Church Crashing Adventures: Another Free Methodist Church

Kennett and I were running short on little local churches, all in the same little town, so we tried a Free Methodist in my town.  (We hadn't taken much time to discuss the matter, so didn't do anything too adventurous.)  The thing is, the Free Methodist church we went to last time was very tiny, sparsely attended, and heavily weighted toward seniors.  The building of the one in my little town is quite large and modern, and I had taught kids who went there and said it was "awesome," so I was hoping for a real "young" church.  Maybe some real loud worship music. Maybe some teenagers in there and stuff.

    Well, it was younger than I intended or hoped.  The Sunday School teachers and pastor were away, so the kids stayed in the room, and this changed the flavour somewhat.  This was a church, it seemed, for middle-aged folk and their little kids.  A few teens. Not many.  And the service wasn't "pitched" to them.

   In general, it was wholly indistinguishable from all the other churches we've been to, in every way.  The first forty minutes were presided over by jovial, loud, exuberant, bubbly, continually joking, corpulent ladies of a certain age.  Lots of hearty laughing for no particular reason.  No male voices. A lot of stolid male faces and laughing female ones.  Males teased for lack of enthusiasm.

   I'm still not used to church being mostly laughing.  I started to realize, when a dad was asked to pray during "the offering," and he prayed very quietly and fervently, that the actual Jesus and God feelings were, in typical Canadian fashion, too embarrassing and private to REALLY let out very much.  Let the words of the songs express the deep, sincere feelings, but laugh a lot outwardly.
  This praying guy wasn't "with the program," and there was a quiet quiver in his voice.  Embarrassing and personal.  Not exuberant passion.  Deep, silencing, lump in throat passion.
   "With the program," the ladies presiding over things were running the room with a lot of demanding of hand gestures while singing, and songs with standing up/sitting down activities, and call and answer type stuff. This meant a certain amount of "Kindergarten Teacher/Children's Television Show Host/Standup Comic" persona.  One of the ladies presiding actually was an elementary school teacher, and boy did it show.  The mugging.  The asking kids questions, and if the answers weren't shouted, refusing to accept them, as if they were "wrong" answers.  Big, broad personas.
   Personas hide true selves, I think.  Even so, I caught a glimpse that these people's true selves were much more reverent and deep and "into" the spiritual than they'd ever act in front of people.  At church.  They were doing nothing but laughing and being loudly cheerful, to keep their actual deeper, warmer, truer engagement with the songs, and their richer feelings, carefully hidden.  For privacy.

   I am sick, and also couldn't escape some Brethren negative reactions, despite how affable and decent and down-to-earth everyone was.  Here is my negativity (feel free to judge, criticize, disparage or otherwise  be negative about my negativity):

-the Children's TV Show thing, with all the standing and sitting and hand gestures and "shouted vs. whispered" bits made me squirm very uncomfortably when I was a child. I never, ever enjoyed all that.  As an adult, I still feel exactly the same.  I think the goal with that stuff is to involve people, to draw them out of themselves, to make it nicer for everyone.  And for extreme introverts, this has all the opposite effects.  Actually gives us the shakes.

-There was prayer time, which impressed me.  What didn't impress me was all through "prayer time," without two seconds of respite, when we were to silently pray (perhaps even coming up to kneel at the foot of a mini-crucifixion station erected stage right), there were at all times TWO guitars and THREE voices sounding. All amplified.  Literally singing "We pray to You, oh God, we pray to you (repeat)"  I'm thinking "Why didn't we start by having them singing 'We walk in the front door, the front door oh God, and take off our coats, take off our coats, oh God, for You!'?"
  And all the while I'm thinking about maybe trying to pray anyway.  But this grouchy, Brethren heart is crying out inside me "Will you jackasses shut the HELL up!  Can't you see I'm trying to pray here?!  Can YOU  pray when there's loud music on?  Oh wait.... you're not praying. You're singing at us about praying instead of actually doing it."  And then I thought "But isn't singing "We pray to You, oh God" prayer? Technically?
  I decided that singing "We pray to You oh God" and then not actually adding anything else to that doesn't really count as praying.  It's like the phone is ringing, and you pick it up, and instead of a conversation starting, you just hear the sound of it keeping on ringing.  Doesn't count as a phone conversation.  How about a rule: "No singing during prayer time?"  I have come to wonder why the sermon doesn't have people singing right over it the whole time.  They sing over absolutely everything else.  (Grouchy).

