Church Crashing Adventures: Pentecostal

The church this time was a Pentecostal one.  I picked it because growing up in my own Plymouth Brethren church, there was no brother church that was more maligned than the Pentecostal Church.  If someone had a strong personality, or a bit of enthusiasm or energy, someone in our group would often say "S/he's fine, but a bit...Pentecostal."  Music could easily be "too Pentecostal" as well.  If it had much energy or verve, or made anyone want to move anything, it was "jazzy" and "a bit too Pentecostal."

   We thought the Pentecostal church was wall-to-wall people rolling in the aisles, slain in the Spirit, speaking in tongues and getting healed and so on.   When the Pentecostal church by my folks' place got built (it's not the one in the picture, but looks identical) my parents and their friends made endless jokes about the new place needing extra thick carpet for rolling on, and sound proofing to drown out all the shouting in the Spirit, and so on.

   Today I was prepared to not see any of this.  I've long stopped believing what I was taught at my church about the other Christians and what they do and teach.  The most damning thing our church taught about the Pentecostals, though, was that "they" all believed that you could be saved, headed for Heaven, but if you sinned enough, you'd turn around and head straight to Hell.  I still don't know how much that's true.  But today I was ready for whatever.  Kennett and I met in the parking lot, like we'd planned a perfectly-timed bank heist.

   There were people all over the place, talking, laughing and generally not being sober, solemn, silent and reverent.  That's always weird to me.  Loud laughing in a church.  Before the service, especially.  Aren't they supposed to be getting all sombered up?  It's embarrassing, but whenever I have entered a church in the past, my face has naturally gone (even more) all stony, and a general funereal air has fallen upon me, from decades of practice.  Here, today, that wasn't even possible.  It would have been completely out of place and silly, to the point of my not being able to do it.
   A greeter guy at the door shook our hands and asked our names, then followed us down the hall to make sure we collected our church swag:  Pens.  A year-long-agenda/calendar thing.  A full-colour printed welcome flyer with the church staff, schedule of events, "ministries," a personal info card to turn in, and a weekly bible verse.

  Unlike what would have happened in my church, first we were given all of this stuff to begin with instead of just having everyone stare silently at us, and second, none of it had bible verses or warnings about Hell on it.  The weekly bible verse card, attached to the welcome package, was the only scripture snippet.  It said "Greet one another with a kiss", which I was relieved to see that no one did.
   In my head, the word "holy" is supposed to be in there before "kiss," but I just checked 1 Peter, and it's not there.  Turns out I'm thinking of Romans, 1 Corinthians and 2 Thessalonians.  For some reason, "holy kiss" has always made me think of "soul kiss," so I picture there being a lot of tongue involved in a holy kiss.  Quite out of place in a church, among strangers.

   Unlike the Presbyterian church we went to last time (which Billy Connolly's description of "drrEEEarrry PrresbytEEEErrrian!" had proven quite accurate regarding) this one's leaflet used full colour printing.  But with punctuation errors the Presbyterian one lacked.  Also, instead of crocheting being the extra-curriculars, the programs had energetic 90s names like "Elevate!" (and "PULSE" and "VIBE" and "Revive.")  Like twelve year olds, Kennett and I sniggered slightly over there being a "High Pastor" and a "Pot Blessing Meal."

