If I Want Buddhism, I’ll go to a Temple

I am not going to church today.

I can’t do it. I would like to go, for my dad’s sake, but after watching Tim Gilligan preach “mindfulness” (the new Buddhist/Hindu fad) to Christians, I can’t make myself go.

Here’s what happens when I take my dad to Meadowbrook Church. He sits through the service without saying much. Then as we drive home, he criticizes. “They just want to get your money.” He doesn’t encounter God at the church. He can tell the pastor doesn’t have much to say. He knows the message is empty.

The apostles preached with power and authority. They didn’t crib from Oprah and Dr. Phil. They didn’t plagiarize from Gwyneth Paltrow. They healed people. They raised the dead. They prophesied. They told people things only God could have revealed to them. In short, it was pretty much the opposite of what happens at Meadowbrook.

Nothing is going to happen to my dad at Meadowbrook. It’s a church that can only reach people who already want to believe.

I’m looking at other churches online. I don’t know what else to do.

I’m checking out a place called Kingdom Revival Church. They have a live Youtube feed. Right now the music team is going at it. The music is much better than the music at Meadowbrook, which features Hillsong-y stuff so bland it’s impossible to discern the melodies. Meadowbrook has better musicians, but listening to them is like having white bread with “lite” mayonnaise shoved into your ears.

Kingdom Revival appears to be what I call an “ethnic church,” which means it looks like it’s minority-heavy. I am reluctant to go to another ethnic church. As a veteran of ethnic churches, I am used to services where people get so emotional, they mistake emotion for the Holy Spirit. It wears you down. Meadowbrook Church is a lifeless, dried-up caricature of real church, but ethnic churches tend to be places where people work harder at pretending to be full of the Spirit than they do at getting to know him. If you want to see a pregnant single woman on a stage, singing on the music team with full approval and speaking in tongues, or if you want to see an active car thief playing the piano in a position of authority, your best bet is an ethnic church.

I generalize, of course. If I were not aware that there were exceptions to generalizations, I wouldn’t be watching the service.

It’s frustrating to see how churches go to extremes. They smother the Holy Spirit, or they work themselves into a frenzy, pretending he’s in charge. Satan likes extremism, so I suppose it makes sense.

The music people are speaking in tongues, so I guess I don’t have to ask whether the church is charismatic. It doesn’t look bad so far. Now they’re praying for a friend who is in the hospital. I haven’t seen anything like that at Meadowbrook.

I’ll watch for a while and see if it looks like this place is worth visiting. Hopefully no one will mention yoga or BLM.

Wow. He just said, “They can’t place hope in Buddha, because Buddha can’t move. Buddha is a statue that sits on a shelf and collects dust.”

Hmm. That was timely.

I just realized I’m watching last week’s service. I’ll switch to the current service.

BTW, the wife of the pastor of my last church died this week, and her husband, who has pleaded guilty to felonies, is scheduled to go into custody two weeks after Thanksgiving. You can see why I’m reluctant to listen to preachers without testing them.