You step into a fundamentalist church and are immediately accosted by a greeter with a visitor’s card. Nothing says “Welcome!” to a visitor like a card asking your for Name, birth date, address, phone number, e-mail address, children’s names, and blood type. Ok, that’s stretching it a bit. Since when do fundies contact people by e-mail?
“Just drop this in the offering plate!” says the usher happily, leaving you to forage around for one of those little pencils that are stuck in the back of the pew. For a moment you consider leaving a fake address and phone number but isn’t it extra wrong to lie on a church questionnaire? With a sigh, you scratch the answer in.
And what’s this? At the top is a large garish sticker that reads “GUEST” in orange letters. The small print helpfully instructs “peel and affix to clothing.” Excellent! As if you didn’t already stand out like a sore thumb.
After the third hymn the same usher trips down the aisle with the offering plate. He knows you’ve got a visitors card and his lifted eyebrows tell you that burying it in your hymnbook is not an option. So into the offering plate the card goes. You idly wonder how much trouble it would be to sell your house and move three counties away…
And fundies understand the connection between this post and the previous one.
Good catch, Ron.
My conundrum was always wondering whether or not, as a missionary, we should fill out the visitor’s card since, technically this wasn’t our first time. Sure, it had been at least 4 years since our last visit, but still…
Been there, Stephen. 🙂
I remember my first exposure to “the connection”. When I was a student, I visited a large fundie church, filled out the visitor card and was visited the following Tuesday by SIX people. In our conversation, we discovered that 3 of them didn’t know that they had grown up on the mission field together!
I have also seen how they scam info out of people be giving away “free” tickets to get into a big Christmas production. Then the next Sunday they talk about how many visitors there were and how the church needs to be busy in the following weeks to visit every chump that filled out a card.
I have also seen how they scam info out of people by giving away “free” tickets to get into a big Christmas production, etc. Then the next Sunday they talk about how many visitors there were and how the church needs to be busy in the following weeks to visit every chump that filled out a card. I think they called it “drawing the net”.
This is amusing and ironic to me because my church calls out visitors to stand up and be welcomed every Sunday, and every hymnal contains one of these cards that they mention during announcements–but we are a Unitarian Universalist church. There is no clamoring for converts and so far, it seems like some newcomers are rejecting or escaping their previously strict and stuffy religions!