Solar System, Aliens & Church

I had a crazy dream the other night. My evening started with a brilliant choice to begin watching a movie after midnight. To make things worse, it was a sci-fi relic rated below 50% on RottenTomatoes. So there I was fat, dumb, happy, and getting sucked into the riveting plot of Star Trek: Insurrection. Since one bad decision gets lonely all by itself, I added a few more in the form of a midnight trip to the kitchen. Twelve minutes later, I was back on the couch fully prepared to journey with Jean-Luc Picard and the daring crew of the starship Enterprise. I burned the top of my mouth on reheated pizza, soothed the 3rd degree wound with a half-gallon of Mountain Dew, and pressed play. These are the “life choices” my cardiologist likes to pontificate about while billing my insurance company $3,700 per hour.

The next morning, I woke up in need of several things – a better decision-making paradigm, 6 more hours of sleep, a pile of antacids, and a support group. Worse, I knew I’d had an awesome dream, but couldn’t remember the details. It had aliens, chase scenes, secret surveillance subplots, and the terrifying basement in my childhood church. The Mountain Dew hangover blurred most details, so I’ll have to fill in the plot gaps with some childish imagination and courageous artistic license.

Here we go --- An advanced race of intergalactic aliens have secretly infiltrated earth. Surprisingly they are not here to enslave us, exterminate us, steal precious resources, drain the oceans, enlighten us, or dine on our brain stems. Instead they have travelled billions of miles to invisibly and quietly study human behavior, particularly the behavior patterns of my church.

(Yeah, I know. This plot is kinda’ lame and not likely to get funded for a pilot episode. But give me a break! I was still recovering from being burned by hotter-than-the-surface-of-the-sun pizza and a nasty Mountain Dew hangover.) Before the aliens start to study anything else, they want to wach our behavior. They want to establish a basic understanding of what makes us tick by seeing what’s most important to us. After studying our patterns of behavior, they conclude that we are orbital people. In the solar system, moons orbit planets, and planets orbit the sun. And church people's behavior is kind of like all the little things orbitting bigger things which then orbit even bigger things. Our rituals, routines, and charitable giving reveal what’s at the center of our religious solar system. Where do we choose to spend our time. What are our tithes and offerings spent on. When do we volunteer the most and what kinds of service do we mostly choose.

After months of secret observation the head researcher, Marvin, presents their findings. Here’s his executive summary: “This entity called “Church” is complex. It is defined by the people who participate (sometimes called members), but Church also encompasses many other components and mysteries. The primary components of Church are:

• 465 people

• 8.75 full-time employees

• 135,650 man-hours per year including all time for employees and members

• Approximately $1,290,000 in annual donations

• Church and personal libraries totaling over 105,000 books

• 135 regular volunteers / additional 82 occasional volunteers

• Specialty clothing known as “Church Clothes”

• A campus including a warehouse-shaped building of roughly 200,000 square feet

• 4.2-acres of pavement

• Of the 168-hours in an earth week, members spend an average 97% “doing their own thing” and the majority of the remaining 3% is spent by members and employees at Church

That 3% occurs usually takes up most of the the morning of the day called Sunday. And a detailed analysis of Church's components reveal that Church and its members are primarily vested in preparing and delivering a weekly "Sunday Event". Preparation and delivery of Sunday Event consumes more than 90% of Church’s resources. Sunday Event is the vortex, the gravitational center. It is the gathering – the moment when everything Church -- all the people, all the talents, all the energy, all the education, and most of the money aligns around the synod, the great center called the “Church Service.”

Marvin went on to explain that, like the members of Church, the Church Service routine is also orbital. Church Service is tightly choreographed for precision and repeatability. Two millennia of doctrinal refinement, canonization, ritualistic pomp, institutional tradition, and Christian routine have produced the perfect rythm known as “Order of Service.” Order of Service synchronizes all the participants, it aligns all various orbiting elements. Once Members arrive on Sunday morning, pick up a sacred parchment called "Bulletin", and make their way to apparently assigned seats. Order of Service is promptly launched.

For the first 5-minutes, one of the male members ascends to the Pulpit from which he reads various “Announcements” from a crumpled and creased version of Bulletin. Marvin admits this part of the routine remains befuddling, because the audience of seated members are already holding Bulletin and many have already read Announcements. Adding to the mystery, Announcements tend to include the same list of events week after week, year after year. Several alien researchers theorized that Announcements may be primarily a training time for Announcement Man who reads them. “If Doug manages to avoid screwing up Announcements, maybe he can be trusted with weightier responsibilities. Heck, if he managesd to make the pain of Announcements mildly entertaining, he might have the right stuff for ministry,” so to speak.

Moving on, Order of Service shifts to the next thing: 20-minutes of musical “Worship”. Worship was the favorite part for most of the the alien researchers. They had grown accustomed to invisibly smiling and swaying with the church members who would also sing and sing, smile and sway. If the correct songs had been prepared, the members would beam and sing loudly. If the wrong songs had been selected, their mouths would move but barely make a sound. The forced smiles betrayed a slight tinge of disappointment, even resentment that songs other than their favorites were being played. But when the song list is right, then the spirit of the room really starts to move. Marvin explains how the members will sometimes stand up from their seats, singing loudly (from the diaphragm).

Some members occasionally get lost in the emotion of the moment and start to raise a hand (or two). But as the hand reaches waist level, a primal urge, a multigenerational instinct invisibly pulls the hand back down and into a pants (or skirt) pocket. Marvin explained that this strange repression of the human spirit is also mysterious and must be studied further.

During Worship, children and adults alike sing and sing. The building sometimes vibrates because of the intensity of singing and the musicians. As evidence of the importance of Worship, Marvin shares that a large amount of financial donations buys special audio equipment so that Worship leaders and music can be clearly heard. Furthermore the time of Worship is the only time that all members seem to be actively and emotionally involved. Surely Worship must be the center of gravity for Church, but much to the aliens surprise, the very center of everything was yet to come.

Even though Worship was a high point, the gears of Service never stop turning. Next comes the Offering and the members are always surprisingly eager to give. And the giving for Offering was vitally important. Like fuel in a car engine, Offering primarily keeps two essentials for Church Service running – Staff and Campus.

• Marvin apologized for a brief but necessary diversion from Church Service to explain these two essentials. Staff includes full-time employees that are in charge of doing Sermon and some leadership responsibilities. Although most of the leadership and decision-making is done by volunteers called Elders. Some other full-time employees answer the phone and prepare various sacraments for Church Service like printing Bulletin.

• Campus is comprised mostly of the big building filled with very particular rooms – Sanctuary (where Church Service takes place), Bathrooms (mostly used during before, during, and after Church Service), Classrooms (mostly used to store interuptive children during Church Service), and Church Office (mostly used to store the Staff during the week).

If the center of the church solar system is Church Service. And the heartbeat of Church Service is something called Order of Service. Then the very core of Order of Service is something called “Sermon”. Sermon is the center of the center. The very design of Campus centers on Sermon. The most senior Staff and their salares primarily focus on Sermon. Without Sermon, there are no members. Without Sermon, there is no Campus. And when compared to all other parts of Church Service (or the human experience for that matter), Sermon is dramatically different from everything else.

(To be continued)