It was that time of the month again, and Kennett and I dropped into a small Free Methodist church. I was struck by how exactly like all the other churches in the community this one was. Carpet, soft chairs, dried flowers and generally an "old lady's apartment" sensibility to the decor. Small, slightly elevated stage at the front with a modest assortment of music stuff (no drums at this one), about three times as many seats as people to fill them, and about four kids, not a single teenager or twenty-something, and pretty much all senior citizens. A great deal of undeniable lower middle-class obesity and failing health. Like before, resplendent in dress shoes and an untucked wine-coloured dress shirt with faded black jeans, I felt a bit overdressed.
I arrived at ten, because although the church's website is down (URL for sale), other church listings said Sunday morning services started at ten there. It took until a bit past fifteen minutes after ten before things really got underway at all.
A ridiculously good-looking (about thirty years old) husband and wife team took the stage, and people sat down. PowerPoint was fired up, wallpaper backdrop graphics all winter scenes to match what was raging outside the windows, with the watermarks left on each slide. He played guitar and sang with a fairly solid Disney voice, and she played electric bass very quietly and perhaps was singing (she had a microphone) but I couldn't pick her voice out from the elderly female voices singing in the room. A couple of ladies raised hands in the air like they just didn't care.
After the first song, everyone was sent to shake hands with everyone. I'm sure they didn't mean a thing by it, but several of what old men were there seemed downright suspicious, one asking, all bristling eyebrows, quite abruptly in lieu of a greeting "Who are you guys?" and several saying "I've never seen you here before..."
I was checking to see, in my critical way, and I noted that really none of the songs were to God so much as maybe about Him, but mostly about us. Pretty much every one was really mainly the whole "us deigning to sing a song about liking singing songs about liking singing songs" thing. But it sounded cheerful and warm and understated. We were asked to sit down, praised on our singing, and the entire first chapter of the book of Job was read to us in the NIV from a PowerPoint slide. (I really liked that an entire chapter was read) and then we stood up again and sang more. This part took about half an hour. In the middle, we sat down while the ushers collected money, "our way of blessing God back" the man said. We bless God with money? Then more singing.
I was amused at fairly creative choice of song. It was written from the point of view of our fears and guilt singing to us (in the verses) and us singing back to them, claiming to be children of God, and therefore immune to fear and guilt. The reason I was amused is because the slide-maker had capitalized the "y's" in "You" and "Your" as if singing to God. But the "You" in question was in fact the singer singing to himself, with the fears and guilt addressing us. With the capitals, as God is addressed. I smirked inside. I am such a knob.
I was amused at fairly creative choice of song. It was written from the point of view of our fears and guilt singing to us (in the verses) and us singing back to them, claiming to be children of God, and therefore immune to fear and guilt. The reason I was amused is because the slide-maker had capitalized the "y's" in "You" and "Your" as if singing to God. But the "You" in question was in fact the singer singing to himself, with the fears and guilt addressing us. With the capitals, as God is addressed. I smirked inside. I am such a knob.
Then there was a coffee break. The people who were ushering everyone into the next room from whence the stench of coffee emanated like sulphur from the very gates of Hell took special pride in pointing out "We have coffee now. Before the sermon. Not too many places do that." We were obviously dealing with badasses, there. It was pretty intense.
Because of my new-found focus on making connections (I'm trying out the notion that making connections is the first step toward unity, trust, sharing, caring and all that other Christian stuff, and that without it, you can't do any of the rest) so I resolved to try to make a connection instead of being essentially airlifted in, and then fleeing at the end without really connecting. That went pretty well, actually.
People claim to want to know what your name is, but what they really want to know is if you're a Christian and what church you go to. So I went with what they wanted, more than what they asked. Kennett isn't terribly into identifying himself as Mennonite (people think it's pretty novel, even though he's not even old order Mennonite or anything) but each person who seemed remotely curious-looking got told "He was raised Mennonite. I was raised Brethren." I also said "We're just going around seeing all the different churches in town."
This broke the ice and opened doors. Now they felt they knew what we were all about. The last part did strike many as particularly adventurous, eccentric behaviour, it seemed. I'm not shopping for a new church so much as touring them.
I spoke to Luke, the singing/guitar guy, him sucking on a Tootsie Pop handed out during the part where they address the kids and then send them out ("your heart is nice and squishy and soft like a Tootsie roll, but sometimes we sin, and that puts a hard shell around it. And then we try to cover that up with a wrapper. Only Jesus can unwrap our hearts." Presumably Jesus can lick away the candy that cakes our squishy hearts.) We quickly found that we knew a whole lot of the same exBrethren people from Ottawa. He identified the Brethren as being both the source of most of his Christian friends, and us as being "people who really know what the bible says." Thought we were terribly well read. Because many of us have read the bible.
I explained how, every time someone tells me he or she is in bible college or the ministry, I always ask if he or she has read the bible,. I told him how I've yet to once get an answer in the affirmative, though several atheists I know have read the whole thing. (It's not that hard. You just have to care, and hold tight to your Christianity, because nothing challenges it like knowing what's in the whole bible.) I gave him a copy of my book. I said he didn't have to read it, of course, and he said he might anyway, but that he's terrible about reading, but that his wife is a librarian and reads everything.
I spoke to Luke, the singing/guitar guy, him sucking on a Tootsie Pop handed out during the part where they address the kids and then send them out ("your heart is nice and squishy and soft like a Tootsie roll, but sometimes we sin, and that puts a hard shell around it. And then we try to cover that up with a wrapper. Only Jesus can unwrap our hearts." Presumably Jesus can lick away the candy that cakes our squishy hearts.) We quickly found that we knew a whole lot of the same exBrethren people from Ottawa. He identified the Brethren as being both the source of most of his Christian friends, and us as being "people who really know what the bible says." Thought we were terribly well read. Because many of us have read the bible.
