Outchurched

The previous post reminded me of the time that a Christian friend from work (at a job I held a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away) invited me to see his church’s Christmas presentation, which was a musical based on the works and writings (interviews?”) of Thomas Kinkade, the “Painter of Light.” This was at the point in my life where I’d made the decision to stop attending church and hadn’t attended for at least six months. It seemed to me that it was his way of trying to get me engaged with church again without having to jeapordize our friendship by trying to argue/debate/discuss it. I appreciated the care/concern, but had no interest in going back into captivity. Once freed, a captive isn’t necessarily hot on returning to captivity (unless one is a King Rat).

However, at the last minute I decided to go (loneliness/boredom can motivate you to do a lot of things), although I’ve never been a Kinkade fan (I inherently dislike those who willfully misrepresent their products) and couldn’t really pallate the notion of going to watch a Christmas extravaganza whose purpose was to manipulate me into making a “decision for Christ.”

I point-blank told my friend that I was leaving if/when it turned into religious drek. However, I didn’t keep my word; I sat through the whole thing. Although the content of the performance was lacking substance, value, and unclad female breasts [the “over-18″ type], it’s almost impossibly hard not to watch people who are passionate about what they’re doing. I’ve been involved in enough theater to know how much effort, care, and love went into the montrosity of a production, and besides… my friend’s young kids had bit parts and were pouring their hearts into it… and they were really cute kids.

I was curious as to what a megachurch would do in terms of a musical production. Performance-wise, it was actually pretty good. The amount of work that went into the production was blatantly obvious. The set design was nothing less than amazing… even though it was in the visual style of a Kinkade painting. The folks at my friend’s church took an inane, lame, uninspired script and musical score and turned it into a nigh-unto-tolerable experience. They came remarkably close to making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

However, you’d expect something glitzy and big from a large church with non-trivial resources. It was definitely an interesting contrast to the relatively small church with trivial resources that I’d previously attended. The number of people on stage easily outnumbered the total attendance of my previous church, by at least a factor of five.

In addition to doing some narration, my friend was working as a greeter, so we didn’t end up sitting together. He was instructed to “be available” so that he could help answer questions and attend to anyone who wanted to “make a decision for Jesus.” At the end of the performance came the inevitable passing out of contact cards. When I was given one I felt inclined to throw it away. However, it occurred to me that there was a better way…

I marked the checkboxes next to “I want to talk to someone about my relationship with God” and “I’d like to talk to someone about becoming a Christian.” I then wrote “I’m really worried that I’ve just been pretending to be a Christian” in the comments section, entered my friend’s name and phone number, and turned it in. I went home and thought nothing more of it.

A few weeks later my friend came up to me at work and said:

“Hey Dan, you won’t believe this. My pastor called me up and asked me if I wanted to talk about my relationship with God and asked if I was struggling with feelings of being an inauthentic Christian. Well, it was like Divine Intervention or something, because I’d totally been thinking about those things. Anyhow, we had a long discussion and I’ve recommitted myself to God. Because of this event, and because I’ve been feeling a heavy burden on my heart for the unsaved in remote parts of the world, I feel that God is calling me to quit my job and become a missionary.”

I replied: “Wow man, that’s uh, interesting. When are you going to do that?”

He answered: “In two weeks. My wife quit her job, and we’re pulling the kids out of school.”

I responded: “Praise God, brosef. The Lord moves in mysterious ways.”

He laughed and said: “My pastor pulled me aside and asked me why I’d filled out one of the contact cards. I was perplexed until he showed me the card and I figured out that you’d written it at the Christmas show… and then we both laughed.”

“That’s right bro, I too move in mysterious ways.”

This entry was posted by Rev. Dan on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Testimony. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.