I’m sure there are fundies out there who will pay money for this:
“You could change someone’s life… at a traffic light!”
All posts by Darrell
Visitor Cards
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…
Door-to-Door Visitation
Not wanting to be outdone by the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, fundamentalists have long been fans of door-to-door outreach programs. Thursday evenings or Saturday mornings will find any number of fundamentalists about town giving a gospel soft-sell pitch.
“Hi, my name is Rufus! We’re here from Lighthouse Completely and Totally Separated Baptist Temple and we were just wondering if you go to church anywhere.”
These are not randomly chosen words. The training for door-to-door outreach is very specific about the words used to draw the net around a potential convert. The spiel is tried and proven; the clothes are picked with care; even the number of times to knock on the door is carefully planned. If it’s good enough for encyclopedia salesmen, it’s good enough for the fundies.
It doesn’t matter whether or not door-to-door is culturally acceptable any more or even if anybody bothers to listen — just get out there every week and knock on those doors. 13 million Mormons can’t be wrong.
Sermons
For those fundamentalist sermon aficionados out there, here are a few sermon genres that grow better with age, like a fine old wine or a ripe old cheese.
The Stump Speech: Religion and Politics are a great combination. Stir some verses into your political diatribe and shake well. Extra points if you can get a politician from your party to actually do the speaking.
The Guided Missile: There’s a person in the church who needs this sermon that’s why you wrote it! Make sure to make eye contact with them while you preach it, especially during the yelling parts. Getting other church folks to glare with you will get you bonus points every time.
The Impromptu Concert: You’ve got a great singing voice — use it! Stop cold in the middle of a point and break into glorious song. People are just dying to hear you sing, so serve it up often.
The Linguistics Lesson: Let people know that the hours you spent in that church basement getting your education were not wasted! Make up entire points of your sermon telling the difference in the original language between the kinds of love. Extra points if you can find that in the original manuscripts, “thou shalt not wear pants” is clearly stated!
The Scientific Discourse: Make sure that everyone knows what a great mind you have by quoting scientific facts. If you don’t have good scientific facts to back up what you’re saying then just guess at some. After all, science is all THEORY anyway!
The Obscure Reference: Find thing in a passage that nobody else has ever thought about. Preach a message about the clasps on Jonah’s shoes. Or the beard on Daniel’s billy goat. Go ahead. Don’t just preach about the folks holding the ropes on Paul’s basket, talk about people who wove the rope and the builders who made the wall so that Paul could be lowered over it. The dynamite is in the details.
The Testimony Time: Why should only one person have all the fun of talking? Letting people break into the middle of the sermon to share their experiences on the subject is sure to help people relate. Make sure to have the tissues handy.
The Campfire Story: Spend most of the service involved in telling a really horrifying story. If the story can involve dismemberment, decapitation, or being eaten alive, so much the better. Best if used during a youth rally or chapel service.
The Springboard: Pick a verse, any verse. Read it with feelings. Then talk about anything you want to. Extra points if the verse is from a minor prophet.
The Cheer Leading Session: Make sure people are following along by asking “Amen?” at the end of every sentence. Sprinkle in a few “And all God’s people said?” lines as well. Be sure to chastise the crowd if not enough response is forthcoming.
Little Cups of Grape Juice
When the time rolls around for the Lord’s Supper, fundamentalist pull out the little plastic cups and the big bottle of Welch’s grape juice (making extra sure not to use the sparkling grape juice with the foil over the cap since this is most assuredly the appearance of evil)
Now everybody in fundamentalists circles knows that Christians since the Apostles have all celebrated the Lord’s supper with grape juice. How they did this without refrigeration is a bit of mystery. It would seem that although our Lord turned water into wine, His followers spent a lot of their time miraculously turning wine back into water. Those Jews who were used to drinking fermented wine for Passover must have been in for quite a shock.
Moving forward in history, we can clearly see that all those tales about Luther and Calvin drinking beer and wine are just nonsense. It’s doubtless the devil’s lie to get the demon rum into our churches. Believing in a good American prohibitionist like Billy Sunday is better than following the examples of those beer-swilling foreigners any day.
Fundamentalists, lift those little cups high and be thankful that you are free from leaven of wine, if not the leaven of the Pharisees. All hail Welch’s.