The pew beneath us is literally shaking.
All three of us are attempting the impossible.
How in the HELL are we supposed to keep a straight face?!
I, DH and his brother sit in a small church in Tiny Town, a burg of about 5000. Not exactly what I had in mind, at least it’s rather pretty (pretty empty, ammirite??). Pastor South’s church is in the middle of a building project financed, of course, by the sale of Pastor Kind’s former church (Not sure I’ve ever seen a church that wasn’t in the middle of a building project. It’s kinda their thing.)
Two older ladies are singing about the crucifixion, obviously one of the saddest, most tragic stories you can possibly tell, but this particular song turns the whole somber story into a five minute joke by putting some VERY serious lyrics to the melody of On Top Of Old Smokey. The three of us are doing an extremely poor job of trying not to laugh. I am biting my tongue HARD.
“Thirty pieces of silver, thirty shekels of shame…” sung in an old timey croon to a scratchy accompaniment track that had to have been recorded the first year cassettes were made. (Sidenote: So. Looked this up online and turns out this was some sort of country hit for Hank Williams Jr. Now I feel bad. But honestly, could YOU keep a straight face through this? I mean, I grew up with the lyrics being On Top of Spaghetti, All Covered With Cheese.)
Music in the church is…interesting. A recurrent problem is that individuals somehow become convinced that God has called them to sing, when it is painfully obvious that a far more sinister being had to have been involved. Try to explain to someone convinced that they can sing, that they can’t. It ain’t easy, and to this day I’m pretty sure my picture is on dartboards across the United States, owned by the people I had to turn down. It sometimes was honestly worse than the most cringey American Idol auditions, and could make William Hung seem like a rockstar.
We are now Independent Pentecostal, kind of a catchall denomination for those who left the UPC and their strict holiness standards behind. But wait, there’s more!
Still plenty of rules to obey, one of them being that secular, nonreligious music is off limits. Cheesy gospel good, MTV bad.
Not that there wasn’t any great music that happened here, because being musicians ourselves, we always had friends who were really good musicians. A few of our friends developed a Christian rock band and had some success, as well as their own collection of stories about the Christian contemporary music scene, which had a dark side along with a tendency to overlook bad behavior in musicians…the better the musician, the wider the latitude for their moral and ethical missteps. I saw this with pastors as well, those who were really compelling speakers could get away with murder. It’s fascinating to me how some charismatic individuals could be so charming yet hide so much.
Pastor South kind of inherited us from Pastor Kind’s church, we follow along and move to Tiny Town, and our lives become very small. We are worship leaders, and put together the music and the worship team. We are not paid, this is considered a Calling, and you’re supposed to obey a calling, and all that you give is returned to you, right?… RIGHT??
From the very beginning of my experience in the church, we are putting full-time effort into something that doesn’t pay anything at all. (but the retirement plan is out of this world! Ha ha.) We are taught that what you give to the church will return to you, pressed down, shaken together and running over (that’s a verse, for those of you who aren’t from a tithing denomination.) We are taught that ministry is the highest calling. We are taught that God will take care of our needs. In retrospect, I suppose that’s true, I’m still alive, clothed and fed today, but during the years when you usually are building your nest egg, buying a house, starting a retirement fund…, well, all of that just kind of didn’t happen. We’re stringing along in our rusty Ford Escort, living in cheap apartments and sometimes on donated whatever of some sort. Some pious individuals think they are doing us a big favor by giving us things that are either broken, or simply things no one would want. Newsflash: Please don’t donate garbage to the needy, it doesn’t help and now you have given them the chore of getting rid of more shit. Yes, this includes multiple trash bags full of clothing from 1962. Likewise, there’s a woman in the church who offers for us to live for free at a house she owns. A month after we move in she changes her mind and we have to move out. ONE MONTH. Good grief.
We do eventually settle in an apartment, and we also take in a guy from the church who needs a place to stay. He’s fun and funny, and he lives with us for a summer. One night we come home to squad cars in the driveway and him being splayed against the side of the house by two officers. We explain that he lives there. Years later I discover that he’s a sex offender with a history of being a peeping Tom, which explains the police visit. He never did anything to me, but I’ll never know if he watched me. Won’t be the last story I tell of creepers finding the church a safe place to hide, there’s a reason why this is common.
There’s a pattern that develops. Someone will invite us for dinner, followed by an annoying bait-and-switch where they use the social time to unload all of their grievances about how we’re running worship ministry. One woman has the nerve to pop in a VHS showing her old church’s worship team (“The worship there was SO anointed,”) and literally shows us how we should be running the ministry. I’ve definitely had better dessert.
There are a lot of things that are not what I expected working in ministry leadership. We continually attempt to help people who are down and out or homeless, but the heartbreaking truth is that people carry nearly indelible habits that either build or destroy their own lives…which makes a bad situation extremely difficult to change. Take someone who has a good work ethic and is wise with money. You can take everything away and they will find a way to rebuild it. Now take someone whose habits resulted in them living on the street and give them money, food and a place to stay; most somehow manage to lose it all. I recall reading a book about winners of massive jackpots, every single time they managed to wind up worse than when they started UNLESS they already had their financial lives together before the windfall. This becomes a perpetual frustration for me, to this day I still don’t know of any really great solutions to change one’s circumstances for the long term. I’ve seen people change, and I’ve done it myself, but it’s extremely rare and a helluva lot of work. I wish it were more common, but it just isn’t.
Eventually we manage to develop a stability, I have a salon that has really taken off, and DH has a pile of private students. But we are both getting weary of the constant weirdness that pervades Pentecostal churches, and DH is about to pursue something that will yank us right out of Tiny Town.
As in, both coasts.
In less than a year’s span.
Worship Leader Gone Wild 