By Michael David Perkins
I can see them from the bedroom window. Three white crosses, each seventy-seven feet tall, illuminated at night by spotlights and surrounded by a man-made lake and short golf course style hills. People pray along these hills, walk around the lake, look up and see the goodness of the Lord. The trademark symbols of South Campus Off the Interstate guard the back entrance to a warehouse-like structure located next door to our apartment complex. I was curious about a neighborhood church that does not believe in neighborhoods so Betsy and I decided to visit.
Two roads straddle an empty plot of land where a new, larger facility is planned. Guys in orange waved us in, airplanes of worshippers ready to fly up and meet Jesus in the air. And in happy defiance, people pulled all the way through the parking spaces like evangelical jets ready to exit against the flow of traffic patterns and courtesy. Families smiled. Schools of ichthys glued to the rears.
Darkened glass. A short awning. A coffee shop. I was surprised and pleased to be immediately greeted by a slightly graying man with a mustache and suit and tie. He was one of the pastors there, he said. They have five services and oodles of other ministry opportunities throughout the week. They have stuff for kids, stuff for teens, stuff for men, stuff for women, stuff for singles, stuff for young married couples. We might be interested in that last one…if we wanted to be part of the church. This he told us before introducing us to the pastor who leads the young married couples ministry. His name was Troy, but his real name was Michael too, just like me. As it turned out, Michael and I had very little else in common and he found someone else to meet.
We walked into the sanctuary.
Flags hung from the drop ceiling 20 feet up; not all the nations of the world were represented, but the important ones, labeled for our convenience. The room could seat 1,500 in rows of interlocking chairs that wrapped around the stage. It was a wide room but not very deep. That part made me laugh. Finding our spot about halfway into this conference room of a sanctuary, Betsy told me she thought a lot of things were done out of convenience rather than necessity. “The number of services throughout the week, for instance,” she said. The sanctuary was half empty or half full, depending on your thoughts about glasses.
Two large screens were counting down the minutes first, and then seconds until the start of the service. Watching the timer hit T minus ten seconds, I half expected the congregation to begin chanting the final countdown as a smoke machine filled the stage, strobe lights flashed across it and a slow, undefined rumble began to emanate from the speakers that eventually morphed into the sound of a Saturn V rocket achieving liftoff. Most churches have a Call to Worship; we call it Blast Off! But that was my imagination. Instead, there was a guy with a guitar and a sleepy Pete Townsend physiognomy who came out and asked us the question: “Are you ready to worship God?” I guess we were.
It took three songs before I heard about a guy named Jesus, a guy we were probably all here under the pretense of worshipping. I finally felt comfortable singing. Three out of four guitars would have to do as the worship leader hopped on the keyboard for the contemplatively worshipful mood music. And again I couldn’t quite tell who we were singing to. Was it God? If so, why am I talking so much about myself and what I’m going to do? We sung one final rousing praise song that crammed two extra words into an awkward bridge as the flat curtain of a screen slowly began to lower in front of center stage. The worship leader told us that Pastor Joel, who normally speaks here on Sundays, had been ill and so they were piping in the sermon via live telecast from the North Campus, with Pastor Larry. “You watch movies like this all the time. This is just church on the big screen,” he assured us.
The digital representation of Pastor Larry wore the tuft of golden hair on top of his head as naturally as the tiny microphone that grew out from his left ear. He smiled and asked if he could do something unusual this morning. He wanted to spend the whole sermon talking about Jesus. No one seemed to have a problem with it.
He told us about his church’s plan for the future, the way they were an unusual church, the way Jesus is a cornerstone that you are either broken on or crushed under. Precious stones, he went on to tell us, is what we are to Jesus. He’s the cornerstone and the rest of us make up part of his church. “The rest of the discussion is really about you,” Pastor Larry told us, going back on his initial promise. We are valuable and we may be hidden under ground but the valuable stuff is always hidden underground. He takes us and makes us clean. God has a good fit for us. We fit together with one another in the church, but not every church is the right fit. We have to find the right fit.
