burbles in unabashedly juvenile ways.  More notably, the exhaust uncorks more power from BMW's excellent B58 three litre inline six, which sings in a rich pure tenor whenever you press the go pedal.  The part of me that's still twelve finds it delightful.

It is also, apparently, a provocation.

In my history of car rentals, there's a certain type of car...Camaros, Mustangs, and Dodge Challengers...that stirs a response in other vehicles of that species.  These are the cars with big potent engines, free-breathing vee-eights with burbling, snorting exhausts, the kinds of cars I drew in my notebook in math class when I was a sophomore in high school.

Muscle cars, in other words, the cars that flex and grunt and announce to the world on a Saturday night:  "I am stronger than you."  Get two of them together, it's like a pair of bull-elks in rut.  The strong instinct is to bellow and to butt heads.

To them, a glistening and modded BMW eight series is like dark red blood in the water.  

I can't remember a vehicle I've driven that has stirred more aggression responses.  The Escalade that kept roaring past me.  The Mustang GT that pulled in front and made several futile attempts to induce me to race.  The lowered and cat-backed eight year old Lexus that snarled past, the driver shouting "GOGOGOGOGO!"  The Dodge Charger that, passing me, just revved and revved and revved.  

It is, I suppose, just a facet of driving a big Beemer.  It's not just that it says, "I am stronger than you," but also that it whispers to the lesser muscle car owner: "And I am wealthier than you."  I'm not just displaying that I'm loud and fast.  I'm loud and fast and rich, which would make me the most annoying person on the road.

Not that I'm driving the car that way.  I'm using my turn signals (BMWs do have them).  I'm letting people merge in front of me, and generally not living into the stereotype.  I am, during the rental...er..."driving vigorously."  I may have been listening to Rammstein a little more than usual.  But never cutting people off, or tailgating.

Why do we enjoy power?  Is it from the desire to dominate or control, to prove oneself superior to others?

Or is it for the pleasure of competence and a finely made machine, of the sound and feel of a well tuned engine and the sweetness of a Southern summer Sunday night?

Mint and Lavender Tea

Every year, my little garden yields something new.

Last year, at my congregation's annual Gardenfest, I purchased some lavender.  There wasn't really any particular plan behind that purchase, other than that I saw some lavender and thought to myself, "Ooh.  That sounds nice to have."

I brought it home, where I replanted it in a large pot smack in the middle of my mint patch.  I'd received some donated mint many years ago, and it quickly did what mint does.  What had been a drab patch of elephant grass soon was eighty percent mint, and this was fine.  I made some potent juleps for a while, which were delicious and heady and oh so Southern, but also perhaps not the best habit to get into on the regular.  

What might I do instead?  I thought on it for a while, and came up with the idea of drying it for tea.  I would dehydrate and save those leaves, and from them would make for myself potfuls of mint tea come winter.

That was the idea, at least.  I promptly forgot about it until the mint had wholly died off in the late Fall.

But spring comes again, and as the mint renewed itself to the point of needing aggressive cutting back a month ago, I realized I might have another tea option.

The lavender had done surprisingly well for itself in the thick of the mint, the little purple blossoms popping up all throughout that fierce green sea of leaves.  Perhaps I should consider making mint and lavender tea, I thought.  That seemed like it might be a thing.  I looked it up, and indeed it was.

So one evening recently, as cool air returned following an unseasonable warmth, I stepped off my front porch to inspect that portion of my modest herb garden.  Was it brisk enough to justify tea?  That night, the answer was yes.

I plucked two lavender blossoms and a much larger handful of fresh mint leaves, which I then crushed using the very technical process of just squishin' 'em with my hands.  That fragrant mass made it's way into a finely-wrought metal straining basket, which popped neatly into a glass pot.  Water was boiled, and poured into the pot.  It steeped for a while, until the liquid within took on a light golden greenish hue.

I poured myself a mugful, and took a tentative sip.  

Strongly minty, with a hint of lavender, just as one might expect.  It had a satisfyingly fresh brightness to it, so after I finished my first mug, I poured myself another, and sat out on the porch in the crispness of early nightfall and sipped at it for a while.

I have, over the years, grown many things with varying degrees of success.  But this was the first time I'd had herbal tea from my own garden.  It was delightful.

Every year, it's a new blessing.

Work and the World

Some work, or so our culture tells us, is of less value than others.

There’s a lot of chatter about the relative value of work these days, particularly as large language models and generative pretrained transformers start taking over more and more of what used to be the jobs of recent college grads. Given agency, the most advanced models can handle almost any formerly white collar task. They can code better than we can code, which is one of the reasons why in 2026, tech companies like Amazon and Meta have so far shed nearly a hundred and fifty thousand jobs.

But it goes further. Agentic AI can work a project through to completion, it can create and manage customer interfaces online, it can manage your appointments, and it can do all of that and more if you pay the corporation that owns it a mere $100 a month.

These systems can also write and edit, create music in any genre and theme, and create images and videos and movies.

And people say, hey, why are we doing this? Shouldn’t we have them do the things we don’t like to do and that don’t pay well? According to that way of thinking, we want robots to clean our houses and mow our lawns and scrub our toilets and do our dishes, some say. Let them work in the warehouses and let them drive us around and let them deliver our packages and pizzas, let them plant and harvest the crops from our fields.

Just leave the important work to human beings, the meaningful and truly creative work, or so goes the chatter of the chattering classes.

Simply replace physical labor with humanoid machines, ones that would step into the joyless place of countless grim factory shift-workers and itinerant farm laborers, all of whom are little more than cogs in an industrial machine.

I watched with fascination recently as the algorithms tried to pitch me that very idea.

