Back to Church, After a Two-Decade Hiatus

As mentioned in earlier posts, my sister and I decided to start checking out churches together. First on the list: Wayne Cochran’s Voice for Jesus Church, up in Hialeah. We went last night.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you the devil doesn’t know when you’re trying to get to church. While I was getting dressed to go, I managed to fall down the stairs. I’m talking about a set of wooden stairs with a grand total of three steps. I have a pair of shoes with tacks in the heels that aren’t seated quite right, and I forgot all about them. Sometimes when I put my foot down just right, I slide on the hard tacks until something catches. Last night I put my right foot down at the top of the stairs, and it kept going, and the left one went right after it. And they didn’t stop on the next two steps. I went down and nearly broke my entire rear end.

I somehow managed to hit my left elbow very hard, and a lot of my considerable weight came down on my right thumb. If I had hit a little harder, I would have been injured pretty badly. My thumb was pulled upward, putting a lot of force on my wrist. My right hip hit the top step, and somehow I ended up with a pain in the left side of my back, too. After I got up, I checked my elbow, and sure enough, it was bleeding through my nice custom-made dress shirt. The only dress shirt that was ready for me to wear. I put a bandage on it and reached for a blazer. Somehow or another, dust and crud had accumulated on the one I wanted to take. I couldn’t get enough of it off to make it presentable, so I found another one.

My sister has a 335i, and she insisted I drive so she could have something to eat; her day had apparently been unusually frantic. I am not a fan of BMWs. This thing treated me like a prisoner of war. You have to have a Ph.D. to start it, and it has one of those satellite hookup things that allow BMW employees to yell at you while you drive. But I managed. Naturally, there were accidents on the Palmetto Expressway. Ordinarily, a bad time for this run would be about 45 minutes, but we managed to stretch it to over an hour.

We finally sneaked in and sat down. Wayne Cochran was off somewhere, but an assistant named Jose filled in, and he did a very good job. I was impressed.

One of the big problems with Holy-Spirit-centric Protestant churches is that they go off on worldly tangents and tell people crazy things. I quit going to church largely because I was put off by their seeming insistence that every believer had to be rich and free of problems, and that God was a sort of vending machine. Pay ten dollars in, get a hundred out. Wayne Cochran is affiliated with some of the people who offended me in the past. But Jose taught a very solid message. He said it’s not about asking God for stuff; it’s about seeing yourself as an ambassador of the kingdom, and doing whatever you can to advance God’s agenda in the world. The other things will come as they are needed; you can’t expect anything if you show up in church just to get goodies.

You don’t hear this message often from this kind of church. Or at least you didn’t in the past. Maybe things have changed for the better.

One thing surprised me. A yarmulke. A guy a couple of rows in front of me was wearing it. I didn’t know what to think. Had he been dragged there by a Christian wife or girlfriend or relative? Was he a Jewish believer? I guess he was a member, because when they looked around for new people, they didn’t pay any attention to him.

I don’t know all that much about Jewish converts. It’s my understanding that many of them don’t use the term “Christians” to describe themselves, because they reserve that word for Gentiles. And some of them continue to observe the Jewish laws, seeing themselves as plain old Jews who have found the Messiah. You wouldn’t expect an observant convert to hang out in a Christian church as a member. I suppose there is a lot of confusion in this area. I know this: you wouldn’t have seen a yarmulke in a church back when I was going regularly.

This church is not too far from North Miami Beach, which has a big Jewish presence. I suppose it’s very convenient for converts. Just hop on the Palmetto, and you’re there in ten minutes.

I thought the “ambassador” message was great, because it’s an idea I have had in my head for a long time. I think Christians have been wrong to assume “kingdom of God” refers to heaven. I think you can be part of the kingdom of God right here on earth, and because that kingdom isn’t an earthly government, this makes you a sort of foreigner, and your body a kind of embassy. Property and part of the kingdom, regardless of your current location. I had never heard anyone teach this until last night. If different Christians are getting this idea independently, maybe God is behind it. Some things in the Bible don’t make sense unless you understand the phrase “kingdom of God” to have this meaning.

We were planning to visit again on Sunday, but my sister now wants to take a look at Rich Wilkerson’s church, up in Miami Gardens. She has been there before. She says it’s wonderful.

Here’s one of the weird things about all this. In the past, I used to hope that one day, I’d be able to take my sister to church. But she took me. How about that? I figured she would have to be ethered and carried in on a stretcher.

A nice thing about this type of church is that it draws different kinds of people together. This is especially remarkable in Miami, where racial and ethnic tensions are always very high. The guy who did the teaching was probably Cuban. There were a lot of black people in the crowd. There were the usual run-of-the-mill white people. Of course, there were Hispanics. And then there was the guy in the yarmulke. Nobody talks about it, but spirit-filled churches are very good about uniting people. I’ve never been to a spirit-filled church that didn’t have members from all segments of society. As I looked around, I realized this was something Barack Obama, in all his glory, could never achieve. Leftists try to force unity on us from above, but unity, unlike prosperity, is a thing that has to trickle up. You can’t Astroturf it with busing and affirmative action. Of all the pretend messiahs, Karl Marx is the worst and the least effective. He is the Jimmy Carter of messiahs. No, the Windows Vista.

Wow, I didn’t mean to be that harsh. Is it okay to compare a fellow human being to Windows Vista?

Wayne Cochran is a wonderful speaker. He wasn’t around last night, but they had free CDs of his testimony, and I listened to one. He made it just as he was beginning his ministry. Listening to it, it’s hard to believe he hadn’t been preaching for years. As a Southerner whose parents came out of pretty much the same culture, I felt I understood it particularly well.

I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I am now a churchgoer. That is progress.