   The pastors were all from Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, and had that friendly, unassuming genuineness and courteous, gentle warmth one often finds in Maritimers.  The pastor was breaking a fashion faux pas I've heard my kids at school refer to, and wearing an untucked blue denim shirt with blue denim pants.  Double denim.  Kennett and I were both slightly overdressed.  Behind us sat some seniors, all of the male members of which party had flannel hunting jackets, and wore their hunting or ball caps throughout the service.
   The worship team took the stage, and played an introductory song, which I actually knew.  It was "My Hope On Nothing Less Is Built."  It was played very quickly and synchopatedly, with quiet, restrained but solid drumming, an out-of-tune twelve string acoustic guitar, an electric lead guitar turned most of the way down, and a lady playing piano on a keyboard with a clarion, trembling, powerful, golden voice filling the room, backed only very quietly by the instruments.
   The drummer was solidly built and very still and goateed.  The guy on the out of tune 12-string was my stereotype of a church guy, with a sharp haircut and fashionably rumpled shirt, singing in a breathy, raspily sincere voice that was as pitchy as his guitar.  He was not above making eye contact while singing.  The electric guitarist looked like he was right off a tour with Johnny Cash and/or Steppenwolf.  He was extremely dour, tall and gaunt, with long silver hair, and was dressed entirely in black, including a black leather vest and boots.  He had a Fender Strat, and an amp turned away from the congregation, and he noodled away soaringly with the amp turned right down.  What I occasionally heard was some delightful Mark Knopfler-sounding (Dire Straights) stuff.  Kennett noted how he never looked up from his guitar once, nor moved.  The music poured out and he was like a statue, looking down at his fingers, making mood.  The keyboardist/lead vocalist was a fit little boyish woman with a pixie cut, shiny earrings and a soaring, powerful, throbbing voice. Her name was Diana.

   As at the Presbyterian church, first a bunch of time was taken up with charity and committee work talk.  The preaching pastor, Ivan, was about sixty years of age, with an accent that might have been newfie, or maybe just extremely rural Nova Scotia (no aspirated "H's" at the beginning of any words, unless said words started with a vowel, hwhich I 'ave 'eard is a rural haccent thing in England, hactually. Hai thought it was a bit 'ilarious.)  Like the Presbyterian pastor, Ivan brought no bible (again, there was a ceremonial bible on a rostrum, which was never touched during the service, though unlike the Presbyterian service, it sits there permanently, rather than being marched in with an honour guard.) Ivan solely used his iPad.  He also had a laptop and a projector and PA, and a remote controlled clicker to advance his PowerPoint.
   First he had every person in the church go and shake hands with every other person.  Kennett and I didn't do this, so most of the church came to us quite firmly and shook our hands.  This church was a bit better attended than the Presbyterian one, with people scattered sparsely throughout the whole seating area, but if everyone had sat together, we might have filled it a third of the way to capacity.  And there were people of all ages, as well as several different races and income brackets being represented.  After then handshaking, the pastor actually said Kennett's name and mine, announcing us as first-time attendees, and everyone clapped for us.  We sat and looked gracious.

   Then the pastor showed some charity-related slides, and a video about Operation Christmas Child, which little Madascarian children swearing to never, ever again go to a witchdoctor when they're sick, but to go to Jesus instead.  I was thinking that in Madagascar, probably it doesn't say "witchdoctor" on the sign outside the place.  The steps up to the stage were entirely blocked with little red and green "shoeboxes" to fill up with toys and things to send with a gospel message to these kids.  Diana's voice choked up when she said she knew there's be thousands of kids in heaven because of these boxes.  One box caught my eye: a kid had shakily drawn a wobbly attempt at a Christmas star on it, and had managed to draw a very passable inverted pentacle.

    Then the kids were all brought up to the front, just like at the Presbyterian church, so they could be made much of, and then ushered downstairs.  Ivan was being far less "Jesus posing for a portrait, visibly suffering the little children to come unto him" than I imagined the Presbyterian one was being, the other week.
  In my church, pretty much from birth, kids have to sit silently through the hour and a half service each Sunday, and learn to be quiet.  Some are taken out and spanked if they laugh or make noise.  And then they have to come back in the afternoon and sit quietly through Sunday School also.  Some of us also had to come to the hour-long evening gospel meeting too, from a young age, and Tuesday and Thursday prayer and reading meetings as well.
   Not so here.  The kids were handed a microphone to say whatever they wanted, and the adults let them do what they wanted, and didn't act like, were one misdeed to somehow go by uncorrected, the child might be irrevocably ruined.  One little boy lispingly but pitch-perfectly sang a Remembrance Day song about soldiers dying for us.  I knew Kennett, being a Mennonite and a firm pacifist, would find this out of place in a church, and that he'd have something to say about it afterward.  (He called it "that creepy song about soldiers dying.")

