Category Archives: Church Services
Not Having Communion “Too Often”
In many Christian traditions, the Eucharist is celebrated at least weekly. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, celebrate the Lord’s table with about the same frequency that they change their oil.
The basic idea behind these long spaces of time is the notion that having the Lord’s Supper too often will remove the specialness of it and cause Christians to treat it with the same flippancy as everything else they do during a normal church service. It is unclear whether the frequent repetition of other activities such as offerings, sermons, or telling your children you love them also makes them mundane and unappreciated.
There is some variance between different fundy churches in this matter. The frequency can vary between monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, and “Whenever the Pastor feels the Spirit move and gets a hankering for matzah and Welch’s.” Who needs all that self-examination and remembrance anyway?
If you believe that saying grace over every meal (including the bag of popcorn you consume while watching The Sound of Music) is always meaningful but also think that having Communion once a week will trivialize its practice — you might be a fundamentalist.
Liturgy
Yes, there is a liturgy to even Fundamentalists services
Thanks to Paul and Cindy Erlandson for this great piece.
God and Country Sundays
Today around the nation, fundamentalist churches will participate in God & Country Sunday. The national anthem will be sung. The pledge to the flag will be said. The military will be honored. Jesus may or may not get an honorable mention.
To be sure, the conflation of patriotism with Christianity extends far beyond the walls of fundamentalist churches but one can be sure that if they visit most fundy churches around Memorial Day, Independence Day, or Election Day they are much more likely to hear more about the Founding Fathers than our Heavenly Father. Fox News, The President, Congress, Public Schools, Welfare, The Second Amendment, gays in the military, tax laws, and the ACLU also get significant air-time during these patriotic services. Be sure to invite all your unsaved friends and family unless they are Democrats or (worse yet) Canadian.
And woe be unto him who would suggest that perhaps the American flag has little place inside a church full of the citizens of heaven…
Testimony Time
“Who would like to share a word of testimony this evening?”
Testimony time in a fundamentalist church is an experience unlike anything one could hope to find in the outside world. It’s equal parts performance art, spiritual posturing, and the kind of long winded delivery that you might expect after mistakenly asking your hypochondriac great-aunt how she’s feeling today. It is, in short, a wonderful and awful spectacle to behold.
Testimony time has many functions. For example, it’s one of a few times when women and divorced folks get to be heard in the church without being accused of preaching. “I’d just like to thank God for the lesson he taught me this week which I’d like to share with all of you. Let me read you a few verses and then after I tell my story I’ll share a poem that I wrote…”
The Biographical testimony is also a popular one usually involving a description of the horrific sin that the teller was involved in “years ago.” The main point to note here is that while some sins are acceptable to talk about in fundy churches (“I used to be such a drunk…”) some are simply not (“I used to be so gay..”).
Another variation of the testimony is the “Bragamony” which is used for establishing the church pecking order by allowing contenders to matching stories of spiritual prowess. In this struggle for dominance, the timing of the testimony is vital. It’s important not to go first lest your story be outmatched by those following and quickly forgotten. Fall into that trap and you may have to postpone until mid-week service with a considerably smaller audience and must less impact.
“If no one else has a testimony to share let’s turn in our hymnbooks…”
Thanks to Mel, Jennifer, and many others who suggested this topic.