Gospel Church

Two weekends ago I had the opportunity to go to a gospel church.

Now, those of you who may know me, know that I am just about the farthest thing to a gospel church-goer as could be. But friends of my wife invited us to be there with them as they were participating in the joining ceremony or ritual or whatever. My first instinct was to try to get out of it, but, as I soon found I couldn’t, I decided to go into it with a curious mind.

Here are my observations and conclusions.

The church we went to is a large one – a “mini mega-Church” is how I thought of it – that’s been in our area for years and years. In fact, two decades ago, I seriously dated a girl from whose house we could see the church downhill from the front living room window. There are several large buildings – a church, a school, and some sort of big meeting house – and the parking lot probably held twice as many vehicles as the one for my local Catholic parish. There is a big “Jesus Loves You”-type sign, at least fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide, angled towards oncoming highway traffic.

Once inside I guessed the church could hold five hundred people. Later, I saw it held more as I spotted stairs to the balcony and side doors to other rooms-with-a-view. But what immediately hit me when we first walked in was the fact that I was now in the middle of a Christian concert.

And I mean, in the middle. My wife’s friend and her family sat in the third row, dead center. And by “sat,” I mean, “stood, clapping and singing.”

Oh Lord. This ain’t me.

I felt extremely uncomfortable during the first fifteen minutes of the Christian concert. Tried to make myself invisible. Two dozen feet in front of me, on a stage a hundred feet wide, all miked up, were four singers in three-piece suits or dresses, an Asian keyboardist / bandleader, a guitar player who looked like Kenny Rogers, a drummer behind what looked like a Plexiglas penalty box, a youthful black bass player, a horn section of three older men all the way on the right, and a choir of twenty behind them all. No robes though. But everyone dressed well, and were sort of coordinated: black pants and robin’s-egg blue tops.

The band performed three songs. One both sides of the stage were the largest flat screen teevees I’ve seen outside a sporting arena. You were able to follow along with the songs as they splayed the lyrics for all to see, superimposed over inspirational scenes from nature.

After all this we sat down. One of the ministers talked for a few minutes, then we all stood for his blessing. A youth minister then came onstage to talk. He was very powerful, a very energetic, enthusiastic, and, ergo, effective speaker. My wife whispered to me, “That’s what we need!” meaning that’s what our Catholic church needs. Later I pointed out that, being the only gospel church in the county (88 townships and probably a million people), they had a larger pool of participants to pick from than our church did (2 townships of about fifteen thousand people).

The first preacher came back out and invited all the new members to come onstage. Each introduced him- or herself, and occasionally the preacher engaged in some witty and humorous banter with them. We all clapped and took photos when it was over.

A musical interlude of two songs followed. One man soloed during the second song as if it was the season finale of American Idol: Mature Evangelist Edition.

Then the main event: a twenty-minute sermon on … Satan. How he works, why he works, his tactics, his objectives. All biblical-based, with chapter and verse quotations flying up on the flat-screens. If there is something I will easily grant Protestants as a group it is that they know their Bible inside and out. We Catholics, pathetically not so much. And their preaching is so much more dynamic. As the husband of my wife’s friend said to me after the service, “I learn more in a half-hour sermon here than I learned in all four years of Catholic high school.” I would agree. We’re going through a similar situation questioning the value of my oldest daughter’s CCD obligation.

Some more music and the service ended. Just under ninety minutes in length.

The gospel church appeals to a certain personality type. Specifically, the not-me personality type. If one is emotional, extroverted, touchy, weepy – and there is nothing necessarily wrong with being that way – then someone may find himself comfortable in a gospel-type church (and apparently a lot do). But it ain’t me. I’m monkish, introverted, bookish. I receive the Holy Spirit best through history, prayer, creeds, the Latin, the symbolism of the Catholic Church. Crying singers on stage don’t do it for me. (Schubert’s Ave Maria, sung once every Christmas, is the only exception.)

This is the third protestant service I have been at, the other two being Lutheran and Presbyterian. If you forgive my ignorance and take this observation as merely an observation and not a judgmental condemnation, I found each to be lacking. The Lutheran ceremony felt like a town hall meeting to me. Indeed, the church itself looked like a 19th-century New England town hall. The Presbyterian service also felt like a town hall meeting, albeit one with a pretty neat musical interlude where a dozen girls of various ages played a song by ringing different-sized bells. I especially dug the cowboy boots the minister wore on his stage. And if memory serves correctly, that sermon was also about being wary of Satan.

A dominating thought as I sat through all the preaching that day was one of a continuum. Put all those self-help seminars you see on teevee – and maybe your company pays you to attend – such as Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Bryan Tracey, et al, on one side and pure, unadulterated, un-hippy Catholicism all the way on the other, and each of those three Protestant services would fall at varying locations in between.

When I say that these services “lacked something” for me, what was lacking was some participation in the Holy. There was nothing even vaguely Sacred or Transcendent about those services, and I used those words with the first letter capitalized for a very specific purpose. It indicates the Hand of God reaching down to brush fingertips with our outstretched arms. That is what the Catholic Mass means to me, and on more than one occasion I actually experience it. I found not an inkling at any of these Protestant services.

But – if you are reading this and you are non-Catholic – believe me when I say that we are not enemies. We are brothers, not enemies. We are all part of the family of Christ. But even those who are not – Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, Secular Humanists, Scientologists, Agnostics maybe (that’s a pun) – they are not the enemy either. There is only one Enemy, and he must be resisted. And no, I did not learn that fact at the gospel church two weeks ago.