Over the years, I have been a church wanderer, attending Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic, Mennonite, Seventh Day Adventist and Assembly of God services where people spoke in tongues, writhed on the floor, and were pitched backwards to either be healed or have Satan driven from them. Count a few Sunday schools and summer bible camps, and a lot of baptisms, weddings, and funerals in the mix too. It’s all been very informative.

My education also included seeing churches from a different angle. When I attended a Methodist college as an undergraduate, some of my older classmates on our floor in the dorm served as circuit riders or substitute ministers for small congregations across southern Iowa. They shared how they prepared their sermons, which needed to be different for the differing needs of each congregation. This gave me insight from the minister’s point of view.

In graduate school, I needed money to pay for my education. A Lutheran friend put in the good word for me, and I became janitor at the biggest Lutheran church west of the Mississippi. Needless to say, it was a race to keep up with all the different events taking place at the church each day. (Wedding rice in the sanctuary was the bane of my existence.) Not only did the experience provide an inner view of the working of the church, it gave me more insight into what ministers confronted daily. Often, troubled homeless people and others wandered in off the street demanding to see the minister. Often they were considering suicide. The first person they normally encountered was the janitor. So the minister and I formed a bond regarding how to handle these walk-ins, who expected the minister to solve all their problems 24/7, night and day. Others just needed a listener. How the minister ever slept uninterrupted, I’ll never know. As I said before, very instructive.

While in graduate school, the African Literature class taught by an African taught me much about African religions, and the effects of missionaries. Later I taught various African students from different areas of Africa. Eye-opening.

Before the advent of Ancestry.com for genealogical research, I found it necessary to travel to Salt Lake City to work with members of the Church of Latter Day Saints at their Family History Library. While there, I took the LDS tour of the facilities and walked through what seemed the endless string of just married brides and grooms in Temple Square. I was amazed at how far back my relatives had been “sealed” long after their deaths.

After I established my career, my best friend and colleague followed Zen Buddhism. He introduced me to the Zen garden he built at his home for meditation. We practiced Zen as much as possible to survive the rigors of teaching. Students in our classes represented most of the world religions and cults, everything from Wiccans to Native American tribal religions to Voodoo to Russian Old Believers. Meanwhile a neighborhood friend included my wife and me in her Jewish celebrations and traditions.

Our work and neighbors also brought my wife and me in close contact with Sikhs, Quakers, Moslems, and such cults as the Church Universal and Triumphant in Montana, as well as the Rajneeshees of Antelope, Oregon, fame. My cult dossier remains incomplete because I knew no one from Jim Jones’ People’s Temple who drank the cyanide in Jonestown, Guyana. Nevertheless, I felt that I had some experience with most religions through first person experiences supplemented by Joseph Campbell’s film series and central book readings from the various faiths, not to mention various religious classes on the history of religion as well as Jesuit and Methodist classes in Old and New Testaments.

But I was shocked and perplexed when I attended a recent funeral held at a Protestant church. Just as I entered the sanctuary, one usher passed out the program for the service and another handed out the church’s business card. That’s right–a business card.

The passing out of business cards during a funeral seemed quite out of place. I had never encountered this before. The church’s logo or branding appeared on the right side. Contact information for the church’s various “campuses” was printed to the left. That a church had various “campuses” also came as a surprise.

Having been brought up in a world where colleges and universities had campuses, I was taken aback when Nike created its own “campus,” with other major companies following that trend. Suddenly most high tech companies competed to have a “campus” for their headquarters. They took a word that meant the grounds of a school or college, and turned it into something that gave their corporations a different cachet, a type of elitism. They weren’t really big corporations or businesses, they were something different, not industry, but extensions of graduate school. To some extent, this was true. Most blue-collar manufacturing of their products was hidden, not on the “campuses,” but rather abroad. The idea of campus had been co-opted by business.

The church business card also stretched the idea of campus. One of its campuses was not really a campus at all. It was a golf course. A single service was held there each Sunday in the club house. The green finishing holes seen out the windows may have reminded people of the green open area of a campus. Nothing is impossible. I wondered if business cards were passed out to Sunday golfers who needed God’s help in attaining par and who were ridden with guilt at golfing instead of celebrating the Sabbath.

The main church where the funeral service was being held was listed as another campus. That meant the church itself and the parking lots around it where it was difficult to find parking. There was no feeling of a campus unless a single structure could constitute a campus. In all fairness, the church did harbor a preschool, but it was housed in the church building. Since the golf course campus had been advertised as the “North Campus,” the main church may have been the south campus. The possibility of east and west campuses lingered in the air. Maybe they will have golf courses too.

So, was handing out business cards at a funeral the church’s attempt to recruit members the way Microsoft and Oracle compete with each other? Are they saying, “We don’t just have worship sites; we have campuses,” which sounds much more expansive, important, or boated depending on one’s point of view? In any event, maybe we can list our house as a campus. Maybe some good tax and spiritual advantages there. We still have a little lawn left.