December 3, 2012
Monday

When I planned out my Holidailies ideas for this year, I made a decision to make at least 20% of the posts non-Christmas related, although since I write about my ordinary life as a suburban wife and mother and friend and community member (who also happens to be a fiction writer), and it is the holiday season, I knew that might be a challenge. Tonight I find myself at just about midnight on the third day of Holidailies unable to do much except give a summary of the issue it took me two hours earlier to explain in a letter to the township commissioner for my area.

I have lived in this house since 1976. It was built on a tract that had once been a farmer’s field. Property at the top of the hill is still being farmed, and the tree line that marked the boundary between this tract and the field to the south is still there, although there are no longer bits of the board fence still standing.

In about 1993, the tract to the south was sold, and a church that had outgrown its city block built a new facility there. I considered us fortunate because the part of the tract directly bordering our property was left as a grassy meadow. We lived in harmony with that congregation until 2000, when their denomination began strengthening their ministry to Spanish-speaking members whose style of worship was a bit different from the staid and solemn American Protestant style the parent congregation used. I wrote about my first encounter with the problems that this style of worship can cause here, and reading it again after a long time, I am struck by how cavalier and arrogant the pastor was toward me.

As it happens, the pastor may have been generally cavalier and arrogant with a lot of people. A schism developed among the members, and the congregation disbanded. That was in about 2004. The building was sold to another congregation, and that’s when the trouble really began. In the past eight years there have been at least four different groups that have occupied that site, each of them using a more “robust” style of worship than the last. Each congregation brought along with it other problems as well. Although they were very sincere people who loved the Lord and wanted to help people become their best selves, they were much better at praying and preaching than they were at raising money and keeping themselves solvent. The last congregation especially struggled with this, letting the property deteriorate and causing drainage problems for several homeowners on the border (but not for us).

Now a new congregation has moved into the building. Problems began with their first event, a celebration service that shook our windows and rattled our walls. I walked over there that Saturday afternoon and asked them if they were aware of just how loud and intrusive their event was for us. I had to ask someone to step out into the porte-cochere with me because she could not hear me in the vestibule. I still had to shout so she could hear me outside. The woman seemed not to understand what the problem was. “We’re having a church service,” she said.

The problem with the noise from the building is not entirely one of volume, although it is loud. It is one of percussion. They use amplified drums and bass guitars, and they place the musicians on a dais in front of a stained glass window that faces out toward our property. The thumping of the drums (and an instrument that makes a sound Ron calls a moose fart) makes the window and the metal roof of the building vibrate, and the waves travel a canyon created by the trees and our houses, and then reverberate off the long wall of our family room. We can not only hear the beat, we can feel it.

We had an informal agreement with the former congregation that had them place the drum set and the other instruments away from the walls and the windows. That helped some. But since October, when this new congregation, when its drums and bass guitars and tambourines arrived, the problem has gotten worse.

Their music department practices on Friday nights from 6:30 to 9:00. On the last Friday of each month there is a “Victory Vigil” prayer service that goes from 9:00 to midnight. Worship services take place from 9:00 on Sunday mornings until about 1:00 in the afternoon. There is a program of some sort in the building every single day of the week besides Friday and Sunday, but we never hear anything at all at those times.

Efforts to engage the congregation in discussion about this have been unsuccessful. I have written to them, using their website’s contact form, because their email doesn’t work. The pastor did call me once, about three weeks ago. This was an awkward conversation for me. The leadership, and I suppose most of the members, are from Nigeria, and their speech is difficult for me to understand. Further, it is difficult to express my unhappiness with the way their worship style, which is shaped by important cultural differences, affects me without the risk of sounding racist or bigoted.

So tonight I wrote to our area representative. She was helpful when several of us approached her with concerns about the way the neglect that the former congregation let happen was affecting our property. We’ll see what happens.

This was something of a downer post, a sighing over my annoyance with noisy neighbors. At least it wasn’t about Christmas!