   Another little girl sang the alphabet song, leaving out a few sections of letters.  L M N....P.  Q R S T...W X...Z.  Then the first little boy grabbed back the mic and was smilingly told that one song was enough for him.  Then the pastor "prayed over" the children, with a special Remembrance Day focus on how they were going to go downstairs and hear about Someone Else who died for us, just like those soldiers had.  Apart from the introductory hymn, this was to be the only reference to Jesus Christ in the whole ceremony.  Like the Presbyterian service, it was Christian, but not to the point of mentioning Jesus by name or anything, in the sermon or even the prayers the pastor made.  To be fair, Diana might have said "Jesus" in a 'between-songs' prayer, now that I think about it.  But there was nothing about him coming to earth, or dying or anything like that.

   Kids gone, the worship music started.  Three long songs.  Huge PowerPoint lyrics.  We were "invited to stand."  So Kennett and I didn't, at first.  Then we realized it wasn't really an invitation.  (after the songs, we'd be told "You may be seated.")  So we stood too.  There was no speaking in tongues.  About half of the people at certain points thrust a palm heavenward, doing what Anne Lammott calls "making the room look like it is full of swaying palm fronds" but it seemed quite natural.
  One lady clapped and danced, as did her daughter, in an upbeat song.  It was cool, and not odd.  The woman had that half blissed out, half defying anyone else to not join in kinda body language.  Kind of defiant/happy.  But mostly happy.  It was like she waited all week to come out to church, and be her real self.  Weird.  Didn't anyone tell her that church is when you put on your stone-face to protect your true thoughts and feelings from being seen, known and corrected?  That it is your protective mask?  If anything, this woman's dancing and enthusiasm would have protected her.  It was very, very uncontrived.  If anyone in the room had tried to impress anyone else, or put on some kind of show, it would have been out of place, and most people would not have paid any attention to it anyway.

   The songs were 7-11 songs (seven words, sung eleven times) but I checked, and every single one was to and/or about God, and not about "us."  No singing about loving to sing about singing.  No songs about just humbly, privilegedly, nobly and generously thoughtlessly just sacrificing our all for God, Who is lucky to have it. No songs in praise of praise.  They actually did it.
   And right toward the start of the music, I realized, probably mostly due to Diana's singing, that I was having the whole Jake Blues from The Blues Brothers experience, sort of.  I was swept up in the mood.  Didn't move a muscle or have a facial expression or sing along or anything.  But still.  I felt like I was able to absolutely exude positivity and joy and happiness and love.  That my whole mania for everyone and everything always being real and right didn't really matter right then.  At all.  Like I could let go, at least for that song.  I was feeling so euphoric that I thought "Where is the love coming from?  Am I standing in a shaft of light with it pouring down over me?"  And I realized, "No. It's pouring through me and out of me.  A lot of it's in here all the time and never gets out.  Cool."
   Diana, accompanied herself on keyboard while she prayed emotionally in a breathless, rushed amplified whisper, with her eyes closed, between songs, the music never ending.  At first I thought it was pretentious to give your prayer a soundtrack, but then I decided I liked it.

   And then the musicians left the front and the pastor took over and all of that was over.  The "God is awesome and fair and always faithful to us!" part was over, and we'd have 45 minutes of "we suck, people sin and kill hurt each other and lie and think they can get away with it, they really do, but God will get them in the end."  And nothing about Him sending His son to fix that, or us getting saved from sucking, or anything.

