When i was six i had to sit in my own poop for an hour long sermon because nobody would let me get up to go. Course they also had to sit in it with no reaction heh
That is outright neglect. That level of strictness is just ridiculous. If they really wanted you to sit and listen, and take the sermon seriously, you certainly can’t do that while sitting on a turd, while also having the attention span and understanding of a six-year-old.
Yeah the 60s were a different wotld heh
Learning about Jesus while your underpants are full of poop is a good way to make a negative association.
Seeing that religion is generally full of shit, I find some irony in this scenario.
The sign said, “Everybody welcome, Come in, kneel down and pray”
But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all, I didn’t have a penny to pay!
So I got me a pen and a paper, and I made up my own little sign.
I said, “Thank you, Lord, for thinking about me, I’m alive and doin’ fine”.
Woooooaaah!
I let my college RA bring me along one weekend to a megachurch she attended. The pep rally vibe I can accept as just not my style of worship, but the order of service was short on scripture and long on homilies of questionable theology.
When I was like six or seven years old, my great aunt Ruth stayed over Christmas eve. She was a nun, so because it was important to her, we were going to open all of our Christmas presents after mass.
Mass was almost three hours. I remember this pretty clearly because I had a cheap casio wristwatch and I was timing it. I probably didn’t hear a word of the sermon.
Making kids wait to do anything but open presents on Christmas day is criminal, imo.
Oh my God this brought back a memory. It was probably the time my friend invited me to their church and expected me to speak in tongues. Like wouldn’t let me leave until I was filled with the spirit and speaking in tongues. It was terrifying.
Can you type out a longer, detailed play-by-play so we can eat popcorn as we read it?
It was so long ago, I remember being surprised that such a regular girl belonged to such a terrifying church, I guess if you grow up in it, it seems normal?
We arrived with her parents and sat towards the middle of the pews, there was the usual call and response and singing and a sort of sermon I don’t remember but then one by one the people in the audience started standing up and babbling. Then my friend did and their parents and the pastor was exhorting us that EVERYONE needed to submit and be filled with the spirit, EVERYONE!! Who, me? EVERYONE! I stood up and made some nonsense sounds and that seemed to satisfy them. I was congratulated and hugged and then there was some more churchy stuff not so crazy.
I mostly remember being scared, and also being so confused that this was “church” to my friend. My mom made us go to “church” and it was guys in robes and some singing, a sermon, some praying, a little more singing, a benediction (really pretty - “May the Lord bless you and keep you, may he make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you”) and then walk out in an orderly fashion. Mostly really boring, not scary because I didn’t believe any of it.
But to her, “church” was this mass of people being crazy and babbling and the preacher yelling, and it never, like, coalesced into order, it was literally a pack of shouting mostly adults, who seemed convinced this was an essential sign that God was speaking directly through you.
My grandmother’s funeral comes to mind. Some old preacher dude walks up to the podium with a legal pad, flips over a page, drops the “we’re at a funeral, act somber” body language like you’d drop a bath robe, and starts what I assume is an average Sunday sermon, occasionally remembering to point to the corpse behind him and insisting “That’s what she believed.”
He had the gall to offer his hand for me to shake.
“Heh, sure are easy when they’re stiff like this! …and very sad.” (one of the treehouse of horror episodes)
Being a kid with ADHD, all of them. Each and every service drove me to the brink of insanity. I stopped going once I was old enough to decide for myself.
I’ve got a bunch of horror stories that take some detail to explain, but I remember a couple moments of shock in particular.
Was actually a Methodist service, Easter Sunday. it was when they cut a baby lamb’s throat and it bled. It was great special effects with a real lamb but children started crying.
Also, the time we all went to see Passion of the Christ, 9:00 or 10:00pm showing. There was a mother smacking the shit out of her toddler for crying when the torture started. I’m a different person now and would put a stop to something like that now.
A Catholic Christmas Eve Vigil (not Midnight - different kind of Mass).
The scene was thus: A strange-to-me Catholic church off of something and Capital in Milwaukee, near where my mom, not a religious person but a nice person, took me and my sis when Christmas happened to fall on our regular visitation weekend one particular year.
The priest spoke on and on, as fathers and Father tend to do. The readings familiar, unre(M)arkable, (L)ukewarm, Psalm verse, same as the first.
The Homily was delivered in the patented priestly monotonic nasally drone, the incense and insensitivity flowing too freely. The easily-employed white, gray-haired, “middle class rich”, Kohl’s-suited, stoic husbands stood, sat, knelt, genuflected, stood, knelt, stood, sat, stood, knelt, genuflected, prayed, sang-chanted, with their wives, who were fully guilt-jeweled for common marital slights, whether real or imagined, or who benefited from rich parents who left their ill-gotten legacies to their ill-raised, now boomer kids who have become reluctantly over-sexed wives. The department store credit cards tucked safely in their expensive clutch purses, these women were fully-prepared to wage full-out Karen-esque, post-Christmas sale consumerist war in the following post-holiday sales season.
Retail workers never stood a chance.
