A Different Kind of Dead

My wife and I occasionally attend other churches – just to see what’s out there.

We both grew up in a Bapticostal-type church setting.  Teaching and preaching was full of solid fundamentals of the faith, and the environment was “alive.”  Today we regularly attend a Southern Baptist church.  The teaching and preaching are a little on the light side, and I would categorize the environment as “lively,” (full of activities) but not “alive” (breathing life into our lives).

This past Sunday we visited a little church that we thought might be closer to the Bapticostal environment in which we grew up.  We were wrong.

This joint was hopping – literally.  I have nothing against exuberance in worship.  I’ve been in services where I experienced genuine exuberance.  This felt like a seance – or rather, what I imagine a seance is like, since I’ve never been to one.

Here’s a quick recap.

There were two songs, each with two notes, each lasting 12-15 minutes.  It wasn’t worship; it was an exercise in repetitive humdrumming.  Each iteration ginned up more volume, activity and gyrations than the last.  It was like what you see in a movie where a group of African medicine men or Rastafarians repeat the same mantra over and over, beat the drums louder and louder, each time with more forcefulness than the last, until they’re all finally entranced in some hypnotic state.  That’s not God descending in power; that’s you working yourself up into a frenzy.

Sitting there, it hit me: Air Dancers.  You know, those inflatable things you see along the roadside in front of a new store.  A fan blows a bunch of hot air up a fabric shaft.  The shaft has “arms” about two-thirds of the way up, and a face painted near the top.  The rush of hot air causes the contraption to “dance.”  From a distance, they look life-like.  But the slightest real observation reveals that it’s just a bunch of hot air in a tube.  There’s no life there.

Air Dancers are a different kind of dead.  They give the appearance of life.  They even approximate liveliness well sometimes.  But there’s no life in them.

The same is true for Charasmaniac / Charaslunatic joints like the church we visited.  They’re devoid of true life, yet they offer the appearance and approximation of liveliness.  They are a different kind of dead.