I explained how, every time someone tells me he or she is in bible college or the ministry, I always ask if he or she has read the bible,. I told him how I've yet to once get an answer in the affirmative, though several atheists I know have read the whole thing. (It's not that hard. You just have to care, and hold tight to your Christianity, because nothing challenges it like knowing what's in the whole bible.) I gave him a copy of my book. I said he didn't have to read it, of course, and he said he might anyway, but that he's terrible about reading, but that his wife is a librarian and reads everything.
The Sunday pamphlet was interesting. It informed us, among other things, that:
-the church is "missional" and is currently "uncompromising" the word of God.
-Pastor Doug will not, as previously announced, require a colonoscopy next Friday after all (the whole time he paced up and down, portly, baldly be-ringed and elderly, fixing each of us with his steely gaze, I couldn't stop picturing a colonoscope dangling out the back of him)
-Bonnie and Barb were the ushers and tellers this week (it's a weekly rotating schedule of two people each week. The schedule's in the pamphlet. As usual, there were more things being done than people to do them.)
- Gloria had five teeth removed recently
-Barb is getting both a skin melanoma removed and her knee replaced next month
-Jane and Paul are in Florida and may be able to preach to friends there, possibly
-Lisa's having her first baby at 44
-Jo-Ann is recovering from bladder surgery
- .80% of Christians are spiritually bound. There's a seminar to fix that on the first Saturday in March. (I believe the "decimal' was a period left over from the previous sentence, which was missing one.)
-a discussion of Heaven will be held on Monday. Bring a bag lunch. The discussion will be "non-threatening" so you can safely bring interested friends to it. (one assumes this means that Hell won't be mentioned.)
After this, the sermon happened. Pastor Doug did it. Guitar-playing Luke had already read the whole first chapter of Job, so Pastor Doug dramatized the whole story, after reading part of John 17 without comment. He skipped Elihu and God talking to Job, as well as Job's response, pretty much entirely. He did not miss out on saying that Job lived happily ever after and had three daughters who were the most beautiful girls in all the land.
First, though, he told the story of a princess who got a nose job and still thought she was ugly, and likened this unto us getting our Christian nose jobs in terms of being Christians now, with new, perfect selves, but still feeling sinful/ugly and needing to learn about how perfect we look to God now.
First, though, he told the story of a princess who got a nose job and still thought she was ugly, and likened this unto us getting our Christian nose jobs in terms of being Christians now, with new, perfect selves, but still feeling sinful/ugly and needing to learn about how perfect we look to God now.
He also explained how that, if you get cancer, or lose a child or your job or something, the Enemy can use this as an opening and can take away your joy, which you need to please God. Your joy being gone can make you vulnerable to the Enemy, who will use it as a door into you. He can even, sometimes, make you be very, very tempted to not go to church.
When people speak on Job, they always do this specific thing. Pastor Doug did it too: they tell how amazing Job was. How much he suffered, and heroically didn't curse God, despite the advice of his stupid wife. But then somehow also, without really integrating the two views of Job, they can't help but also diss him for having what Pastor Doug called "a pity party" and feeling sorry for himself. Oddly, God doesn't seem to have judged Job for that, as far as I can remember. But I have yet to hear someone speak on Job, or Peter, or David, or Elijah, or Moses, without taking shots at them. They don't just mention the weak spots or failings. They present the person as far better than us, far closer to God, and then suddenly sound like they're saying something wholly contradictory in the middle about them being stupid and doing dumb stuff, and then they're right back to praising them to the sky like they didn't even do the dissing right before that, in the middle of the talk.
Reading all the angry God prophecy that I've been reading lately, I have come to realize that when calamity falls, this idea of (let's say someone has cancer) saying to the victim of it "You're a Christian, man! Smile! Sing! Bless God!" or (let's say someone's child died) saying "You're a Christian, lady! Smile! Laugh! Praise and thank God!" seems fairly inhuman and also against scripture. I think we're supposed to weep with them that weep, and not, like Job's idiot friends, lecture the person on having a bad attitude. The prophets don't advise Israel to smile and thank God when God rains judgment down on them. They advise them to weep. Because it's the appropriate, sane response. And they point forward to a time when God will be done doing all that, and will have something new coming, that will happen next.
Anyway, I liked what Doug said about "When bad stuff happens, God's planning stuff next" and so on. I mean, I'm pretty dogged in my belief that, as when Doug asked the question "Why does God allow bad things to happen to people who've not done anything?" that the most scriptural answer is "to glorify/make Himself look good."
What I added to that attitude today was that God often makes Himself look good by making us look good. Usually by tossing us stuff that is clearly more than we can handle, and helping us grow to eventually be able to (kind of) handle it.
I liked when Doug said that we are not blessed based on being good people, but then he kind of said we get blessed based on having good attitudes about our dependence on God. Oh, well...
I liked the service more than any of the others, though the music at the Pentecostal church was very good. I see why the Free Methodist church is such a comfortable move from Brethren for so many Brethren people. Quibbles:
-The pastor was a bit professorial and lecturey. Paced up and down the aisle giving steely eye contact to person after person, demanding full attention, while telling whimsical tales he clearly thought were well-told and hilarious. Some of the congregants were obvious apple-polishers, cultivating, into their autumn years, attention got by rueful, toe scuffing, raised hand comments like "Pastor Doug! I do that!" or "Pastor Doug! My dog does that!"
-Jesus wasn't really mentioned, again. Certainly not that he died or anything like that. I'm starting to suspect they "save" that for Easter? Church seems to be "God is awesome! (Don't sin 'cause He'll know)"
But I liked them and I liked it.
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