The Rapture

As I puttered through traffic on my way in to classes this morning, I found myself meditating a bit on the theology of the rapture.  With the deep and woeful disappointment of Harold Camping's followers now just a few days away, there are a whole bunch of folks who believe this is a central part of Christian theology.  That belief goes well beyond the devotees of that sepulchral radio evangelist.

It also goes deep into others who claim to be Jesus followers, like, say, in the toight-as-a-toiger teachings of our slickity local Jesus MegaCenter.  It's all over the place.

Rapture is just a central part of evangelical doctrine.  Folks eat it up with a spoon.  Tim LaHayes narrative extrapolations around the Rapture have sold an abundant pantload of Left Behind novels, and produced some of the most ragingly unwatchable films in the history of moviemaking.

Honestly, I just have never gotten it.  Not even a little bit.

I know it draws inspiration from an interpretation of one section of Luke's Gospel, in which Jesus says some are taken, and others are left.  And...well...that's pretty much it.  There are some extrapolations, followed by some interpretive gyrations, followed by some Olympic-level proof-texting, but it's essentially just that one little chunk of text, interpreted through the warping lens of the Archangel Scottie and his Bible-Believing transporter room.

Here's the essence of my problem.  This morning, as my sitting-in-traffic-mind immersed itself in the section of Faure's Requiem that was pouring through my six-speaker sound system, I found myself in a rapture-reverie.  I found myself viscerally envisioning that moment, were it to happen to me.

Now, I know this is a stretch.  As a progressive Christian, married to a Jew, a same-sex-relationship-affirming liberal Presbyterian, I know I'm not really on the Tim LaHaye shortlist.  Still, one never knows.

So here I am, envisioning what that moment would be like.  The world is coming apart.  Earthquakes.  Fires.  Buildings crumbling.  People crying out in terror.  And as one chosen, I'm unaffected.  I'm rising up, not really bodily, but into that deeper reality of God's presence.  I'm suffused with light, radiant with the power of my ascension to a place of peace and glory, my physical form yielding to my spiritual body as I began to move beyond the spreading cries and conflagration.

And it would just suck.  I'd feel horrible.  It would be the worst moment of my soon-to-be-over corporeal existence.

Why?

Because Jesus matters to me.  What he taught matters to me.  How he lived matters to me.  And from the Spirit of his radical and transforming compassion, I'd look down at the fading, burning world and weep.  I'd want none of that suffering for any of those souls remaining, even those who have hurt me deeply.  I'd feel not satisfied, or relieved, or joyous, but consumed with horror and loss and disappointment.

Like, say, Christ would have felt, if from the cross he had seen the story play out differently, watched the world consumed by annihilating fire, the fury of a father destroying everything that had hurt His child.  I can understand that anger, but it bears no resemblance to Christ.  It's a human rage.  If the fire had consumed centurion and swept aside zealot and pharisee, Christ would have seen it as betrayal.  He would truly have been forsaken.  His purpose, all his love, all his hope, all his teachings, all his transforming logos-radiant meat and bone and blood...wasted.

The reason the rapture works for folks, theologically, is that it is all about them.  It says, in defiance of the cross, that real Christians don't have to suffer when the world falls apart.  It reinforces ego and sense of otherness, at the expense for the hard Kingdom compassion that lies at the heart of the Gospel.

It just isn't Christian.

Freedom, the Burqua, and Women

Yesterday, as I picked up an inexpensive vacuum for the church at the local K-Mart, I found myself waiting by my vehicle as a woman loaded her kids into her own minivan. Her cart and her kids were right next to my door, so I just said a gentle "excuse me," smiled, gave a little shrug, and stood there. I've done the "loading up the Conestoga" thing with kids many a time, and there's just no rushing it. She apologized, and smiled, and bustled about her business.

In keeping with the diverse and varied nature of my close-in suburb, the woman was Muslim, and was wearing a headscarf. Her two young daughters were also wearing headscarves. The scarves were bright and lively in color, and both she and her daughters were dressed in a way that was both demure and pleasant.

As I motored away, I was reminded of the current struggles that secular Europe is having as it attempts to adapt to some of the dynamics of Islam. In particular, it called to mind French president Sarkozy's recent efforts to completely ban full coverage veiling of women. France has had a tremendous amount of difficulty assimilating Islam into itself, particularly in its most rigid forms. "Full coverage" and "women" just...well, it ain't French. But it goes deeper than that.

