“Good grief, I’m going to be late again!” I groaned, glancing at the clock in my car and then out the window. I was almost to school, and late as usual, but something else captured my attention. Several workers stood around a church sign with a stone frame and a bright florescent message board. The sign had been basically finished for the last month, but every week I saw them adding another layer of stone decoration to the already elaborate sign. That sign and its church were built well outside of town, in the middle of a farm field, so why the need for fancy architecture? There were few local converts to be found, or even passing cars to be inspired its by sermon titles. The sign serves little purpose except to illuminate the neighbors’ yard at night with its garish florescent light, an unsavory intrusion that doesn’t belong.
The sign belongs to one of the two newly built churches along my daily commute to school. Every day for months, I watched them take a fairly large farm field, grade and pave it over to build two churches. Just two buildings on dozens of acres. Their boxy Wal-Martesque architecture, with only one floor and gobs of parking, takes up so much land, and simply smacks of wastefulness. My dad used to farm that land, planting almost fifty acres of crops, and now its sole purpose is to give a hundred churchgoers a place to conveniently park their midsize SUVs and sing Amazing Grace on Sunday morning.
These churches in that field, are not the only invasion and conversion of farmland happening in my rural community. Rather, they’re an exception to the norm of suburban housing developments springing up around my family’s farm. A mere hour and a half from both Washington DC and Baltimore, my small town of Gettysburg is considered within commuting distance of those cities, and therefore ripe for development. The desire to develop the land causes prices to skyrocket, so fairly large farms make a fortune of profit when sold for...