   Ivan threw up a slide which announced that his sermon topic would be "An Almost Perfect Crime."  I thought "He's not going to speak about King David and Bathsheba, is he? On Sunday morning?  An Old Testament royal sex scandal to go along with worship?"  (King David saw Bathsheba bathing naked on the roof and her beauty in the moonlight overthrew him, so he knocked her up, then had her husband get killed in battle, then married her.)  Then the doubly bedenimed pastor said there was something we can't do.  We think we can, but we can't.  He's met Christians of all kinds, many of them pastors, who think they can, but even pastors can't.  He went on for a while.  He never did tell us what it was that we may think we can do, but really can't, but he meant to say it was "we can't fool God."
   I thought "He's not going to speak about King David and Bathsheba, is he?"

   He then spent some time and read us stories about a bunch of the dumbest criminals and the crimes they attempted to get away with.  I'd heard them before. I have Google.  Then he showed a video which was a news report of a dumb criminal and how he thought he'd gotten away with his crime, but hadn't.  It took a while, too.  I thought "He's not going to speak about King David and Bathsheba, is he?"

   Then he talked about how we can't escape sin.  I thought "He's not going to speak about King David and Bathsheba, is he?"  Then he said he was going to discuss a portion of scripture about someone who thought he had committed the perfect crime, but that there is no perfect crime.  I thought "He's not going to speak about King David and Bathsheba, is he?"  He said it was someone from the Old Testament.  I thought "He's definitely going to speak about King David and Bathsheba."
   He preambled for a while further, and then put the story up on a series of slides, and read each one and expanded upon each one at length to try to bring the story to life.  Like it needs that, quite.  I was impressed that he was reading the whole thing, instead of using PowerPoint for a couple of scripture scraps.  At the Presbyterian church, there had been no screen, no PowerPoint, and people had simply read the tiny bits of scripture from the program we'd been handed, though there were bibles in the pockets on the backs of the pews.  Here, there were no bibles at all, but the PowerPoint was breaking down the entire story verse by verse without skipping a word of it.  I have never heard anyone say "sex" Sunday morning in church before.

    And I caught my brain "correcting" things, like noting how he read that in the springtime, the kings went to war, but David stayed in Jerusalem.  And he interpreted "the various foreign kings going to war after winter is over but David not going" as "we have to always do the Lord's will for us."  I knew Kennett would have something to say about "not waging war every Spring = not obeying God's Will."  But I caught my brain correcting, so I turned that down, if not off.

   The sermon was lengthy, and was 'people suck.  They lie.  They think they've gotten away with things.  But God is greater than any forensics.  ANY forensics!'  There was no mention of Jesus, or salvation or hell or heaven or anything.  Just that we suck and we sin, and God knows.  Better than "there is no reason to change.  We've been Presbyterians like this for centuries, and there's no reason to change!  Not changing is beautiful. So beautiful there's no one under the age of sixty here."

   Then he teased next week's sermon.  He's from Nova Scotia, from a family of eleven, and he said this gave him an ideal chance to see that sometimes, one kid gets punished unfairly for something small, while another seems to always get away with murder.  He then said that King Saul simply lied, but "wasn't fit for ministry" afterward, while David committed both adultery and murder, but was.  And he promises to teach next week exactly why that is.
  I am almost tempted to go, reeled in by this masterful turn of suspense.  In my head, God never wanted Saul to begin with, and chose David, and David was His kind of guy anyway.  And the Old Testament is all God liking some (rather dubious) people (Jacob) and hating others  (Esau).
   The whole David and Bathsheba discussion had failed to make me think or feel anything that wasn't decades old and all-too-familiar.  But the teasing of next day's sermon made think "Why am I not conscious of sinning?  I generally don't do things unless I feel they're okay with God.  Am I deluded?" and "I think God treats me like Saul and Esau.  And that I was born to be like the prodigal's elder brother.  That sucks."

   Then the worship team came back up and Diana's golden voice rang out again like a trumpet, and love was everywhere, and it was all about God being so faithful, of having always, always, always done right by us and always been so good and so giving and so generous.  And for the first time, the "happy" seemed above and beyond what I could muster.  And I thought about how I hold something against Him.  I really do:

It has to do with being a eunuch for the Kingdom.


