After some posts dealing with very gloomy matters, I feel that something more cheerful is in order (if only to cheer myself up—these days I shy away from opening the newspaper in the morning—an experience probably shared by some of my readers). As often happens to me, a minor news item sent me off musing about broader matters.
On September 15, 2014, Religion News Service carried a story about the following incident: The Reverend Johnnie Clark is pastor of Rehobeth United Assemblies, a Pentecostal church in Columbia, South Carolina. He was sentenced in municipal court to one day in jail for the misdemeanor of “public nuisance”, in this instance consisting of repeated violations of city noise limits. [I don’t know anything about municipal statutes in South Carolina. But I had to think about a local law in Massachusetts I encountered when my family and I used to spend summers in the Berkshires. The town we stayed in had a weekly newspaper that, among other things, reported on cases tried in municipal court. One misdemeanor that came up regularly was for an offence called “making unnecessary noise”. I loved that concept, and since then have regretted not living where such a law is enforced!] The Columbia church of the story has been in this location for twenty-five years without any problems, but noise emanating from its worship services has been bothering owners of newly built houses on the same street (could it be a case of gentrification?). The story specifies the offending noise as “singing and shouting, dancing and drumming “, as is characteristic of Pentecostal worship. When complaints started to come in, Pastor Clark asked in an interview “How can you declare a church to be a public nuisance?” After he ignored numerous citations, the heavy hand of the City of Columbia finally descended on him. I will stipulate that during his day behind bars he was treated with the courtesy customarily accorded a man of the cloth in this very religious part of the country; I have not followed up the story, thus do not know whether in the meantime the pastor and his congregation have been limiting themselves to decibel levels deemed acceptable in polite society.
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