Sarkozy's central beef is that the burqua and requiring a face to be covered dehumanizes women, and that this ce n'est pas acceptable in France. Though I suppose as a progressive I'm supposed to be generally tolerant of all things, I find that I have a very similar reaction whenever I've encountered burquas here in the DC area. While I find headscarves for Muslim women no more degrading than head coverings for Mennonites, I find the burqua painfully offputting.

It is quite simply not possible to argue that they do not dehumanize women, because that is precisely what a burqua does. That's the purpose. It strips a human being of any identifiable features. They cease to have any visible traits that permit you to recognize them as an individual. Behind a full coverage veil, women are easily viewed as wraiths, shadowy beings that must remain silent in the presence of real human beings, meaning, men.

Confronted in this way, conservative Muslims tend to have two responses. First, they assert that it is their right in a pluralistic society to do as they wish, and that if a society wants to claim it is modern and open, it must be tolerant of such things. There is more than a little truth in this. We Americans tend to err on the side of tolerance, because it's a vital and central part of our history. The net effect is that Muslims in America tend to be more moderate, more open to others, and are much more vested in this nation and it's principles. People who bloviate about Islamofascism and the inherent evils of Islam and imagine that they're defending American values are, in fact, doing the exact opposite. American freedom is a far more robust and viral thing than they seem to recognize.

The "tolerate our difference" argument is, therefore, fine...so long as folks making that argument recognize that this "difference" is not something that can ever be coerced. Do you have the right to wear a burqua? Sure. But in a free society you also have the right, the very moment you realize the burqua is not something you want to wear, to take the damn thing off. And I use that word advisedly.

If you want to participate in a pluralistic society, and to enjoy it's many benefits, your faith community needs to recognize that here every woman is free to choose 1) what she wears and 2) whether she wants to be a part of your faith community at all. In the places where the burqua is worn by all women, neither of those two things are true. That will never, ever be the case in America.

The second counterargument is one that shuts the mouth of a significant portion of American conservatism. That argument is simple. Most conservative Americans are Christian. Most conservative, Bible-believing Christians will argue that women are theologically subordinate to men. It's right there in Genesis, say they. It's right there in Timothy. Women are beneath men. They can't be leaders.

And so in a proportion of American churches that I find quite simply mindboggling, women can't be pastors. They can't be elders. They can't be deacons. They are spiritual inferiors, who can teach the kiddies, but are expected to...sssshhh...not teach or lead men. In the most successful nondenominational megachurch in the capital city of the great Republic of the United States of America, for example, this is how it works.

"You see?" a crafty Taliban might say. "You Christians also understand that women have their place. We simply have a different way of expressing it."

And he'd be right.

Beloved Spear Bible Puzzler: Mclean Bible Church Edition

One last interesting takeaway from my megachurch experience:

That I wasn't particularly impressed with the scholarship evident at Mclean Bible Church message this last Sunday didn't mean it didn't serve it's purpose. The sermon wasn't intended to go deep into the intricacies of the text, or to introduce you to the nuances of Bible scholarship. It was meant to reinforce your New Year's Resolution to Go To Church, and to sound both warm and authoritative. It was not intended to speak to an audience that knows much about the Bible. Those sermons tend to drive off the noobs, or, rather, drive off people who don't like realizing how complex the Bible actually is. That glossy simplicity is why I found myself, on several occasions, going...HWaat?? like Dave Chapelle's Lil' Jon.

Yeah, I know, it's a dated reference. But I'm gettin' old. I can't help myself.

One of my more significant HWaats came as the sermon introduced us to the villain of the Esther story, Haman. Now, I know Haman well. He's a major character in the life of Jews, and being the proud papa of a couple of Jews, I hear about him annually at synagogue. Every year during Purim, my kids spin their groggers to drown out his name with loud clackings. He's the arrogant official in King Ahasuerus's court before whom Esther's uncle Mordecai refuses to bow, because...as the story goes...faithful Mordecai only bows before God. Haman then seeks to avenge that slight by not just seeking the death of Mordecai, but by plotting the slaughter of every Jew in Persia. His come-uppance by Esther is the great victory in this tale, as the cruel, proud and powerful antagonist is routed by the beautiful, brave orphan girl.

