Members of The King James Independent Baptist Church of Moose Jaw, SD were given a special treat this past Sunday when their pastor, Dunbarr Lampenilli performed a classic bit of fast-talking hijinks.
“The pastor just started yelling and got all red in the face,” reported long-time member Ellen Dunstead, “We’ve never seen him like that before. We thought maybe he was having some kind of a stroke because we could barely understand him.”
As it turns out, however, the pastor was actually pulling a prank on the unsuspecting members who attended church that morning. After performing a long-winded rant in which the pastor chastised multiple members by name for their sins, told self-promoting stories, and told racist jokes the pastor then spread his arms and yelled “GOTCHA!!!!”
“It was just the funniest and most unexpected thing we’ve ever seen in our little church,” Said Dennis Hammerbottom, the church’s head deacon, bus driver, and printing press operator. “He really had us going there for a while but it turned out that we just really had it all wrong.”
When we finally caught up to Rev. Lampenilli in his office on Monday afternoon he was almost overcome with mirth. “They thought I was serious!” he said, wiping his eyes. “I did this entire bit on how wine in the New Testament was non-alcoholic and they sat there and thought I had honestly lost my mind.”
Don’t hold your breath for a repeat performance, however. “It’s not the kind of thing I’ll probably ever do again,” Lampenilli admits, “if somebody had been taping the service with a video camera who KNOWS what kind of impression that might have made on YouTube. Context is so important and if they didn’t see my big gotcha moment at the end they might think I was actually the worst pastor they had ever seen.”
According to the church bulletin, next Sunday KJIBC will be trading in their gags for the book of Galatians and getting back to the exegetical study they’ve been working through all year. “I certainly wouldn’t want a service like that every week, ” Deacon Hammerbottom admitted, “I don’t know who possibly could.”
