c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

UNDATED _”I can’t count how many miles I have walked from my house up the hill to this church,”says the woman.

In a Sunday School reflection on her faith journey, she also talks about chasing snakes in Goshen Swamp in East Carolina, learning to embrace integration, and pastors who touched her life.

But it is her description of years spent walking up the hill to church and down the hill to her home that lingers in my mind. For it speaks to a world I have heard about but rarely known.

It’s more than a matter of neighborhood. I know plenty about neighborhoods: rushing out the door to play, walking to school, walking to the corner drug store, growing up amid attentive grownups, making our own magical kingdoms in backyard tree houses.

On Sunday, however, it all changed. Call it brand loyalty. The Roman Catholics drove five blocks north to Immaculate Heart of Mary. My family and one other drove 20 blocks south to Trinity Episcopal. Other families piled into station wagons and went to places labeled Methodist and Presbyterian.

To the best of my knowledge, not a soul walked one block east to the little Lutheran church or one block south to the church whose name we never knew.

This was the heyday of denominationalism. We never saw each other at prayer. My playmates didn’t see me sing in the boys’ choir; I didn’t see them in catechism class. If we ventured together onto church property, it was to play sports.

There was a profound disconnect between life and faith. We were loyal to a brand of religion. But I don’t recall ever seeing my friends as believers, as people for whom faith was any kind of non-Sabbath reality. If anything, religion was a nuisance, an obstacle to our playtime.

I never saw my pastor walking around the neighborhood. He touched my life one hour a week.

Our speaker tells a different story. She started out a country Methodist, because that was the church near home. When they moved to Charlotte, a Presbyterian congregation was nearby. When she moved to Durham, N.C., she found Watts Street Church one block away.

Another woman of the same era describes a similar journey: Her family worshipped in whatever church happened to be nearby. The point wasn’t denomination, but the connection between life and faith.

What I have known is church-shopping. We drive here and there, looking for a congregation that meets our self-defined needs. We screen preachers for agreeable doctrine. We evaluate nursery cleanliness, choral quality and Sunday School energy.

We shop for religion in the same way we shop for cars. Take a test drive, kick the tires, bargain with the seller, try never to lose control. Then we parade our selection, as if it set us apart. We demand good service.

All week we go from parking lot to parking lot, and one of those lots happens to be outside a church. Sometimes we chat in the parking lot while the engine warms up; sometimes we just drive to another lot.

Then we wonder why the era seems so secular, and we decide the answer is to post the Ten Commandments on public school walls, alongside fire drill instructions. How could our era be anything other than secular when we compartmentalize faith and make it like ballet lessons and trips to the mall _ that is, something one plans and drives to, not a serendipitous walk in which God can surprise us?

One town ago, I could walk to church. I never agreed with their doctrine and never adopted their brand, but what is doctrine or label? I treasured their friendship, felt close to God and enjoyed the walk.

When I walk out the door of church this morning, I feel the disconnect immediately. I don’t want to get in my car and drive home. I want to walk home, see fellow worshipers sitting on their porches, walk with the elderly woman and ask her more about snakes in Goshen Swamp, wave to my pastor.

Not because I yearn for the past, but because I find the disconnect between faith and life a burden.

DEA END EHRICH