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Escaping the collapse

25/8/2026

A university student witnesses different Protestant and Catholic expressions of faith

2025 – Protestant church service in Minnesota

The lobby here has self-help kiosks like the airport. They have a book and merch store with a cashier and everything. It is a megachurch. This is only one of the campuses, and supposedly not even the largest. I've been invited here for a Christmas-Eve-Eve service, and I'm trying my best to be generous. I had a discussion before this with someone in leadership there, and I’m trying not to remember how they proudly said that they have intentionally engineered their service to be maximally entertaining via music, lights, and digital aids to cater to the shortened attention span of younger generations who might rather spend their time doing something more stimulating than sitting through a traditional church service. It’s hard to not sound like a snob when you’re trying to politely argue against something being as entertaining as it can possibly be.

I don’t go to many concerts, but I'm fairly sure the lighting rig is concert-level tech. The huge spotlights smoothly swing and swivel across the stage and audience as the musicians get on stage. Everyone remains sitting as they launch into a classic from American hymnody: “Jingle Bell Rock.” The woman singing has an amazing voice, and the guitarist crushes several crazy licks in between the verses. It’s some of the best live music I've ever heard, and visually, it's incredible – the screens, the fog, the performance. It is a spectacle of the highest order.

Guiltily, I’m enjoying myself. They follow up with “Silent Night,” which placates what feels like a petty instinct to at least have the word “Christ” or “God” get sung at some point. I am rebuked by remembered words: “He who loves men, loves their joy”. These people are having a good time, and I am pouting.

The preacher is not here in body but here in spirit – and on screen, which is arranged, very convincingly, to position him as if he really was walking around on stage. With the lights dimmed, I actually forgot about this until they turned him off. Tony, the guy I talked to, said they stream their pastor because it is unifying, and that the singularity in leadership ensures that everyone who goes to a branch of this church, anywhere in the Twin Cities, will hear the same message, be shepherded with total equality, and will hopefully never be put in a position of being led astray by a contrary or unorthodox word. The preacher was undeniably great, and he preached the gospel. Still, I wonder how my church, numbering about eighty souls per service, manages to rustle up five or six regulars to speak, while this congregation of thousands can only find one.

But, as much as I want this to be a cut-and-dry verdict, there’s a hair in the soup. The hair is that my girlfriend, whose faith I love and respect, was led to Christ here. Despite my suspicion that I could probably walk into this Church every Sunday for a year with one of those high-visibility construction vests and never be noticed, she came here and was both seen and loved.

Leaving the service, we both laugh that there is a full-time cashier manning a merchandise shop in the lobby. To us, that's a little weird. I apologize if your church has a merch corner.

Maybe it's more normal than I’m aware of. What they are doing is bringing people in. After all, this is a Tuesday night, and there are more people in this lobby than you could fit in my church using a trash compactor. And I know that, for least one person – a person I love – this place was the body of Christ.

2022 – Basilica in France

My buddy Nate and I wait in the enormous line and feel like idiot tourists. At least we have the satisfaction of making it to this point without buying anything with an Eiffel Tower on it. The peddlers are all speaking English because they know their target audience. I am an American, but Nate is a Canadian, and he is carrying a AirCanada bag with a big maple leaf on it, which, by association, somehow eases the guilt of tourism. But here, on the steps of a famous church, we are all tourists, and it feels more like home. A busker plays “Stand by Me” and collects a mountain of cash in his guitar case. He has a whole set up with a microphone and amp, and he’s really good. Something about the scene feels perverse.

The place is breathtaking – so large, it doesn’t feel like it quite qualifies as indoors. A massive Christ stretches his arms across the ceiling as the golden-haloed saints look on in painted wonder. The endless ranks of pews stretch all the way down to the altar, but only about three people are seated. The rest, like us, mingle at the back or walk around the sides trying to get the perfect angle, brazenly, unashamedly, taking in this tremendous sight through the lens of cameras and cellphones, looking up at the ceiling and the stained glass, then looking down at our pictures. This whole atmosphere creates a kind of nervous silence, where everyone is falling over each other for a picture, yet trying to sustain, with mixed success, an awkward solemnity and reverence. As one counted among this number on multiple occasions, I know this behavior is inevitable; a building like this is an absurdity, it is so unlike the rest of the world.

How could you not take as many pictures as you possibly could? Yes, there are photos on Google (that are probably much better than yours anyway), but they aren’t yours, and it is important that you were there in a way that I think is not entirely self-centered; it’s important to witness marvels and to remember them.

This is not to say that there isn’t something ugly about a cathedral filled with tourists. We are struck by the unlikeness to our places, and its unlikeness to us. We take pictures of buildings like this in the same way we would photograph a crashed UFO: not out of an awareness of its significance or meaning, but because it is different and strange. Maybe the ugliness comes from this–that an impossible labor of devotion and beauty has been degraded to novelty. Maybe that is why the guy singing “Stand by Me” feels so off. Yes, it's recognizable, it's familiar. We understand “Stand by Me”. But he’s on the steps of something utterly otherworldly, and he’s singing about a girl.