-The worst EVER "singing about singing at church" song was sung.  It literally said "We like to go to church (repeat 3x) We like to sing to God (repeat 3x) We like to pray to Him (repeat 3x) We like to hear the pastor preach (repeat 3x)."
  Kennett did not miss how squarely this fell into my "singing about what you're not actually really doing at that moment, because you're singing about doing it instead" box.

-The (quite good, temporary fill in) pastor was explaining that, if we have Jesus in our hearts (yes, the two Free Methodist churches mentioned Jesus repeatedly, unlike the Presbyterian and Pentecostal ones, which didn't mention him at all when we were there), that you are shining.  If he's in there, you shine with that, every day.
  So, it's not a question of "Are you shining for Him?"  It's a question of if people are seeing it, and if we're keeping clean the mirror that we are, that reflects the light of Jesus.  I liked that mixed imagery, though it was mixed.  The idea that, wherever we go, it's not about "Are you shining?" and remembering to "try" to have the light of Jesus shining, but about how people might be perceiving it.  Because we aren't in "control" of the light.  It is itself.  People see.  And do they understand?  When I'm railing against Pharisees because I can't help myself?   That maybe that's Jesus?
  The pastor spoke on God.  And how God was light.  (When am I going to get negative?  Gimme a sec): he read a verse about wicked men.  He then said that, when you go into a room, if someone in there is grouchy or has had a bad day, that person stands out.  You notice it.  Then he said that if someone is cheerful, then that lights up the room.  And then he went on to talk in a way which showed that he was drawing a direct correlation between shining for God and being cheerful.  And between biblical portions about wickedness, and people who are grouchy or have had a bad day.  I felt like, without quite realizing it, he was putting forth an underlying message that Cheerfulness is next to godliness. Hm.
  My thoughts on light and darkness are sufficiently numerous that I think I will write about them in a separate blog entry.  For now, suffice it to say that I don't think in the bible, "light" imagery presents itself as merely synonymous with cheerfulness.  "God is light" doesn't mean "God is cheerful/makes us cheerful."

-There were those people who were the only ones with their hands in the air, who made nearly orgasmic sounds in response to everything the pastor said, and "quietly" called out adjectives they preferred to the ones he chose himself.  Also, they called out answers to all his rhetorical questions.  My Brethren sense made me feel like these people were not, as they presented themselves to be, just a ridiculously appreciative, supportive audience, but seemed, rather, to be pulling focus consistently off the pastor, and onto their own exuberance.   A distraction more than a support.

-I've realized that if I have an idiosyncratic lack, it is an inability to socially "do" or feign enthusiasm or exuberance. And I feel like, when you go to a new church, they are wanting you to admit how awesome they are.  Like they want a review.  (Well, I hope they don't read this.) This wasn't helped at all by the fact that, once we were "dismissed" (that word was used, adding to the "kindergarten" feel), one of the orgasmic, recreational worshippers turned to both of us, fixed us with a steely gaze and mock-angrily demanded "WEEEeeellll....?"  Looking for affirmation. Just like she'd been all service long.
  I was characteristically difficult and said "Hm?" in response with "politely" raised eyebrows, just as if I had no idea what she was asking.
  So she said "Didn't THAT just move you, deep down in your heart?!" She was positively, scowlingly demanding me to agree. That their church was awesome, and had been awesome that day.
  "Maybe a tiny, tiny little bit, yeah" I replied, as I am a bastard and seem to need to be unhelpful to people with agendas like the one she was wearing, nailed to her forehead.
  This did not appear to entice her to speak with me further.