That's the story that's retold every year in the synagogue and the story we get in Veggie Tales, anyhoo.

But what I heard at Mclean Bible on Sunday was different. From the pulpit came the assertion that Haman hated Mordecai not because he was a nasty piece of work whose ego had been pricked, but because Haman was an Agagite, a people who traditionally despised the Jews. And the moment I heard that, I said...Hwaat? Agagite? I'd never noticed that detail before, as it seemed essentially irrelevant to the thrust of the story.

Now, I know my "-ites" from the Deuteronomic histories. You say "Jebusite," and I'll have some clue what you're talking about. And no, it has nothing to do with Homer Simpson. But Agagite? No such people is mentioned elsewhere in the Torah, the Prophets, or the Writings. But it seemed familiar somehow.

As the sermon went on, my mind churned. Agag? Where had I heard that name? Then, it clicked. Agag, King of the Amalekites. That must be the reference, and it's one I know well. We hear about Agag in 1 Samuel 15. I know this story well, because this is one of the favorite passages of the neoatheist movement. It describes the genocidal massacre of the Amalekites at the purported command of God. The command in that story is to slaughter all of them, down to the infants and livestock...and Saul does. All the Amalekites are utterly destroyed with the sword, all save Agag, who gets executed later. But when Saul fails to kill some of the sheep, he forfeits the right to rule Israel. It's an nasty little tale, one that a Spirit-filled heart knows is utterly at odds with both the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and the nature of the loving God he proclaimed.

At first, I thought the pastor must have just randomly googled this bizarre factoid. I was all prepared to get huffy and judgmental about the unscholarly nature of his message. But...as is so often the case...I was wrong. Upon returning to my study, I discovered that the "Haman-hated-Mordecai-because-he-was-an-Agagite-racist" is a common theme in many commentaries. The pastor had done his homework.

Up to a point. Because making that claim opens up an interesting can of worms for those of us who like to actually think about the implications of what we say.

It establishes a rather interesting tension between texts. On the one hand, the Bible clearly states that all of the people of Agag were butchered, every last one of them, completely, in an ugly genocide. Then again, Haman is, as a descendant of Agag, supposed to be an Amalekite. And not just Haman. Digging into it further, it appears that after this total "genocide," there were still plenty of Amalekites kicking around. David fights 'em agin in 1 Samuel 30. I tend not to buy the argument some conservative scholars make that he's fighting a zombie Amalekite army. I like zombie exegesis as much as the next guy, but this one seems a bit of a stretch. An Amalekite also shows up at the story of the death of Saul. He appears not to be undead, either, as no mention is made of David's soldier needing to double-tap him to be sure he's finished off.

This poses a problem for both neoatheists and biblical literalists. For the neoatheists, it means that the total genocide they eagerly point to as evidence of the monstrous evilosity of our bloodthirsty Sky-Daddy probably wasn't quite the event that's described. The text is still hardly the ethical highlight of the Bible, but looking at it from a broader historical-critical biblical perspective, it also doesn't seem to be quite the thing it says it is.

Which is, of course, the problem for literal inerrancy. These texts are clearly and in their plain meaning in tension with one another. Does "completely" not mean "completely?"

Fascinating. Learn somethin' new every day!

Where Mclean Bible Church Could Use A Little Help

To begin, a caveat. Mclean Bible Church is, by every worldly standard of success, an immense and glorious triumph of a church. My tiny, tiny church hangs on to existence by its fingernails. What MBC does, people want. It is big, prosperous, and diverse, and offers a cornucopia of ministries and services that fully meets the perceived needs of those who attend it's many worships and groups and studies. If you're looking for best practices for building a successful faith organization, you ain't gonna look to the revitalization struggles of Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda. You'd be well advised to look to MBC. They've got a tried and tested business model.

So with full recognition of my utter unworthiness, let me offer up the primary critiques I have following my visit to this great golden Jesus behemoth.