It was a livestream from a robotics company called Figure, in which a small team of androids worked sorting packages onto a conveyor belt. Every package had to be sorted and placed label-side-down onto the conveyor, which they did without blinking or talking or doing anything but that mindless task. Because we love our anthropomorphization, each had name tags, and “Frank” ran in the background for an entire day, stopping only to go charge up while “Gary” the robot took over. Those humanoid robots worked nonstop for one hundred and ninety one hours, handing nearly two hundred and forty thousand packages. Not a single complaint, not a bit of gossiping about their programmers, and not a single worry about health care if they tweaked a muscle in their back.

Why not automate all such tasks, the moving and sorting of objects from one place to another?

Surely there’s no particular gift or blessing that such a blindly simple action can express, no reason God would look on that kind of action and say that it was very good. I’m sure there are countless underpaid factory workers around the world who would concur that, given the option, they might prefer to spend their time doing something else.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that is always true. I mean, can we think of a time when we move things from place to place, that we sort and measure and prepare with hands and arms and backs, that might have positive moral weight?

I can.

I think of the souls from my little church filling community garden beds with dirt, and filling backpacks with food for kids. I think of the simple labor of stocking shelves with food for our Little Free Pantry. I think of the folks who assembled the playground that now memorializes a child of the church. I think of the care that keeps our facility hospitable to those we are hosting, like painting walls or repairing a broken lock? All of those actions, simple and physical and real, are part of God’s good work.

Any action, done with gracious purpose, is part of God’s work.  That our culture values meetings and accounting and finance more than harvesting and repairing, caring and making things?  It's just a mark of our fallen and sinful nature.

As we act and move and do things in the world, there is work that…for the well-being of our souls…we shouldn’t look down on, or set aside for our ease or convenience.

Seven Forms of the Small Church

Small churches can be wonderful, delightful, and a blessing to the world, but they're not all cut from the same cloth.  Precisely the opposite, in fact.  Unlike larger churches, which rely on replicable models and systems, little churches take forms unique to their particular local environment.  They're as unique as the fluttering variety of little finches that Darwin once marveled at as he toured the Galapagos.  Each is subtly but meaningfully different.

That said, there are notable similarities between teeny tiny Jesus gatherings, types of small church that share features with one another.   One of the best typologies I've come across in my years of serving and studying the small church was created by David R. Ray, a Congregationalist pastor, author, and scholar.  In his classic book The Indispensable Guide for Smaller Churches, Ray lays out seven different ways we can do small together.  

I've found it useful, because self-understanding is always useful, and I figure it's worth sharing.  Let's take a look at Ray's thinking about what forms little churches can take:

1) Semper Minor.  That's the motto emblazoned on the crest of a particular type of church, and it just means "Always Small."   As Ray describes it, these are the churches that have just always been the size they are, and they're completely copacetic with it.  They know who they are, and what they are is just fine.  They're not bothered by their size, and the comfort they feel in their own skin makes them tough, resilient, faithful, and effective.

2) The Remnant.  This church was once many times larger than it is now.  It tends older, and is often paired with a sanctuary or facility that it fits into the way your five year old feet fit into your mom or dad's shoes when you snuck into their room and tried them on.  They are lost in memories of what was, and wish they could bring back the day when those pews were filled and they moved powerfully in the world.   "Back in the day," they sigh, "things were better."

3)  The Startup.  Ray describes these gatherings as “Not Yet Large.” Sure, there are only twenty souls gathered, but they're only six months old.  They've been planted in a mushrooming ‘burb by a charismatic leader with a good plan to tap local energies.  They've got a strong online presence, often have connections to an existing ministry that understands evangelism, and all the trappings of a big church in microcosm.  They'll either blossom or wither on the vine, but growth is their goal and big is their aim.

4) Small on Purpose.  These are the Christian gatherings that Ray calls "intentionally small."   They're not unfriendly, but they have a very disciplined and particular way of life, with high thresholds for entry and a demanding set of commitments for continuing participation.  Monastic/Neomonastic communities and collectivist intentional communities where goods are shared inhabit this category.  They're authentic, intense, and by design they ain't for everyone.

5) Islas Etnicas.  These "ethnic islands" provide a home away from home for displaced people, and as immigrant, refugee, or expatriate gatherings, they offer a place of welcome and cultural familiarity.  They are particular blessings to Christians who are FOB (fresh off the boat), as they offer a safe place in which a new arrival can find their bearings.  Unlike most other forms of small congregation, they're not representative of the larger community in which they find themselves.

6) The Clan. These churches tend to form in rural areas, and have their pews filled by the extended bloodlines of one or two families who live nearby.  Although they can be perfectly friendly to folks visiting, and can do good work in the surrounding community, the only way you really become a member is through birth, marriage, or intimate relationship.  They're as robust as the families that comprise them.  Or as dysfunctional.  

7) The Schismatics.  These churches are defined by their constant state of conflict, driven by power-oriented leaders who prevent growth to maintain control.  Who are they in conflict with?  Their denominations.  The other side in the Culture Wars.  Anyone who crosses the pastor or his wife.  They can be strangely attractive to people who hunger for drama in their lives.  Ever see the Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man?  There are really churches like that one.  Well, maybe not quite that bad, but close.

Obviously, some of these categories are more inherently healthy of soul than others.  Schismatics are driven by the energies of conflict, and aren't generally healthy places to spend time.  Each of the others has a purpose, and some share paradoxical similarities.  A Remnant church can often be as separate from the life of the community around it as an Isla Etnica, for example.

If we are collectively sentient enough to shape the communities in which we live, I tend to think that we should work our little gatherings so's they have all the best features of Size 1 churches and Size 4 churches.   Combine a sense of Gospel purpose and integrating intent with a comfortable, confident resilience, and you've got quite a blessing.

If you're interested in more of David Ray's writing and thinking, definitely give his Indispensable Guide a look.