And I'm sorry, but I have no more negative.  Clearly I am not feeling well.  The songs were repetitive and mostly kind of empty, but they were, in many cases, almost all "sung to God," which I think He likes,  and some were willing to touch upon the oh-so-awkward fact that life can be hard sometimes.  It wasn't all "Everything/God Is Awesome!!!"  There was one in particular which rhetorically asked:

What if Your blessings come through raindrops?
What if Your healing comes through tears?
What if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You're near?
What if my greatest disappointments
And the aching of this life
Are the revealing of a greater truth this world can't satisfy?
What if trials of this life are Your blessings in disguise?

...which I thought was very beautiful.  Also, the guy speaking used a real paper bible, and encouraged people to use theirs, or their phone bible apps, and turned to a bunch of places in it.  They had the big "show bible" on a pedestal, but they actually used the real thing, and didn't slap it up on PowerPoint, which was only used for the lyrics of the songs.

   We were ignored by those who had their own conversations to have, and approached by those who didn't, and who wanted to increase church membership.  A few voiced the "Who are you guys?  Where are you from?  Are you visiting Free Methodists or something?  Why are you here?" questions that are always bouncing around when we show up, unannounced and unescorted.

   It is always SO awkward when asked "Where are you guys from?" to have to say "Here."  (I  mean there was one kid in the room who goes to the high school in which I work, and one kid who I had a conversation with last week when buying gas from him at one of the remaining "not Self Serve" gas stations in the world.)

   In one of those discussions with some nice older middle-aged folks, they also were not quite asking the question "Will you be coming back and perhaps joining our church?"  All of their questions approached, then took a step back from, asking this question outright.

  I generally tend to simply answer unasked questions just as if they've been asked.  This led to me giving quite a little speech about how I'm not looking for a new church, actually, because I don't think God intends us to go off into our little churches and stay in them and be subdivided thereby.  So I won't do it.  Because it's weird.  Like us, all being Christians in the same tiny town, but not knowing each other at all unless we happen to go to the same church.  Odd.

   I suspected that they were now perhaps fervently hoping I'd go to a different church, but we had the discussion anyway.  I said I thought what God intends for us Christians is, instead of being meekly subdivided by our church groups, and thereby neutralized and negated, that He might want us to walk through all the backyards of the other Christians and churches, so to speak, and introduce ourselves, say "hi," and have a BBQ or something.  

   This unorthodox thought of mine seemed to do that thing ideas of this kind always do: it was received and assented to in a tired, "duh!" way on the intellectual level, but was threatening on the actual level.  I was told that the Church wasn't as it should be, of course, that there's no perfect church, and that we must never forget that individual churches and people can be quite powerful.  The fear was seen and voiced: "There's a place for church, though. It's important."
   Is it?  I imagined if we'd gotten together in someone's living room, back yard, porch, veranda, gazebo or basement, and instead of singing about singing, singing about praying, singing about reading the bible, singing about going to church, if we'd simply read a chapter of the bible, prayed (aloud, in small groups or together), and sang a song (not one about singing or going to church) to God, before eating stuff and not calling that activity "church."  What would that be like?  Doing instead of singing about doing.
   Another lady came over and told a story she was dying to tell, at this point, about how they were "down in South America, which is all Catholic, you know..." and how they gave pens and combs and things to some kids in an orphanage. I think this was an attempt to talk about one time, when they were in a different continent, and there was no Free Methodist church handy, so they "did good" instead, and how they liked it.  That one time.

   These folks apparently thought that everyone going off to their little churches and calling that "the assembling of yourselves together," like that is what the bible intended, was normal and good.
  So I said "Can you imagine how powerful we'd be if we didn't slice and dice ourselves into fragments, though?"  And then I said I thought we divided ourselves because we preferred it that way.  That we used it as a way of not having to deal with Christians who thought and lived differently from us.
   All that went over like a lead zeppelin, I think.  I can ruin anything.