Our Heathen Church

Our church has some problems, but I bet so does yours. After you move past reasons like “organ vs. drums,” or ”too many/too few potlucks,” or “serving communion on Youth Sunday with coca-cola and doritos” problems with churches will boil down to two points. 1) People are sinners and, 2) your church is full of sinners. If you were not aware of those two points it is time to stop going to your church. It has failed you badly.

“Pastor's teeth are too shiny” is not a valid reason to not like your church. Though “Pastor is too creepy,” however, is entirely valid.

And let me tell you, no place is full of more sinners than our church, good old Evangelical Church Peace of Christ Nampula. (Warning: time to fasten your sarcasm seatbelt). Several weeks ago about 8 different churches from our denomination (the Evangalical Peace and so on church) got together to mark the end of a pastors conference, in which over thirty pastors from all over the province were gathered for service Sunday morning.

Things were going fine until at the end of service, the lead pastor got up for announcements. The first and only announcement was that this year, Christmas falls on a Sunday. In lieu of meeting in church that morning, he continued, all the churches would be shut for people to spend the day with their families.

What would have been more appropriate to say was, “Head's up, Christmas is on a Sunday and I'm going to be out of town for a family reunion [the part he failed to disclose], but feel free to do whatever you want. It's your church after all.” Instead, the message was, “shut your doors.”

Its as if all at once the Holy Spirit touched each of these pastors to stand up, start pounding their fists, and say that this was probably the worst decision ever made since Paul decided Jews could eat meat or something of that sort. Once the furor died down, the pastors began to speak one at a time. Each pastor reiterated the same point, which is that this just simply wouldn't do because his church is full of the absolute, most horrible human beings to ever walk the face of the earth.

The bulk of their reasoning was this. Friday, people will leave work and start drinking themselves silly. Without church to go to on Sunday folks will just steamroll through onto Monday. And most people, having absolutely nothing to do, will probably continue drinking all week. Then one of them pointed out that New Years is also on a Sunday. New years day, being the most celebrated day of the year in Mozambique, meaning that folks would spend almost two full weeks participating in enough licentiousness and debauchery to make Sodom and Gomorrah blush if they didn't have to go to church.

Now, I will grant that a big sin culturally here is drinking and other behaviors like spreading HIV to almost 25% of the population. I can see how this would be on the pastors' minds. But they were making a clear argument that without the threat of having to show up sober for church, these people would drift away until their blood alcohol level is so high the blood that the blood would be indistinguishable from the alcohol. One pastor said verbatim that without church people would have nothing to do other than drinking.

Don't think that your church gets away free though, just because people don't show up hungover on Sunday morning. That doesn't mean that you don't spend all your time gossiping about the pastor's wife, always happen to leave you money at home come time for the offering, and think that you're saved because you know the lyrics to every Chris Tomlin song ever written and Jesus is setting aside a special place for you in his personal choir, directed by Mr. Tomlin himself.

Now that I've fully offended the gossipers, penny-pinchers, and Chris Tomlin fanatics, I will say that I don't know what your church is like, but I'm sure it has its problems to. But as of now I know that ours is apparently full of horrible, terrible, drunken sinners and the only thing that I know that will save them is church Jesus.