In short: The church was overheated, like hell hot, probably good prep for some of these people, and my not-Catholic mother was next to me trying to morally fix or better herself, or maybe she was trying to impress my sister and I, or, more than likely on reflection, trying to placate my very-Catholic dad and stepmom, but mostly I had been standing for what seemed like FOREVER, and my knees alternately locked and unlocked, and my youth-fitting suit that was too small but too expensive to replace at Kohls just yet sweltered me under imagined and real guilt, and the incense, and the droning, and the HEAT…
I was about 4 seconds from passing out when some stranger approached me and said “Hey, you don’t look OK. Let’s go outside now before you faint.” and I swear it’s the best religious experience I’ve ever had: A human being a human and taking pity on a young kid dealing with physical and emotional distress. I went outside and cooled off in the Midwestern December air. Soon after, my mom and sis came outside and we left in the beater car that smelt like gas if the heater was fully turned on, so we had to leave the freash air selector on and the slider control at no more than 3/4 quarters, but that’s OK because the A/C, which hadn’t functioned in many presidential election cycles, was fully-replaced by the December air, the religious experiment over.
I’m not at all religious but I hope that guy knows just what he did for us that night. We were faking faith, just trying to be good people, and the droning, heat, guilt, and THAT FUCKING CHRISTMAS INCENSE just did us in.
Lesson learned.
Not only was that an interesting experience to read about, but you wrote it very well. It was like reading a novel, where the main character is narrating some back story.
If you don’t already write, you should give it a go. I’m no expert but I’ve been reading actual books for pleasure since about 1975. I have a mind which generates images from text when I’m reading and they are more vivid with writing that I enjoy. Lots of imagery was flowing from your words.
That one where Trump held up a bible
I might be mixing up events, but I thought that it was a photo-op when mass protests were happening in D.C. You know… appeal to the Christians. Am I mixing it up with something else?
No I just thought it was funny. But in reality the worst “sermon” (so to speak) I attended was when the speaker started going off about men in tight pants and women in “spanx”. He very clearly didn’t understand what spanx were and was most likely talking about yoga pants. That’s not even to mention the homophobic rant where he implied that all fashion designers were perverted gay men who designed tight pants so that they could look lustfully at other men in tight pants
This reminds me of a tweet I saw where a pastor was saying that “it’s a good thing that homosexuality is against God’s law cuz if it weren’t guys would just be banging each other left and right” and the person who was reposting it said “I know something about you that you don’t know”
Some homophobes don’t believe in the existence of straight people.
What wouldn’t he do?
All of them except the one where they handed me a collection plate and thought they were giving me the money so I took it.
I didn’t grow up in a church that had one of those. So I’ve always wondered what would they do if you came to Sunday service, in a hobo outfit and took some of the money in the collection plate. The defense being, ‘What? I’m poor. I’m homeless. Jesus would have given.’
Nowadays? Depends on a whole set of indeterminate variables.
But odds point to tazing. arrest, something on that end of the spectrum.
More likely to depend on region of the country or world than anything else.
I’ve seen a collection plate with a tap-to-pay terminal so that would make it more difficult.
I was around 9 or 10 when this happened. I went with my best friend and his mother. Everyone made a big deal about there being someone new at the church. Then i was handed a gold plate bowl thing of money, so i started stuffing handfuls of money into my pockets thinking everyone was welcoming me with cash. My friend was giggling, i looked at his mother and she was shaking her head. I passed the plate along but kept what was in my pockets.
After looking up how much money my local megachurch took in last year ($60 mil) versus how much they spent on charity ($3 mil), I think you were probably justified.
It was right around the release of Star Wars Episode I, and the new pastor thought if he brought modern pop culture references into his sermon, maybe The Youths would sit up and pay attention.
The sermon was a whole thing about “being a Jedi Knight for God” and it was insufferable. I’m not sure time has ever gone by slower. I was twelve and absolutely not won over, I wanted to crawl out of the pew and die.
Pew or pew not - there was no die.
I unironically loved that shit when I was like 5
maybe The Youths would sit up and pay attention.
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Not a church service, but I attended a church wedding.
Pastor gave a sermon as is tradition during a church wedding. Every minute or so, he somehow managed to work in “and since you are in a place of God, you should not disrespect the bride and groom or our worshippers by using your phones”.
Bitch, I’m here to support my friend who’s getting married, not your church or your worshippers. I know for a fact that my friend chose to get married in the church because it’s cheaper, not because she’s super religious. Also I’m agnostic and haven’t read the Bible, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t say “thou shalt not use mobile phones in churches”.
I very pointedly had my phone out for his entire sermon out of spite
If your friends didn’t care, fine I guess, it was their wedding after all. If you don’t understand why this makes you look selfish and callous though, then you’re not the kind of person I’d want at any party, let alone a wedding.
I’m sure your friends felt great knowing that Facebook was more important than their wedding ceremony.
Imagine not being able to leave your phone in your pocket just for the duration of your friends’ wedding ceremony, irrespective of the location. Insufferable behaviour.
Well I’ve only ever been to one and it was my uncle’s wedding. no complaints, ceremony was short but its the only church service I’ve ever been to so that’s it.
