Another week, another church to visit

(UNDATED) Growing up, Suzanne Strempek Shea was warned by priests and nuns not to step foot in a Protestant church or else the “roof would fall in and we’d go to hell.” Which, in a way, helps explain why Shea decided to spend a year on the road visiting 50 churches, a different one every […]

(RNS4-MAR24) Book jacket for “Sundays in America” by Suzanne Strempek Shea. For use with RNS-SUNDAYS-BOOK, transmitted March 24, 2009. Religion News Service photo.

(RNS4-MAR24) Book jacket for “Sundays in America” by Suzanne Strempek Shea. For use with RNS-SUNDAYS-BOOK, transmitted March 24, 2009. Religion News Service photo.

(UNDATED) Growing up, Suzanne Strempek Shea was warned by priests and nuns not to step foot in a Protestant church or else the “roof would fall in and we’d go to hell.”


Which, in a way, helps explain why Shea decided to spend a year on the road visiting 50 churches, a different one every week.

Always a questioner, Shea gradually drifted from the Catholic faith of her youth until she was touched by the death of the charismatic Pope John Paul II — especially the faith and passion exhibited by the millions of mourners at his wake and funeral.

“I realized that while I knew this man had been the head of my church, I had no idea who ran the other types,” Shea says. “Do Quakers have a pope? As a writer, I thought I might visit all types.”

The result, a kaleidoscopic view of American Christianity, will be released in paperback April 1. The hardback version of the book, “Sundays in America,” was published by Beacon Press last year.

“It was for her and is for readers a captivating trip into the heart of non-Catholic Christian America that reveals the amazing diversity of one complex faith,” the periodical Book List said in an early review.

Shea is a veteran writer; she began her early career writing for newspapers in Springfield, Mass., and Providence, R.I. She has also written two memoirs, including one on dealing with and surviving breast cancer.


In her latest work, few ways of being Christian escape Shea’s notice.

The book introduces readers to Quakers and Shakers, evangelicals and Mormons, cowboys and truckers. Shea’s searching took her from the American Southwest, where she visited the Hopi nation, to the Appalachian Mountains to the coast of Maui in Hawaii.

“I tried to capture the vastness of the choices and the variety of the places,” Shea says, recalling the lack of diversity among the Christians she encountered in childhood.

“As a kid I had no idea about — or in my rural village ever saw — synagogues or mosques,” says Shea, who still lives in her native state of Maine. “The only churches I knew about, other than my own, were the ones I was told to not enter.

“And there are plenty of those — 34,000 types of Protestant churches in one estimate; 2,000 alone in North America.”

As she planned her research, she found she had too many to choose from. “I selected those I’d see on any corner in my New England village — Methodist, Church of Christ, Episcopalian — and also those I’d stumbled upon in research.”

For example, she determined to deepen her understanding of Baptists by traveling to Plains, Ga., to attend Maranatha Baptist Church and sit in on former President Jimmy Carter’s Sunday school class.


For a firsthand view of how believers were affected by and helping minister to victims of Hurricane Katrina, she worshipped at Lagniappe Presbyterian Church in Bay St. Louis, Miss., which is housed inside a former hot-tub showroom.

To check out the world of the megachurch, she traveled to preacher/author Joel Osteen’s 16,000-seat megachurch in Houston. To understand the multiple stripes and types of American believers, she also took time to visit a Shaker meetinghouse in Maine where the community has dwindled to four souls.

While researching the book, Shea chatted with a cousin who had belonged to various churches. “We were at a music hall and he began moving the glasses on the table, all in various directions, but definitely toward the other side of the table, where they met.”

Shea saw it as a way of explaining multiple paths to the same destination.

“The many different religions take people in their own directions, he said, but we all want the same thing: to get to heaven. In the churches I visited, I found that goal to be true — salvation and also gathering to praise God and be thankful, to ask for blessings.”

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