At a big church like this, altar calls are less embarrassing because someone usually walks forward. A lot of people did, in fact. The schools of ichthys cried and raised their hands and wished they could be part of something so special, wanted to be precious stones buried under ground, wanted to sing more songs with awkward bridges. Next week, maybe. They had lunch plans at the moment and it was getting pretty close to too late.
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Michael David Perkins was saved by God’s divine grace and repents of his sins. He watches movies and makes them. He also goes to church.
Okay, so you felt really cynical about a really big church you visited. I guess I kept waiting for there to be a point. Did I miss something? I’ve read this entry a few times to see if I have. If this was just about some angst you were feeling with regards to this church, then that’s fine. I just thought it all was building up to some kind of conclusion.
“We fit together with one another in the church, but not every church is the right fit. We have to find the right fit.” – This line caught my attention. Are you agreeing with him since you didn’t care much for their church? This seems particularly relevant to me, anyway, since my wife and I are considering looking for a new church. It’s a weird mix of feeling like we don’t belong in our current church and wondering if two years at this church still isn’t long enough to decide that it’s been too long…
Re-reading my comment, it sounds harsher than I meant it to be. I just had a “where’s the cream filling?” moment and am honestly wondering what point you are going for.
Henry:
I appreciate your comments and your interest. This post (and potential future accounts of church visits under The Steeplechase Diaries banner) is intended to take the limited yet often lucid impressions of visiting a church and use them as a springboard to explore christian culture and its effects, positive and negative. In many ways, you bring the cream filling. It is not about hammering a big church or about being cynical. Big churches do things right sometimes and small churches do things wrong sometimes. Sometimes the methods differ, sometimes the principles.
And what you bring up is an important practical point of being a follower of Christ: when and how do we know a church is the right fit? I wrote about that part of the message because I do agree with it to a certain extent. Obviously this church was not the right fit for me, but it was for reasons that go beyond nitpicking. I don’t have to stay at that church several Sundays to know that. This gets at a fundamental idea that I hope readers will take from the post: there are things that occur in a church service that feel wrong sometimes. Sometimes they feel wrong because they are wrong; sometimes they feel wrong because an individual has preferences or personal biases. It is important not to mix the two. In this case, there were both. The way the cars parked in the parking lot felt wrong, the way the greeter tried to integrate me into their various ministries before knowing anything about me felt wrong; the shallow nature of much of the worship songs was wrong, the way the service seemed to be built around this image-driven event where Christ and His Gospel are hardly mentioned at all was wrong.
And that is the point. Churches communicate things about their beliefs and theology by the way they conduct a worship service. It is rarely explained outright, but it is perceptible.
I like what your saying Michael. What are we at church for if we’re not there for Jesus? It turns into a really bad hobby if Jesus is not our goal.
“This gets at a fundamental idea that I hope readers will take from the post: there are things that occur in a church service that feel wrong sometimes. Sometimes they feel wrong because they are wrong; sometimes they feel wrong because an individual has preferences or personal biases. It is important not to mix the two.”
Absolutely agree. There’s a tension in there that is hard to figure out.
“Churches communicate things about their beliefs and theology by the way they conduct a worship service. It is rarely explained outright, but it is perceptible.”
Agreed, again.
Thanks for clarifying. I had a suspicion that this was “the point” of this series/post but… just wasn’t sure. Looking forward to more…
Henry – I think some of the confusion comes from Michael David’s writing style, as well. It’s different than other things on this (or any) site.
He’s not going to provide an analysis in the traditional sense: “We went here. Here’s what I observed, and here is what is wrong or right about it.”
As a filmmaker/storyteller – he wants to observe more than analyze. Sometimes, like in a good movie, he focuses his lens on something that strikes him odd or peculiar. But don’t mistake his observation of the odd as mockery.
Often he will in his writing say in a sense, “This is the way the world is.” Or, “this is the way people are,” or in this case, “this is the way the Southern evangelical megachurch is. Isn’t that kind of funny.”
What I find in Michael’s writing in those moments, however, is not that I am left (as his reader) in a position of self-righteous superiorty mocking his subject. Often the reader is caught with the subject and both are equally exposed.
This is what the best observational satire does – and I think this is the vein that underlies Michael’s writing