2022 – Sweden, Växjö Cathedral

Its most striking feature is the double spire, sprouting up like twins–a product of mitosis.
We walk inside the doors but don’t go any further. There are just two people inside. One woman is playing a flute, and the other is listening.

2022 – Sweden, Vetlanda State Church

I came with a few friends, but we all spoke English. The service was in Swedish. The only other people there were a few very old Swedes. There are more people on stage than there are in the pews. There is a small choir and a swath of clergy in vestments. After a short liturgy, there are hymns. The number is up on the board and we flip to the song in the hymnals. We try our best. There is something freeing about sitting through a church service that you can’t understand. Without the words, you notice the actions – the tenderness with which a candle is lit by old hands. Without understanding words, faces get easier to read. The woman giving the homily smiles at us whenever she pans to our uncomprehending faces. The choir of teenagers is definitely forced to be here. They are wondering who we are; this is a small town.

I can also look around at the mural. This church isn't a cathedral by any means, but the walls are very tall and there are a few arches. A mural has been painted around the entire church, and it’s very ambitious. The woman with the white hair comes up to us after the service and speaks to us in perfect English, telling us that an eccentric minister commissioned the mural in the early 1900s. It must have been local talent – the mural isn’t great. The figures are clumsy, and the dimensions of some of the finer details must not have been properly measured out. Each of the Gospel writers and some of the Old Testament prophets have little nooks between pillars and in corners, squashed or distended into their nooks. Happy indulging our curiosity, the minister takes us to the very back of the church, and points out an odd figure, almost eclipsed by the organ. Among the painted Israelites and Roman soldiers, there is a man playing a grand piano. For some reason his hair is flying around like the guy on the Kansas album covers. She explains that this was the minister who commissioned the mural, and that he had himself painted in.

2023 – Prauge, St. Vitus Cathedral

Out of all the cathedrals we stumbled into, St. Vitus’ was the most fearsome. Its exterior is blackened from centuries of existence at a time when you had to burn something for light, and then later, from the smoke produced by industrialization. The waterspouts that guide water off the sides of the roof are fashioned to look like shafts speared through stone humanoids, protruding out of their gaping throats. It's the first time I've seen real gargoyles outside of cartoons or other pop-culture renditions. The ones on the side of St. Vitus are monstrous, like the ones I've been shown. But there are others that I have not seen, that work their magic not from monstrosity, but from agony. There are the usual demonic faces here, but there are also much worse human faces, faces contorted into pain and hate. The idea of frightening someone into a church feels ridiculous in our age, but seeing them in real life, I am transfigured, in my inner self, into a medieval peasant, suddenly experiencing a disturbingly unprotestant urge to cross myself and mutteringly shuffle into the safety of the cathedral.

The place is magnificent. Construction started in 1344, and you can tell they took their sweet time. Not an inch is without adornment, and in Gothic style, it's ridiculously busy from head to toe. The walls tell histories, theologies, and patronages. The church is the product of centuries of never-ceasing stonework, glasswork, woodwork — authroized and unauthorized.

Ancient saints bear unmistakable 21st century graffiti on the hems of their robes: “_ ♡’s _” and “ __ was here” and ordinary profanity. It's chaos. Your eye cannot rest in a place like this — every square inch has been given something clamoring for attention. This is not helped by the size. Nate observes that it's actually impossible to take in the whole thing at once. Because the ceiling is so high, you can’t quite get an angle where you can see the floor and the ceiling at the same time without moving your head.

I wonder what growing up in a church like this would be like. Growing up in churches with bare, Baptist walls, I think I would have delighted in a place like this. It’s hard to tune out of a sermon when all you have is a cross and, God willing, a window. I distinctly remember trying to work with what I had: if that light fixture fell, who would it crush? What if a firetruck drove into the stage? Maybe they took all this stuff away because they did want people to listen to the sermon. But if that can’t be helped, wouldn't it be better to be in a place like this — a place that had sermons all over the place? Weirdly, the busyness of St. Vitus is quieting and reverential.

Once the deep Protestant fear of having an emotional response triggered by a thing melts away a little bit, I can see a place like the Prague Cathedral for what it is: a place of stories, lovingly and fearfully told.

