There’s no Sunday school, and meetings are regularly held at Denny’s restaurants, but for members ”” and the federal government ”” Sacred Spiral is very much a church, albeit a Pagan church….
In the years since abandoning the title of coven, [Rosemary] Szymanski, founder and president, has worked with her fellow witches to organize openly and spread knowledge about Paganism.
“Covens are much more secretive,” Szymanski, a witch for 17 years, said. “So in 2007, I banned the coven and created the church.”
Why would they use the terminology of church? That’s fascinating.
Because they’re silly people playing games.
They may be silly people, but these are not games they are playing. I strongly suspect that they have not the slightest idea what they are dealing with.
#1 Archer, I think it because of the appeal and “respectability” conveyed by the word. They probably think that seekers might be more inclined to give their “church” a chance and the community would be more accepting, less threatening.
But on the flipside, lol … When I was on the copy desk of a newspaper many years ago, one of my tasks after the paper was put to bed was to edit the religion copy and design/lay out the page. The Unitarians (ahem, I mean, the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship) sent me a release every week announcing the topic for that Sunday. I placed it with the other briefs and gave it a small one-column headline. I tried to make the religion pages attractive and interesting so I didn’t assign the same headline every week — I read the release and tried to incorporate the nature of their program into the headline.
Obviously, “Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship” wasn’t going to make a one-column headline, lol. They pointed out that they didn’t like the U-U abbreviation and, frankly, I didn’t, either. One week, I called them a “church” in the headline. They went ballistic.
“We are NOT a church!” the leader said, pointing out that the group was upset by the association. “We are a fellowship!” I told them I understood but “fellowship” wasn’t ideal for a one-column headline unless I shrunk the point size to the point where it wouldn’t be headline-appropriate or noticeable. They accepted “group” as an identifier but were insulted when I suggested “club,” lol.
Honestly, “club” fit. This was a very humanist group and their topics were rarely spiritual — even then, the “spiritual” was more of a loosely associated New Age practice such as some type of homeopathic care. They had a lot of environmental topics, science presentations, and sometimes art. It wasn’t even close to being typically Unitarian. I think they formed under the Unitarian banner for “respectability” purposes. I wonder if they gave that up and now self-identify as a humanist society?
The pagan/witchcraft group in this article is playing word games but I would be concerned about the intent, unlike the crotchety Unitarians. The pagans want to appeal to those for whom “church” evokes a positive response and they want to assuage the discomfort these people may instinctively feel about paganism/witchcraft. They may want to attract the young who are too naive, rebellious, or unwitting to discern.