So I’m having my morning tea and watching CBS Sunday Morning–I strongly suspect I’m their only viewer who’s not an AARP member–and came across a little nugget of brilliance that I thought I’d pass along.
The segment was about a “drive-in church” in Daytona Beach, FL. It’s in a repurposed drive-in movie theater; the minister gets up and does his thing on a raised platform up front, the service is miked, and the congregation hangs out in their cars and honks their Amens. They seemed to get a pretty good crowd on a Sunday.
The reporter asked the pastor–a white, sixty-something man straight out of Protestant clergy central casting–”Isn’t there a risk that [this setup] is so convenient that God won’t count it?”
“No,” the pastor answered serenely, “God doesn’t work that way.”
The reporter–who was being kind of a contrarian jerk–pressed him again:
“You really think God likes what this is?”
To which the pastor replied: “I know She does.”
Hallelujah for feminism and progress in unexpected places! I’m not Christian, but that’s my kind of church.
Do waiters on roller skates bring milkshakes and burgers to the assembled? I might convert for that.
Servers come around with little bites of bread and thimblefuls of grape juice for the Eucharist. But milkshakes and burgers would be better (if less theologically meaningful)!
What a cute story! Thanks for sharing, it made me smile.
Thanks for the story.. I was expecting some racist/sexist comment by the Pastor… I feel bad now.
I love it. That is even more awesome than the scene in Dogma where a very exasperated Salma Hayek explained that, as a Muse, she had no power to stop the writers of the Bible from changing God from a She to He.
Hey! The boyf and I love Sunday Morning! We live for it on the weekends.
I think I’ve said too much…
@SarahMC: Okay, so you and the boyfriend and I are the only under 50 people who watch this! You can tell by all the ads for pills to treat osteoporosis or prostate enlargement!
But I do love Charles Osgood’s soothing voice and the little Moment of Zen bits at the end…
We used to have a drive-in church near our house! Never made it to the service, though…
That seems like a sweet idea.
Church should be fun – the church I attend at home is amazing with multimedia to accompany stories, our own take on new and old hymns with drums and dances and a vicar who never wears a dog collar.
If you are going to worship God, then you do it of your own free will and have a good time! I definitely think God will approve, after all, the message is the same.
That’s so cute! A drive-in church wouldn’t appeal to me at all, but hey, if it’s what they want to do, more power to them. So convenient that God won’t count it? Puh-leeze. Isn’t there something in the Bible about “two or more gathering in My name”? They don’t say “two or more standing or sitting around,” just “gathering.”
Posts like this always remind me how grateful I am to have grown up in a liberal Christian denomination where women have full equality, and it wasn’t all that unusual to have a feminist pastor praying to Mother God. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized not everyone is like this.
And I’d also say that if you’re a fan of the “She” then you should check out the NOOMA short film “She,” which is all about female imagery of God from the Bible, which notes that much harm has been done to women by the Church Universal, and which suggests that when we see God as only belonging to one gender, we limit that which should be limitless. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p_W_ZprQYU