What Happens When You Ring 185 Doorbells

Vicki Garlock thought she was signing up for a logistical challenge—visiting enough places of worship in one month to break a Guinness World Record. She put a giant map of Chicago on her wall, examined bus schedules, and created spreadsheets. What she didn't anticipate was the rule revealed a few weeks before she started: at every single location, she'd need an actual person to sign a verification form.

Her first thought? "They just made this impossible."

But here's what she didn't understand...yet: Guinness had actually turned it into something that would change her completely.

Vicki grew up going to Lutheran grade school and Catholic high school in a small town outside Chicago. She knew her Bible stories cold. But in tenth grade, she took a course about the world's religions taught by a priest, and something opened up inside her that never quite closed. For years, she carried that curiosity quietly. She got married, had kids, worked at a multi-faith community, and spent twelve years writing a religious education curriculum. Somewhere in there, she realized she needed to stop reading about other traditions and actually show up.

When she heard about a guy in Delhi, India who'd visited 76 places of worship in a month and set a world record, she looked at her husband and said: "I think I could beat that."

By September 2025, she was living in Chicago Airbnbs, riding buses and trains to 85 carefully scheduled appointments. Then, on day five, another email from Guinness: someone else in India had already pushed the record to 111. Vicki's carefully constructed plan wasn't enough anymore.

That Friday night, she lay awake thinking about giving up. But Saturday morning, after her two scheduled stops, she did something different. She got on the L train and rode to a Seventh-day Adventist church that had not responded to her earlier emails and calls. She just showed up.

The guy at the door didn't turn her away. Instead, he said: "Oh my gosh, that is so cool! Of course we'll sign your form!" Then he told her about two other Adventist churches nearby. She visited both. At one, there was a Spanish-speaking, more traditional place of worship upstairs and a English-speaking more contemporary place of worship downstairs. At the other one, she stayed for the service, then joined the potluck in the basement. She ended the day with six signatures instead of two.

And something clicked. She realized: if you show up where people gather and meet them where they are, they will usually be interested, and they will usually be welcoming. For the rest of the month, she kept her appointments—but before and after and in between, she visited every place that hadn't responded. She just rang the bell and waited to see who answered the door.

And that's how she got to 185.

She met security guards, administrative assistants, and building managers—who gave the best tours because they knew every corner of their spaces. She heard immigration stories, history lessons, and was invited to various services. At one Islamic Center, a guy named Nadeem was skeptical at first. Over two dozen security cameras had watched her approach. They sat and talked for forty-five minutes. By the time she left, he was telling her about other places to visit and offering to make introductions. They're friends now. 

One of her most interesting experiences happened at a Buddhist temple. A recently retired minister showed her an altar built by Japanese Americans in an internment camp during World War II—constructed from whatever materials they could find so they could keep practicing their faith. In the fellowship hall afterward, a small elderly woman said, "I was in the internment camps. I was six." She described working in soap factories handling lye, working in munitions factories while being told she wasn't trusted. Then another woman approached: "You were in the camps? I was too!" And they began sharing their stories with each other.

She saw that type of resilience and creativity in all sorts of places all over the city. Huge Polish Catholic churches built a century ago were now serving Hispanic congregations. One Buddhist temple met inside a church. A Lutheran congregation that held Sunday morning services in Hindi and Urdu rented space on Sunday nights to a white evangelical church with a band. People figuring it out, sharing what they have.

She also went to over 20 worship services, many not in English. And she discovered something: when you don't have to worry about words—what they mean or are trying to mean—you can let the experience wash over you. You can hold it in your heart instead of your head.

Vicki kept thinking: How would someone like me ever have these experiences without the Guinness attempt as an excuse to ring the bell and see who answered?

Now that Vicki has the world record, there are a couple of questions that people almost always ask. 

First, people ask about her favorite place. But that's a question she can never really answer. There wasn't a single space where she thought, "I'm glad I don't worship here." Some were cathedrals with soaring ceilings. Some were tiny churches that smelled musty and served breakfast to the neighborhood. It didn't matter. The people she met were all connected to their spaces. Those places were meaningful to them. And because of that, they became meaningful to her too.

Second, people ask what enabled her to connect so easily with people and communities so different from her own. Her answer is honest: "I'm just an old white lady. In some ways that worked to my advantage, because people looked at me on their security cameras and decided to open the door." But she also says this: "I walked into places believing we were already connected. We are all humans on this planet in this time and place. How did we both end up here? There is something miraculous about that."

Here's the thing about boundaries—the ones we set up ourselves or the ones culture and history build for us: they only come down when someone crosses them. And Vicki learned it requires less bravery than you'd think, because on the other side of almost every door is another human being who is almost always welcoming, almost always kind.

So here's a question for you: What doors have you been walking through? What communities exist in your own town that you've been curious about but never approached? You don't need a world record as your reason. You can find a service or event online, send an email, make a call. You can say, "I'm here to learn." And if you're feeling particularly brave, you can just show up.

What would it take for you to ring the bell?