Our Visit to Center Church on-the-green

On the morning of 27th of July, my other four roommates and I decided to go to watch church praying ceremony which we have long been expecting to see. We went to the center church on-the-green which is the first church of Christ in New Haven. We arrived there at 9:55 am, just five minutes ahead of the Sunday church ceremony time. Actually, the chapel on the green is a typical Gothic architecture, with a high three-layer tower-like pointed white roof, four big white columns supporting the front of it,which makes the building outstand among the rest of those nearby buildings. By the time we arrived, there had already been more than ten people sitting on the benches. Upon entering the chapel, we were welcomed by two people. One smiling old lady gave us a handout and the other old gentleman gestured us to sit on those benches. After we sat down quietly, I found the inside of the church is really splendid. A very large and magnificent glass pendant suspended from the middle of the round high blue ceiling. In less than five minutes after we sat down, one senior gentleman in a black Christian long gown and another senior lady in a white Christian long gown with a beautiful long green scarf around her neck declared the beginning of the praying ceremony. The whole ceremony lasted exactly one hour. During most of the time, the senior gentleman in black long gown read some chapters from the Bible. From time to time, the listeners read the prayer of confession together with him, or sing some songs with the a lady who sang beautifully. But we didn't see any lady singing on the spot, so we guessed the beautiful voice perhaps came from a recording played through an amplifier set on the second floor. Besides reading prayers of confession and singing those songs printed on a specialize song book, the people in the church also shook hands with each other while saying "Peace be with you". By the ending of the ceremony, we were encouraged to donate some money to the church with which, we were told, Christians in this church would maintain the chapel and give help to those needy Christians. 

The following picture shows part of the second floor of the chapel. And that is where the recording of those beautiful songs came from.

The hardback blue book in the following picture is the song book in which there are more than 500 songs. One of the hard back brown books is Holy Bible, and the other one is The New Century Hymn.