Then at an intersection, I came upon a life-size crucified Christ raised high above a sign to Vaudeloges and followed the sign into that gem of a hamlet with its long narrow houses whose shapes whispered of the longships of the Norse, its rugged church, clustered graves and the inevitable war memorial guarded by painted shell casings.
In Revelation 2-3, the risen Jesus dictates "letters" to seven individual churches clustered in the Roman province of Asia (western Turkey today).
And still today -- as High Holiday services at Harvard University, for example, take place in two multi-purpose rooms and in two borrowed churches, clustered around Harvard Square -- what makes our spaces of worship into sanctuaries is that they become filled with the words of our tradition.
But a short way up the mountain was Montepertuso, little more than a church and cluster of whitewashed homes, where we discovered the area's real heart and soul.
By entering into the deal with the village, it has won approval for the development, but in modified form: the church will cluster the houses it builds, ultimately helping the village to increase the total acreage of public land at the site.
A group of pre-teenagers headed to Washington on a church trip clustered around the plane's windows, watching the six members of the honor guard come to attention and march over to where a flag-draped coffin was coming down a conveyor belt.
The most important of these was the Peace of God movement, a series of church councils clustered primarily in the years preceding the millennium of the birth of Jesus and the millennium of the Passion and later incorporated into the broader institutional fabric of medieval society.
This village an hour's drive west down the Seine from Paris, with its 11th-century Romanesque church, its cluster of limestone houses, its 150 inhabitants and its central patch of gravel for the obligatory boules, seems the image of an unchanging France set apart from any storm.
Brown called the fact that the majority African American churches are clustered in an area near Ferguson "a disturbing pattern".
