I AND MY DIRTY CHURCH HABITS

First, I have to tell God in advance to close his eyes to everything I’ll be writing in this blogpost. And if he ever makes the mistake of opening his eyes to behold any of the sentences I had written, he should be thoughtful enough to forgive me like he always does. (at least I warned him before hand).

So this evening I was back in Church for the regular “Sunday Sunday Tonic” (as I had been accustomed to call the Sunday service until few years back), and with my prim and proper self, I sat listening to the preacher rave on about holy spirit and all the perks (well, God I told you not read o). 

But that was not where it all started, I particularly was not so interested in going to church today, but blame me, I had succeeded in dragging myself to the Church and standing there at zero-motion listening to the praise and worship; wondering if God won’t understand had I stayed back at the hostel, alas, there I was feeling like everything was wrong with the world. 

I remembered the worship session used to be my favorite segment back then at the Teens Church with unalloyed teenage cacophonous renditions, and then the after-service meeting item 8 (yah it’s an extended sequence of item 7); but you know what they say  about change. #Timeandchancehappenstothemall.

Moving on and back to this evening, remember I told you the preacher was stuck-in deep with this Holy Spirit thing? Yeah, so it was a Holy Spirit Sermon today with special appearance from the third dude of the trinity himself. And listening to this young man as he preached today; without any warning whatsoever, I started to feel colossal pity for this unfortunate word in the English language –“actually”; that’s the word – “actually”.

Well, we all know how much this word fits into almost any sentence construction and we never just seem to be able to resist the temptation of using it, we really just can’t help it, but how on earth will one deliver a 50 minute sermon on “How to experience the outpouring of the Holy Spirit” and afford to use the word “actually” approximately more than 60 times?

I know, I am not supposed to be doing this; keeping tally of how many times a preacher uses a particular word, but I settled my case with God already, so ya’ll had better keep your nosy hypocritic mouths in silent mode. ‘Cause the truth is, keeping tally apart from keeping me awake, it’s way way fairer than pinging-o-sermon, so what do you say now? Huh?

Well, moving on.

You know the Church can be a pretty funny place and most times I just wonder how God will go about judging this bunch of hopeless youths in this reckless generation (I do hope he has all that figured out). Observe me for instance, keeping tally of the frequency of “actually” usage during a sermon. How am I supposed to make heaven if God waltzes in though the church doors at that point?

There are some times when I ask questions, really silly ones. Some like why the preacher has to cajole the congregation to scream halleluiah. You know those very awkward moments when a preacher screams “praise the lord” and he’s a met with a drab response coming from tired parishioners? If they don’t want to praise the lord (shey tis their own wahala na), but then the preacher will come on with lines like; “if you know “today” is your year of glory”, “if you believe that you will earn 1 million naira this month”, “if you believe Arsenal will win a trophy this season”, shout a thunderous halleluiah; and then the crowd runs amok with shouts and whistling and then I start wondering if they were actually praising God or falling for the sweet words of the ‘wily’ preacher.

I ask so many questions and also notice so many weird things, but then, tonight I have decided to observe the number of times our dear preacher used the word “actually” in the course of his sermon.

I have wasted today at the service no doubt, but then, it earned me a blogpost. Well, all things work together for good for those that …(read up the rest in Rom. 8:28). I can’t afford to misquote the good book.

Nevertheless, much more that my dirty and infamous church habits, the question we should try ask ourselves sometimes is why we do some of the things we do in church sometimes. I don’t really fancy going to church, not because I am an atheist or something other than a Christian, but because we don’t have true church services anymore. True worship has been replaced with well produced renditions laced with lyrics propagating self satisfaction. The cause of the kingdom has been forgotten by so many, and now more than ever, we have so many empty souls filling up our multimillion naira cathedrals.

Preachers are only concerned with getting members into their churches and not into heaven. Faith is no longer a lifestyle; rather it is merely a religious concept that is highly impracticable.

My prayer is that God save this church. And just like John Bethke; I love Jesus, but speak of religion, I detest with an unequaled passion. 

 *Sidenote: I know I have not been here a long time. And am not even sure if I am sorry about that. UNILORIN is not smiling at all. Infact, I had written this just for the sake of it. So...off I go again to the boring lectures and term papers. Ciao. XOXO