For those who remember, I once vowed never to darken Mavuno church’s doorstep after they almost ruined a weekly meeting I’d really gotten to like. Well, like the man that I am, I’ve changed my mind *blushing in shame*. Unbelievably, I’ve become quite a regular at the church’s Sunday services. What happened to make me alter my previously militant stand?
I can’t quite put my finger on it but my current excuse is that I need to have something to talk about at the weekly meeting with my friends. Since the meeting includes discussing the previous Sunday’s sermon, well, how else to have something relevant to say than to attend service and take notes?
The experience hasn’t entirely been a waste of time if I can be honest. Some of the sermons have been pretty insightful. I also like that every week they feature testimonies from real people who’ve had real issues like alcohol, sex and drug addictions, which they overcame and are now helping others do the same. That’s really cool. That kind of boldness is what the church needs if it is to attain the perfection that the Lord requires of it.
One peculiar thing about the services though. Before the preacher comes on, there’s normally two people (male and female) on stage who give announcements and do a back and forth comedy skit. Sometimes they’re funny. Other times I feel like they’re the only ones getting their jokes. They praise the audience quite a bit too, making sure they always tell us how lovely we’re looking plus asking us to tell our neighbour the same thing (just in case they weren’t listening?) But no matter how many times I try and avoid thinking this way, I always end up wondering: is all that pre-sermon entertainment really necessary? I mean, really?
Ok, I understand that Mavuno is a happening church and the people in charge want to spice things up a bit. But sometimes I think they’re in danger of straying from the essence of what Christ said the church was to come together for. When I read the gospels, I see that when Christ had a message to preach he did it in plain language and using parables. There isn’t any record of him going out of his way to coat his message with song dance to make it easier to swallow. His basic method of preaching was to talk to his audience and get them to understand his message, not to give them a good time, but to tell them the truth which would set them free.
When I go further and read about normal activity in the early church after Christ resurrected it appears that what they regularly did was (Acts2:42) to continue in the apostles’ doctrine (the Word), breaking bread (the Lord’s supper), fellowship (social interaction, discussion) and prayers. Later verses in the same book and in others say they praised God in song too. So we can infer from this that the meetings were not a dull affair. However I fear what we have nowadays is focused more on tickling our fancies with entertainment and jokes, you know, to get us to feel really good after the sermon.
Perhaps, someone may say, if you don’t do something to catch the audience’s attention they will not listen to the message. I get it. Thanks to television, radio and the internet we have non-stop entertainment bombarding us from all sides. So much so that a lot of us have become entertainment junkies with short attention spans. But surely, if you give an addict more of what made them sick in the first place, aren’t you just making their condition worse?
