Church (part II)

Last night I attended Scum of the Earth Church (SOTEC) in Denver for the first time. I was invited by my former boss, who is one of the church's pastors, and her boyfriend, another of the church's pastors who was preaching last night.

SOTEC meets in a super funky building that used to be a church and then was home to an artist of some kind and is now a church again. The artist who used to live there used basically the whole building his art studio. There's random glass and tile mosaics on the floors and on the walls of the bathrooms, and different paintings and designs on the walls, and photograph collages and other artsy fartsy kinds of things. It's a totally cool building that completely fits SOTEC's congregation. It's made up of 20- and 30-somethings, for the most part, but there are also plenty of older people. When worship began last night there were two gentlemen sitting behind me who seemed to either be high, be drunk, or have some kind of mental disability (it very well could have been a combination). At one point they started crying and repeating the words we were singing to each other. We would sing, "God is faithful," and the men would affirm to themselves, "He is SO faithful! God is faithful to us, isn't he? And you know Jesus, he's our savior!" It was cool. These men, in just about any other church I've ever been to, would have been scolded in the minds of everyone around them for being inappropriate and distracting, but not at Scum. There, they're just loved.

It was also the only church I've ever attended where upon leaving I saw a couple of shopping carts holding the earthly possessions of a couple of the attendees. In my one visit to SOTEC, I got the feeling that they truly take care of the "least of these." Cool.

(This post could also be much longer... but it won't be. I'll probably refer to this stuff in the future.)