   You see, I don't think I should have to turn down miscellaneous and sundry offers of cybersex, blow jobs and hand jobs over the years and still have to be His perennially ever-celibate heart-mender and mind-expander for women.  Because apparently I have to work for Him by being the priest/confessor of a seemingly endless stream of Christian and pre-Christian (or Christian curious) women who need gal pals, "gay friends" and eunuchs to protect, support and otherwise help them with their man/daddy issues.  Because they need that, and God wants that of me, and I'm really good at it.

  I have not, at this time, written a hymn about how I think I should actually feel about this whole thing.  I can't imagine it would be frequently sung Sunday mornings at churches.  ("Father, I turn them all over to You, without complaint, I give them each and every one to You! From the mouths of babes (from the mouths of babes), yes from their hands, I dutifully snatch / my loveless body (my loveless body!) walk away from beauty (from beauty!) and seek to honour You, to Whom no carnal ecstasy can compare! Amen.")

   I sound like a friend of mine, but how can I stop resenting God for this?  Because I want to stop doing that.  Because I'm going to go out on a limb and say that resenting God for asking me (I believe) to live my whole life helping out women (and about half as often, guys too) who have been mis, under and unfathered, often despite being part of a Christian community?  A bit problematic.  A sin I can confess, but not one that's going away easily.
   How can I take Christian communities seriously when I am left trying to fix all the toys they break?  Comfort their victims, who they so frequently shun and blame for being dissatisfied customers?  For not being happy and healthy, strong and just rilly rilly grateful for Christian community? ;)
   But more importantly, how can I embrace the idea that yes, God is good, and we should follow Him and serve Him, but sometimes He lets life suck, or doesn't honour or bless certain of us in ways that matter to us, and He needs us to eat that, wear that and try to thrive under that without complaint?  Easy for me to blame Him.  Christians are waiting in line to tell me I ought to be blaming me instead.  And that I should be grateful for my health, including my industrial strength libido.  Easy for them.  Especially if they have cancer.

   Fact is, I've been offered Christian blow jobs, hand jobs and so on.  (Sometimes the "and so on" is the most tempting part.)  And I would argue that the act of turning down things like that is NEVER forgiven.  Not by Christian women.  (Not by any women.)  These acts of what I believe to be honouring God are relationship breakers.  They are me 'going down' that deeply mockable path of no romance, no sexuality, like there is no God to honour my attempts to honour Him, yet continuing to serve a God Who seemingly wants that and chooses this for my life.  I think my life actually makes Him look bad.  Makes Him look like He doesn't honour devotion.  That sounds really horrible to say.  But as Steven Tyler sings, it's only, only, only, only my heart talking.  Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh and so on.

   For me, this is what serving God looks like, in part.  Like this.  Saying to affronted women "I don't roll like that.  I'm actually naive enough to believe I can still, at my age, despite this obvious sexual perversion (being penile retentive), build a relationship with someone, and refuse to use a hand job the way people once used a handshake. To get to know them first inside their heart of hearts before going inside their holy of holies."  Saying, "If I go completely contrary to my culture, to modern custom, to the sociocultural mores of the world we live in, unlike almost any Christians who've been even a tiny bit honest with me about their own love-lives/courtships, God will honour that, somehow.  If I am a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven, the bible claims God doesn't want me to feel like a "dry branch" with no growth possible, but that He will reward me so I won't even care that much."
   Well, all that's not working out very well.  I can't claim to easily and fully believe all this, deep down.  Sounds good on paper.  I'm waiting.  G owes me my two-fiddy.  And I don't want it because He owes it to me.  He doesn't really owe me anything, actually.  I want Him to be nice to me because He wants to.  Because He likes me.

   Is God faithful?  To me?  I guess.  Yeah.  In most ways.  But faithful like this.  And I am a bit underwhelmed.
   Church gave me something spiritual to think about today. I am honoured and deeply humbled to share it with all of you.