During the week of Thanksgiving, my friend invited me to attend his church. It seemed like an innocent enough idea. Go to my friend's church and see what he liked about it so much and see what type of message another church might have. So I accepted the invitation and decided to go yesterday. As luck would have it, my friend was even supposed to star in a small play they were holding during the children's ministry that day. So I would really be able to get a feel for various aspects of the church.
The service started with a call for tithing. This is not the practice of the church I usually attend, as the pastor there is a strong proponent of the notion that everyone has their own private relationship with God, and how much you donate is part of that relationship. Not everyone else will necessarily know the hardships you are experiencing or your ability to give and the giving should come from a sincere desire to give, not from guilt or a desire to boast about it later. As such, he feels such things are best kept private. This church, clearly, did not adhere to this same philosophy and exerted a sufficient amount of guilt upon the congregation to make me really wonder what was motivating their giving nature.
I found the children's ministry to accentuate giving even more, if that is possible, than the adult congregation did. As children would sit around showing how much they were giving and boasting about it subsequently. To further compound the competitive nature of it all, the class teacher - my friend's girlfriend - made a game out of it. The more you gave, the more pieces you got. Those pieces then went towards your team's score. You also received more "Bible Dollars" based on how much you gave. I have no idea what those dollars were to be used for, but the possibilities of what they represented truly conjured some interesting images in my mind.
However, nothing, and I mean nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed during the praise and worship portion of the service. (I missed the actual sermon portion, as it lasted all of fifteen minutes and I was at the children's play during that period.) Towards the end of one of the songs, which they elongated beyond all reasonable parameters, repeating the same two line refrain ten to twenty times, the singers suddenly started saying weird things and making very odd sounds. At first I thought perhaps someone had made a mistake, but I quickly noticed that the weird sounds and random chanting continued. People were moving in odd ways and it sounded a bit like a room full of possessed people, or possibly a room full of people with certain developmental defects. It was just about then I remembered hearing something about a church my friend used to go to that was Pentecostal. Apparently, he still attended.
The part that really got me, though, was when my friend's girlfriend's brother-in-law leaped from the stage in his suit and proceeded to circle the room at a full out run, chanting, yelping and spewing incomprehensible verbiage from his mouth. What really got me is no one leaped to summon the men in the white coats to carry this person away and put him somewhere that would prevent him from being a threat to himself or others. (Then again, he's a police officer and a pastor.) I no longer knew what to think, other than I wanted someone to get me the hell out of there. The entire scene had the feeling of a confused mob scene, and I worried that I was attending a cult ceremony where they were soon going to offer me, or someone else, for sacrifice.
(I know this post sounds fairly judgmental, but it is an adequate representation of how I felt, whether that's right or wrong.)
The service started with a call for tithing. This is not the practice of the church I usually attend, as the pastor there is a strong proponent of the notion that everyone has their own private relationship with God, and how much you donate is part of that relationship. Not everyone else will necessarily know the hardships you are experiencing or your ability to give and the giving should come from a sincere desire to give, not from guilt or a desire to boast about it later. As such, he feels such things are best kept private. This church, clearly, did not adhere to this same philosophy and exerted a sufficient amount of guilt upon the congregation to make me really wonder what was motivating their giving nature.
I found the children's ministry to accentuate giving even more, if that is possible, than the adult congregation did. As children would sit around showing how much they were giving and boasting about it subsequently. To further compound the competitive nature of it all, the class teacher - my friend's girlfriend - made a game out of it. The more you gave, the more pieces you got. Those pieces then went towards your team's score. You also received more "Bible Dollars" based on how much you gave. I have no idea what those dollars were to be used for, but the possibilities of what they represented truly conjured some interesting images in my mind.
However, nothing, and I mean nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed during the praise and worship portion of the service. (I missed the actual sermon portion, as it lasted all of fifteen minutes and I was at the children's play during that period.) Towards the end of one of the songs, which they elongated beyond all reasonable parameters, repeating the same two line refrain ten to twenty times, the singers suddenly started saying weird things and making very odd sounds. At first I thought perhaps someone had made a mistake, but I quickly noticed that the weird sounds and random chanting continued. People were moving in odd ways and it sounded a bit like a room full of possessed people, or possibly a room full of people with certain developmental defects. It was just about then I remembered hearing something about a church my friend used to go to that was Pentecostal. Apparently, he still attended.
The part that really got me, though, was when my friend's girlfriend's brother-in-law leaped from the stage in his suit and proceeded to circle the room at a full out run, chanting, yelping and spewing incomprehensible verbiage from his mouth. What really got me is no one leaped to summon the men in the white coats to carry this person away and put him somewhere that would prevent him from being a threat to himself or others. (Then again, he's a police officer and a pastor.) I no longer knew what to think, other than I wanted someone to get me the hell out of there. The entire scene had the feeling of a confused mob scene, and I worried that I was attending a cult ceremony where they were soon going to offer me, or someone else, for sacrifice.
(I know this post sounds fairly judgmental, but it is an adequate representation of how I felt, whether that's right or wrong.)
