St. Timothy's Anglican Church

How Do you Start a Church?

The first thing that you do is to arrive at a belief that Providence is calling you to start a church. Then you must gather together with others that would be responsive to that call. From then on you pray.

But more practically - where will you meet to worship with your fellow Christians? You could meet outdoors in a public park, but such a site is subject to interruptions and inclement weather. You could meet together in someone's house, but many houses do not have rooms big enough to accommodate the number of people that will eventually gather. And even if they did, they become permeated with the personality of the resident family and other worshippers might feel like they are intruding.

You could meet in a rented space, but such places tend to be impersonal and sometimes it is hard to move worship things from place to place – like pianos or organs (if you have one) and altars and such (if there is to be communion services at the beginning). Besides, people will want a place to call their own. Instead of someone’s else’s living room, a public building owned by all the members, makes the congregation more of a true family, with its own house – to have meetings, dinners and social gatherings.

Therefore, as soon as the church has enough members to warrant, plans should be made to build a church. But until then, where does one worship? 

St. Timothy's Parlor

A "Parlor", says Wikipedia, is a formal sitting room in a large house or mansion. In the late nineteenth century, it was often a formal room used only on Sundays or special occasions, and closed during the week. The parlor contained a family's best furnishings, works of art and other display items. The body of a recently deceased member of the household would be laid out in the parlor while funeral preparations were made. In more modest homes, the parlor has largely been replaced by the living room as a result of a twentieth-century effort by architects and builders to strip the parlor of its burial and mourning associations. 
St. Timothy's Parlor.

In a monastery, the parlor was the place in which the monastic family met with those outside the family, or where the members of the monastic family, normally silent, could go to converse freely. Indeed, the French parloir denotes the act of speaking.

The parlor was, then, a special room, a room that was simply not used for ordinary functions by the family. If every room had its function in a house, the parlor was the extraordinary room - to be used as the connecting link between families.

So if you feel a little like a stranger in St. Timothy's Parlor, you can rest assured that the feeling is part of our communion, because it is an uncommon room for us too. We only go there to sing or to worship. It's the room where families get together, so we invite you to come there to worship with us.  

By permission, the ideas for the "parlor church" were taken from an unpublished presentation: Mission Planting and Church Growth by The Rev. Fr. T. Creighton Jones, Rector, Good Shepherd Anglican Church, Myrtle Beach, SC. creogo@earthlink.net