Sunday, August 3, 2008 The Adventure of the Church I will Never Return To

Ok so one of the most difficult things I have encountered here is trying to find a quality church to plug in to. One that doesn’t do all of that typical stuff that makes people not want to go to church. You know what I’m talking about. The list is too long to even mention.

So this morning I got up ready to take on the challenge of finding a new church. I was ready. Bible in hand, journal in hand. Let’s go. I know it may take a minute to find a church that suits me so every week I will be highlighting the church I attended. So as not to defame any churches or make anyone look bad I am choosing to leave out the name of this church.

So Jaime and I walk in and we are greeted. So far so good. The usher seats us. Great. No one is wearing stockings. Awesome. So we sit and wait for church to start and we begin to cry. Crying because it’s not our old church. Because the expectations that we have are so high it will be hard for any church to ever really meet them.

Church begins and I’m just happy to be there. I’m singing and worshipping and just when I finally feel like I’m connecting with God the first lady gets up to do announcements. It was so anti-climatic. They sang two songs and they didn’t even draw each song out for thirty minutes like most black praise and worship leaders do. I felt like my spirit was running free no cares in the world and then ran into a brick wall. I was pissed. So I cried because I knew praise and worship wasn’t supposed to be over and I was supposed to get more, but ok moving on.
Then they wanted to know who the first time visitors were and I so didn’t want to stand but we did and they shook our hand blah blah blah. I felt a little weird at this point but it only grows awkward from here.

They start doing communion and the pastor begins quoting scriptures. Naturally, I open my Bible to read along but find that the scriptures he is citing don’t exist. I begin to think maybe I’m just crazy and because I have the amplified maybe it reads differently. As I look at Jaime her face looks confused too. I think maybe we are both crazy, but he does this three or four more times. Then I think well maybe he has some special edition of the bible that hasn’t hit the streets yet and only pastors have access to it because clearly these scriptures don’t exist in any Bible written up until this point. So now I’m really confused. I’m looking around like is anyone else catching this, but they were eating it up. Then he starts telling people that if they’re not saved and took communion they would die prematurely. What? But it gets worse.

Then we get to offering and they make this big deal about it and start jumping and dancing around like a bunch of coons and by now we are both disgusted and he hasn’t even gotten to the word yet.

So instead of dragging this out let me just tell you random things that were said throughout the course of the rest of the service…

“Bow your head and close your eyes. Nobody move or speak while the man of God is praying.” So if I had to sneeze would I go to hell?

“If you have an ailment or sickness come forward so I can lay hands on you and you can be healed. I can minister to you.” So if you don’t lay hands on me would I not be healed?

“You should follow Apostle _____________ and do what he does. You should want to be like him. I watch everything he does and try to be like him, but I don’t follow any man.” One you just contradicted yourself. Two, he told us we should follow this Apostle at least five more times and I was wondering if he was going to advise us to follow him in the woods and drink the red Kool-Aid next.

“As you push me up you go up! Why don’t you want to push your pastor up? Asking why does he drive this type of car, live in this type of house and wear these type of clothes. When you stop me you’re stopping yourself.” So when you shop at Bloomingdales, does that fill the bellies of the hungry people in your congregation?

Now in no way am I saying that this Pastor or the church is bad. This was just my experience and hey maybe it was just a bad Sunday. Maybe he doesn’t say all those things that could be deemed ignorant on a regular basis. I guess I will never know because I will never go to that church again!