An interfaith journey of visiting 185 places of worship in Chicago and earning a world record

When Vicki Garlock set out to set a Guinness World Record by visiting the most places of worship within one month in Chicago, she carried her experience and interest in religion across diverse faith traditions and a list of logistical Guinness requirements to meet.

What she encountered were many small, meaningful moments of connection, like when a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod minister offered a tour and showed her an angel sculpture, which was the only item that was salvaged from the 1871 Great Chicago Fire. Or when she realized that the interim minister of St. Peter’s UCC in Skokie, the Rev. Brenda Barnes Jamieson, was the parent of a student Garlock had once taught in a college class.

Garlock visited 185 places of worship, from mosques to monasteries, cathedrals to neighborhood temples, following the Guinness rules of traveling only by public transit or on foot and receiving signed and photo verification at each site. Among these, she visited 10 congregations of the United Church of Christ, with the personal UCC connection of having served as the children’s minister at Land of the Sky UCC in Asheville, North Carolina.

Setting out on this task was an exercise in trust, said Garlock, who now lives in North Carolina but grew up near Chicago. She selected the city for this task because of its familiarity, and because it contains both a density and variety of worshipping communities.

“I was trusting Guinness, I was trusting myself, I was trusting the city of Chicago – but also trusting that it would all be okay if I didn’t get the world record. That it would still be an interesting experience, that I would still learn things,” she said.

When she completed her month of September 2025, this trust carried her into successfully earning the Guiness World Record on Sept. 29, surpassing the previous record of 111.

The energy of meaningful spaces

Garlock was surprised to experience the great welcome people extended when she simply showed up. While things started out slowly as she relied on email to set up appointments, she soon shifted more toward a “meandering pilgrimage” of walking neighborhoods and adding more impromptu visits to worship services and offices. She walked over 350,000 steps and attended about 20 worship services.

“It was a privilege to have time and encounter people so willing to open and show me their sanctuaries,” she said.

When services weren’t happening, many people offered tours of the sanctuary and meaningful elements of the church building.

“It goes back to how meaningful these spaces are for people, that they wanted to take time out of their day to show me. They would show the altar, the organ, the curved pews. Someone took me into a stairwell to show me photographs of the founders of the church. The energy of it being special to that group of people was so clearly present in every place I went to,” Garlock said.

Interfaith commitment

Garlock aimed to set this world record with a particular background and interest in interfaith work. She went to a Lutheran grade school and Catholic high school. She has worked at a Methodist and, most recently, a UCC church. She also regularly attends services at Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish services throughout the year and has created an organization called World Religions 4 Kids, which focuses on building bridges across religious divides.

“One of the things I love about this business of interfaith education is there is always more to learn,” she said. “This experience took advantage of the work that I’ve been doing the last 10 years, and the skill sets I have around walking into spaces that are not Christian. But the fun of it was that it also helped me move forward even more – to learn more, to be challenged a little bit, to go into spaces that were still unfamiliar to me despite all the experience that I already have.”

Community connections

As she visited several UCC spaces, one observation she made was a sense of sharing instilled within the congregations. Many shared their spaces with other congregations and housed several community programs, she said.

“One of the things that struck me was that most faith communities were incredibly involved with their neighborhoods and the surrounding neighborhoods,” she said. “It wasn’t just UCC churches that partner in the community, but it was very clear that this is an important piece of what the UCC denomination means and what it means to people who affiliate with the UCC.”

Kimball Avenue UCC, for instance, hosts a community garden on its property and grows food that is used for regular community dinners, Garlock learned.

Lifting up positive narratives

Garlock’s Guinness efforts also stepped into the experience of the broader city. Her time in Chicago overlapped with the ICE surge of “Operation Midway Blitz.” This narrative covered the city and national news, and Garlock heard stories of how it directly impacted people’s lives.

She also witnessed the care and kindness people were extending to one another.  

“It’s a constant, disastrous sort of narrative, right?” she reflected. “And yet, there’s so many people who are trying to live their lives day in and day out, and get along with people, and be kind, and do their jobs well. And it really is such a dichotomy in terms of what narratives are being lifted up, and what narratives we’re paying attention to. We’re going to have to turn that around somehow, I think.”

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