St. Michaels Church of The Burning Bush

On the surface St.Michael's is a fairly ordinary church, if highly puritanical congregation that worships Kay in his guise as the Holy fire. They beloved unlike other followers of Kay, not in Heaven and Hell but of a placed warmed in Holy fire for the faithful and a place of cold tiles for the unbeliever.

Prior to Charles Reeds arrival the congregation burned their worldly belongings as they impede them in their faith. It is likely they chose to do this rather that help the needy as they would have considered it burdening them with more worldliness rather than helping.

The cult beneath
Beneath the Churches already puritanical views lies a self destructive sect with fanatical devotion. Their priest had studied the arts of lucid dreaming and through it discovered the secrets of Chtygonnaar and understood them to a degree that only Johannes and Blackwood knew. The priests knowledge corrupted his teachings, incorporating the Chtygonnaar cycles into them. He believed that if one were to transcend life in the correct manner they would be reborn in the next cycle, unless he knew something no one else did he was likely in error and led his cult to their doom.

He and his cult ritually committed suicide by immolation believing that if they burnt away their old selves they might be reborn.

Know members
Meryl

Charles Reed encounters Meryl when he enters the Church. The first thing he notices is the charred corpses of the rest of the congregation. She mistakes him for one of the other cultists and asks if he was late as well. She believed that burning was the only was to be free of this life and to be reborn in the next, dependent on how the player chooses she may or may not commit suicide as well.

Trivia
St.Michael is the guardian angel of Israel, and is considered the defenders of believers within the Christian Church. Some attribute the deeds of the angel who guarded the eastern gate to Eden with a fiery sword, preventing Adam and Eve from returning but there is little or no scriptural basis for this.

The Burning Bush is a reference to the guise God appeared to Moses in the Bible.