Want to reach the folks in the cities around you? Take one gospel tract designed by someone who is completely ignorant of contemporary culture. Add a dash of bad grammar. Throw in a thinly veiled dig at urban minority culture in general. Shake well.
Category Archives: Church Services
Attendence Books
Memo
To: All Sunday School Leaders
From: Horace J. Studebacher, Sunday School Superintendent.
Dear Teachers,
Please take extra care when filling out your Sunday School attendance books for the coming months. The pastor has informed me that his review of the attendance record has turned up several discrepancies which he thankfully caught before sending the monthly numbers in to the Sword of the Lord. We need to do better. Let all things be done decently and in order, amen?
To that end, here are a few guidelines for keeping your attendance record books accurate.
– Sunday School attendance is defined as people who actually have visited your Sunday School class this week. “They were here in spirit” is not the equivalent of attendance nor is their spouse taking them home the handout enough to count them as present.
– If you are prone to filling out your attendance books on Saturday night, please do so in pencil so they can be corrected. Let’s make it as easy as possible for our pastor to spot those who are falling behind in their Sunday School visits.
– Pregnant Sunday School attendees do not count twice unless they actually give birth in your classroom on a Sunday between 9:30 and 10:15 a.m.
– While Pack the Pew week has always been a time of friendly competition between Sunday School classes for the annual Top Fishers of Men award, it is not appropriate to “trash talk” the leaders of other classes in church the parking lot. In addition the use of door prizes, and other promotional stunts such as swallowing goldfish is discouraged unless you are working in the bus ministry.
Hopefully these reminders will serve to get us back on the path to good honest record keeping. It is important to conduct ourselves in a Christlike manner as we all focus our efforts on getting our Sunday School numbers to new record-breaking levels.
Unspoken Prayer Requests
Unspoken prayer requests are a staple of any fundamentalist prayer meeting. Far from being a simple acknowledgment of an private and personal need, “unspokens” have a variety of classifications.
The All Inclusive This is the most common form of the unspoken request. This call for a show of hands often comes at the end of time for spoken prayer requests, but can also come at any time before someone prays. (Bro. Dwight will now bless the food, are there any unspoken prayer requests out there?) If a person can’t think of a specific unspoken request it’s best just to raise a hand anyway in case they think of one later that they needed covered. This call for unspoken requests may also be accompanied by calls for responses from anyone who has unsaved loved ones, knows someone sick, is wearing a red sweater, etc.
The Guessing Game These are unsolicited unspoken requests given in midst of a call for prayer requests. They are often stated in the form of “I have a very special and important unspoken request.” The game for the audience is to try to guess what the person’s unspoken request might be by counting the number of adjectives used to describe it. Bonus points are awarded to the person with the most creative answer in the after-church unspoken request phone chain.
The Spoken Unspoken There are also the quasi-unspoken requests which go something like “I have an unspoken request that I really can’t talk about that involves my sister. I can’t say a lot but her marriage is having some trouble…and without giving a lot of details there’s also a Bolivan chef named Roberto involved and his three adopted kids and their second grade teacher.” The air is filled with the sound of pencils scribbling furiously on prayer request sheets around the room. Who knew that the unspoken could say so much?
(thanks to mark for the unspoken suggestion)
Traveling Musical Families
In fundy churches, the most common type of traveling musical family is the missionary family. The traveling family musical act is a mainstay of the fundamentalist missionary endeavor. If a missionary is to be a success on deputation and furlough he or his family must sing, play an instrument, and be able to quote John 3:16 in a foreign language. As a reward for doing these things (and not necessarily for doing them well) the missionary is then allowed to sell tapes and CDs of his family’s musical feats on the back table after the service.
There is another type of musical family that is modeled more along the lines of the von Trapp family. These are families with large numbers of children who consider traveling and performing to be their mission. It’s not easy get this act going for the simple reason that it requires having a large family. Two musical kids are hardly worth driving to see unless they’re really exceptional but by the time you’re up to seven musical children it’s a phenomenon, and twelve children barely have to have any musical talent at all to attract a crowd.
There are other costs to be considered too. Matching outfits for all those kids don’t come cheap. Not to mention the cost of transporting them from place to place. Thankfully, people are usually generous with their love offerings to musical acts.
In fact, missionaries are often thrilled to find out that a “big name” in the family musician trade is going to be present that week for the simple fact that they help boost the offerings. Man shall not live by flute solos alone.
Be sure to stop by the display table in the back.
(thanks to Don for bringing back many memories for this post.)
Anonymous Decisions
“Please bow your heads and close your eyes.”
For all of their bluster, fundamentalists are a private bunch when it comes to something as dearly personal as raising ones hand to give a non-specific response at the end of a sermon on a generic topic. There have to be some boundaries of personal space after all.
The anonymous hand-raising also gives the speaker the chance to speak “evangelistically” about the number of respondents. Not that most pastors would out and out lie but they might just claim to “see hands all over his room” when in fact exactly three people out two hundred have raised their hand and one of them is only eighteen months old.
Stand up, stand up for Jesus! Unless you’re making a decision at the end of the service. Then the protocol is “every head bowed, every eye closed, nobody looking around.”