2023 – Sweden, Kiruna Church

It’s a strange place to begin with—Kiruna is nearly a hundred miles into the Arctic circle and has, by official decree, no future. It was eighteen hours by train, but the tickets were cheap. The sleeper cabin fit exactly three, and not an atom more. When all three cots were flipped down in a triple-decker bunk bed arrangement, the room was transformed into a sardine tin. The line from Stockholm up to Kiruna has banked rails, so each cot was equipped with a horizontal seatbelt that is intended to prevent dumping passengers into bed together, but that, when each person is in their bed and strapped into the distinctively utilitarian arrangement, gives the impression of an impending blast-off. We eventually found our way, by way of boredom rather than hunger, to a deserted dining car that was solely graced by a vending machine that dispensed microwave meals; featuring an option of Reindeer stew—a feeble stab at the base tourist greed for novelty—that we happily indulged. The most striking sight visible by the train windows is the mine. The brutalist figure of anore processing plant juts into view as the tallest point on the horizon, perched on top of Kiirunavaara, a small mountain overlooking Kiruna. The mountain is ugly–almost completely collapsed from the inside.

The Kiruna Church, though, is special. It sits in the middle of town in the center of a small park, which is, for most of the year, completely covered with snow. We saw it through the trees before we saw the signs, as its facade stood out starkly against the white landscape. The exterior is incredible, and the entire church is painted a deep red, accented with golden statues of saints that stand at the corners of the steep roof. Its bell tower is strikingly painted the same color, and the two buildings are a wonder of woodwork–both carved with a meticulous, overlapping, scaled pattern.

We were there very early and weren’t sure if the church would even be open yet. Trying the door, it opened and we walked into the completely empty church. There were no lights, and the only light came in from the windows in the very top of the church–the shafts illuminating drifting dust. The smell of the wood was rich. We walked quietly up to the front of the church, and without any parishioners to disturb, we quietly walked directly up to the altarpiece. Its style is unusual, and a massive, impressionistic painting hangs above behind the altar in a dark frame. The whole interior is made of the same dark wood, which makes the bright painting seem almost luminescent. The scene is unconventionally simple despite the huge canvas: six huge beams of sunlight shine down onto a grove of trees.

Without having to wait in a line or jostle past people for photos, the experience of being in a beautiful church is very different alone. Each of us was moved, quietly, to prayer. We sat like that for probably ten minutes before the font doors banged open. A tour bus had arrived. This time, we weren't the tourists. They were loud and took pictures with the flash on–the whole nine yards. Funny enough, they were actually Swedish and not Americans. Sweden, though possessing a rich history of faith, is statistically one of the most atheistic countries in the world, and there wasn’t a church we went into that wasn’t practically empty. As the group is laughing loudly about something, and walking down the aisle toward us, they go quiet for a moment as they pass our pew, before returning to their outside voices. It feels like we’ve been caught praying in a church. One of them steps over the altar rail.

Though we were all three students in Sweden, and had been here for almost a year, we couldn't shake the tourist feeling. Having to constantly ask “Do you speak English?”, or getting mixed up in train stations, or trying to pay with cash in cashless society will always remind you that this is not where you belong. At first, it's part of the adventure, but eventually it becomes grating. It's like the feeling of being a guest in someone else's house–just greatly extended.

After eight months, this moment in the church was like a breath of fresh air. For once, we understood.

For once, we belonged here.

Easter Sunday 2025 - Colorado, Church of the Advent

This is not how I grew up. The priest is a priest, and not a preacher. Some people call him “Father”. I’m not quite there yet. The church has a small bell tower. Finally, they were ringing again–there were bees living in it. The church is small, and the pews creak horribly. During prayer I focus on not creaking. They creak if you move or breathe. Father Jordan (it's easier in writing) is walking around with a bowl of water and a short bundle of straw. He dips the bundle in the water and then flicks it down the rows of pews. He explains that it is meant to remind us of our baptism. One guy at the end of our pew gets totally doused by accident and they both laugh. I have nothing against the communion wafer. The communion wafer is classic. But I like that they bake bread here. I like that I don’t take communion here, and that we kneel at the front as the piece of bread is pressed into my hand by someone I know: “Christ’s body given for you, brother”.

I like that we kneel together as a congregation for confession on the old wooden floor, and that it is uncomfortably long. I like that this church does not do its best to cater to the shattered attention spans of younger generations. I like that there are both clergy and lay people who preach regularly. I like that some of those people have a gift for public speaking, and that some do not. I like not being from here but belonging here.

2025 – Colorado, at home

I glance over my grandpa’s shoulder as he is reading the newspaper. It’s right there on the front page: the huge red church, in one piece, on top of a massive platform with hundreds of wheels. It must be very slow, and the pictures show a troop of ordinary people walking behind it on the highway. That would be a strange experience, living there, if your church just up and left one day. There is also something beautiful about it, too. I wonder if they moved all the stuff inside of it separately. Did they take out the altar piece? Or the pews? Or did they move it exactly as it was? I like to imagine it like that. I like to imagine it with everything left inside, exactly as it was – silent. Escaping the collapse.

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Elias Moore is a graduate of Colorado Christian University.

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