{"id":4844,"date":"2024-12-20T19:37:17","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T19:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/?p=4844"},"modified":"2025-01-08T22:57:50","modified_gmt":"2025-01-08T22:57:50","slug":"when-hollywood-came-to-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/reflections\/when-hollywood-came-to-church\/","title":{"rendered":"When Hollywood came to church"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jump to Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford’s article on this<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a cold Friday afternoon in late January, and I was doing what many pastors do on a Friday afternoon: writing my sermon for Sunday worship at York Center Church of the Brethren in Lombard, Ill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A car pulled up and a young man knocked on the church door. He introduced himself as a location scout for an HBO program. They were looking for a church building for filming. Would I be willing to talk to him? I was skeptical until I saw that the logo on his jacket said Somebody Somewhere<\/em>, the name of one of my favorite programs. An hour later, he had toured the building, taken photos, and contacted the production team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He returned on Monday with a dozen others, including the star of the show, Bridget Everett, and the writers and cocreators, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen. They were quite pleased with our York Center fellowship hall and kitchen\u2014describing them as “mid-century modern.” You know, like almost every church built in the 1950s. They measured and drew diagrams, discussed possibilities, and constantly complimented our facility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their plan was to film in the kitchen, fellowship hall, exterior, and sanctuary. These locations would feature prominently in the third\u2014and final\u2014season of the show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somebody Somewhere<\/em> is a comedy\/drama focusing on a group of people helping each other find where they belong. My clergy friends and I are great fans because it models what we hope the church to be\u2014a place where everyone is welcomed, supported, celebrated, and loved for who they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I especially appreciate the way the show portrays “Pastor Deb.” She is a delightful, caring human being. She is not a caricature or a ridiculously out of touch theologian. I invited Ora Jones, the actress who portrays Pastor Deb, into my office to sit at my desk in her clergy garments, and she looked right at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The day of filming began with tractor trailers filling the church parking lot and crew members placing tons of equipment inside and outside the building. Our church secretary, Jo Miller, and I had a front row seat to the controlled chaos that is location filming. We welcomed everyone and tried to stay out of the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As fans of the show, we were thrilled to meet the cast and found them to be kind and friendly. Everyone thanked us for allowing them to film in our church and were respectful of our building and property. When the final truck drove out of the parking lot, you couldn\u2019t even tell they had been there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A good spirit prevailed throughout two long days of filming. The sense of community that is portrayed in the show was also fostered on the set. Many of the crew members\u2014local to Chicago\u2014told us Somebody Somewhere<\/em> is their favorite project to work on because everyone is so nice and accommodating. We could see it in action. Everyone was treated with respect and kindness, and there was a lot of laughter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since one scene featured a church bake sale, I baked the mint chocolate brownies I always bring to our church potlucks (made from an Inglenook Cookbook<\/a> recipe published by Brethren Press) and passed them around before filming began. A shot of the brownies was featured in the first episode of this season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In each episode of Somebody Somewhere<\/em>, we see people at their worst and their best\u2014like real life. The show, which has won a Peabody Award, is rated for a mature audience. It honestly portrays the realities of life for many people, how hard and how easy it can be to love other people, and the struggle and joy of being part of a family and a community. No one is pushed aside\u2014in the story or on screen. Each person is respected for who they are and encouraged to become who they were created to be. And isn’t that what the church is called to do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christy Waltersdorff<\/strong> retires at the end of this year after serving as the long-term pastor of York Center Church of the Brethren in Lombard, Ill.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n\n\n\n

Seeing us through the camera<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getting to preview the last season of Somebody Somewhere<\/em> was a perk of working with pastor Christy Waltersdorff on an article about how York Center Church of the Brethren came to be a film set. Not having an HBO subscription, I had not paid much attention to the show. As I started watching, it was clear the TV-MA rating meant some of the language and situations would not be comfortable for everyone. However, I gained an appreciation for Somebody Somewhere<\/em>\u2019s respect for Christianity as it is really lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I noted how the show treated Christianity with respect but without sugarcoating the experience of church. The characters in the story who are Christians are active in church, but the two congregations that appear in this season display different understandings of the faith. Characters have difficult conversations about their church experiences and disagree with each other about church\u2014but the show doesn\u2019t take sides. The characters, both churchgoing and not, are respected for where they are on their own spiritual journeys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scenes filmed at York Center appear in the first, fourth and seventh episodes of the season. Those who designed the set were fastidious in the effort to portray a real church\u2014to the point that the York Center mug rack was placed where it would be visible, as were Waltersdorff’s favorite mint brownies, and the quilted wall hangings made by a York Center member. A fictional men’s study group sat in a circle of real church-basement chairs surrounded by the accordion-pleated wall dividers that are still fixtures in many churches across our denomination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn’t just the physical setting that was familiar, but also the emotional and relationship “setting”\u2014what it feels like to be part of a church, or to struggle to be part of one. In an interview with the co-creators and writers, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, Waltersdorff and I asked about their choice to make faith so important for key characters, and to have the church be a grounding place for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thureen’s experience of growing up in rural Minnesota, in his mother’s large family that included a range of Christian backgrounds, affected those choices, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“When spirituality or religion or, I think, Christianity in particular is depicted in media, it’s often either demonized or, on the other hand, held up to be something holy. Or it’s focused on the harm or it’s focused on the good\u2014all of which is real and valid. But as someone who grew up in that I always cringe at the depiction,” he said. “People of faith in the Midwest exist and are very important.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As writers, he and Bos wanted “to make sure we got the details right about that. . . Our rule is to depict everybody with full humanity and to look at spirituality and religion and church, and not ignore the complexities of it but also look at the beauty of it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a crucial scene, two Somebody Somewhere<\/em> characters negotiate how to continue their relationship after one decides to leave the church they both attend, in order to find a church where he belongs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I think that those conversations do happen,” Thureen said. The show is “putting people together who might not agree but still are finding common humanity and trying to grow. I think that\u2019s how we can all make progress.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cheryl Brumbaugh-Cayford<\/strong> is director of News Services for the Church of the Brethren and associate editor of Messenger<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

York Center Church of the Brethren features prominently in the third\u2014and final\u2014season of the television show Somebody Somewhere<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4843,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[107,638,645,644,643,641,640,642],"class_list":["post-4844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reflections","tag-cheryl-brumbaugh-cayford","tag-christy-waltersdorff","tag-hbo","tag-illinois","tag-lombard","tag-somebody-somewhere","tag-television","tag-york-center-church-of-the-brethren"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4844"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4854,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4844\/revisions\/4854"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brethren.org\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}