Early experiences of living in Somerville: churches

I really wanted to write a blog post about how Andrew and I went windsurfing on Saturday--we did, it was super fun, much better than surfboarding--but I don't have any pictures to include in the post. We were, you know, on the water, on easily tipped sailboards, which wasn't a conducive setting for picture taking. We spent most of our day at Old Silver Beach either in the windsurfing lesson (1 hour) or actually windsurfing (4 hours), so we don't even have any pictures of Cape Cod, or of the nearby town of Falmouth.

Instead, this post is about some of the churches in our area.

I've noticed over the last month that there are a lot of churches in the Boston area and so I thought it might be interesting to take pictures of the buildings. Just the exteriors. These are small-ish churches that I wouldn't expect to be open to random visitors/tourists. And I feel weird enough standing on the street taking pictures, so I'm not about to knock on doors and try to get inside.

The first church is the Mission Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith (whew, what a mouth full). From what I can tell, this is only the name of the congregation and sadly, the church's website doesn't seem to provide any additional historic information about the building.

The second building is actually a Jewish Temple, Temple B'nai Brith, which is described as: an independent egalitarian congregation with historical roots in the Conservative movement. Again, I'm struggling to find any historic information on the Temple (the website appears to be down), but a secondhand source suggests it was built in 1922.

Right around the corner from the Temple is a Spanish-language church, Vida Real, which from what I can tell is a large Spanish-Christian organization that runs several churches around the United States. I'm really striking our on trying to provide background information on these buildings. The website for this one is all in Spanish, which of course I can't read. At least there was a stone with the date 1908 carved into it this church, so I'm going to hazard a guess and say that was the year it was built or founded.

The final church I photographed today was the Somerville branch of the Christ the King Presbyterian Church of Boston. This congregation also seems pretty new and their website says that Presbyterian Church of America wasn't founded until 1973, which surprises me, as I assumed it would be older. Maybe that's only in Canada?

And this concludes my not very informative tour of the churches, and temples...the worship facilities? I suspect there's a proper word for describing churches and temples en mass, but I can't remember what it is right now. Maybe next time I'll succeed in finding some historical background information on buildings in my neighbourhood.

Ciao,

Andrea