NEW: About welcoming

["Robert Dickow" <dickow@uidaho.edu>]

Completely new and/or off-topic:

For a period of some weeks during my youth, I went with a friend of mine
around the San Francisco bay area to various churches on Sunday mornings. We
simply showed up at service time. We did this purely on a lark. I am
Catholic, my friend is Jewish. We were simply curious about how various
folks went about their Sunday worship.

Among the several churches we attended, two experiences were most memorable.
The worst was at a (xxx...denomination withheld to protect feelings) church,
which had a locked door for some reason. We knocked at were met by someone
who asked what we wanted. We explained we wanted to come to service. The
individual looked at us for a moment, and then literally slammed the door in
our faces.

The other church (again, denomination withheld) was quite nice. Their
service was splendid and the music was terrific, and nobody seemed to notice
us. That is, until the service was over. At that point, about  a half dozen
people approached us and welcomed us personally to church or greeted us as
they passed, and asked us friendly and inquisitive questions. They were
genuinely caring and really nice.

It seemed to give me an impression that sometimes what one would ordinarily
take to be the same sort of folk, when forming groups of various kinds and
gathering together, sure can turn out to be different in the way they behave
and react to others. Holistics?

Bob Dickow