First, Mclean Bible Church is not a community. It is simply too vast to serve that purpose. You are as acquainted with the people around you as you would be at the Multiplex, or as you wend your way through Black Friday crowds at the mall. Observing the behavior of most of the folks in attendance, that's precisely what was going on. There were little clusters of folks who knew one another, but there was no sense of connectedness between the clusters. It's an easy place to disappear, to be both nameless and faceless. That is, quite frankly, the challenge in any megachurch. MBC's leadership knows this, and relentlessly pitches small groups and study groups and ministries to help folks connect to a sub-community within the church. But it is easy, oh so easy, to move through the church like a shadow. Or, more significantly, to have nothing meaningful to do with folks who are different from you or don't share your particular interests. That's a problem in smaller churches too, of course. But a ministry that is intentionally structured around appealing to particular demographic categories or areas of affinity...and provides little opportunity for transforming relationships in the broader life of the church...runs the strong risk of being "diverse" in the way a high school cafeteria is diverse. Or, again, as a mall is diverse.

Second, and this is a matter of aesthetics, MBC's facility really doesn't present like sacred space. It is an unquestionably utilitarian building, and well-designed for it's purpose. But it's also essentially secular in appearance. There is no significant design feature in the building itself that contributes to a sense of being on holy ground, unless you consider Nordstrom to be holy ground. Ultimately, this doesn't bother most folks. Being American and all, we like the practical and the useful and the immediate. You can worship anywhere, and God is present whereever you seek God's presence. It is, as they say, what's inside that counts.

And that brings us to a third and more significant problem.

Mclean Bible Church...in the worship I attended...did a kinda meh job of teaching the Bible. The message wasn't badly delivered, mind you. The full-head-of-silvery-hair pastor who preached (not their iconic senior pastor, but the pastor of one of their satellite campuses) was clearly comfortable and at ease with his delivery. His slice-of-life description of googling an old buddy was very engagingly presented. He spoke clearly and confidently, and with exactly the right level of emotion. He repeated the sermon title catch phrase over and over again, just like yer s'posed to. It did not bite. It was, occasionally, quite uplifting in a motivational speaking kind of way.

But if the message is meant to significantly deepen our understanding of scripture, then..ah..this weren't it.

He was nominally preaching out of the Book of Esther, chapter four. Meaning he never actually read it, but instead meandered through a paraphrase of the text. As he cranked through the message, a few factoids were dropped into the paraphrase.

Like, say, the fact that Mordecai, the uncle who adopts Esther, was a bachelor. He repeated this several times. I've read, studied, and taught Esther, and know it well enough to know that this"fact" does not occur in any translation of the Protestant Bible. It also doesn't ever show up in the expanded and far more entertaining versions of Esther produced by first century Greek-speaking Jews, which we now find preserved in the Catholic Apocrypha. Having done a bit of googling myself afterwards to figure out where on the web this factoid came from, I found that there is within Jewish Talmudic debate a line of speculation that Mordechai might have been single. I found a previous sermon by the senior pastor at MBC that uses the "bachelor uncle" phrase. But the text itself makes no such claim. Um...guys? Aren't you the ones who claim to be sticking to the plain text of scripture? Hellooo?

Or his strange little aside about Vashti, the wife of Ahasuerus in the story. She's the one who gets the boot so that Esther can come on the scene, mostly because she refuses to be paraded like a piece of meat in front of her drunken husband's friends. Our intrepid interpreter suggested...without getting the expected laugh, I might add...that perhaps she would have been more obedient if she'd listened during MBC premarital counseling. Yup. That's gonna endear ya to the ladies. But then again, this is a church that, while diverse in attendance, is run entirely by men.

As we got to the the Necessary Four Bullet Points You Can Take Home With You, things got odder. From the Book of Esther, the pastor told us from four of the big screens that our takeaway is, first and foremost, bullet point number one, that God is Sovereign over our lives. I'm down with that, being Christian and Presbyterian and all. God is the Creator, and my King.

But...from the Book of...Esther? Esther, which famously and completely lacks any reference to God whatsoever? In which no-one prays, and no-one engages in any discernable religious practice? Yeah, I know, God does get referenced in the Veggie Tales version. In fact, I seem to recall the grape playing Mordechai singing a song about God's authority. But last time I checked, that ain't canon.

Esther, read as it actually presents itself, is so lacking in theology that it almost got dropped from the Bible. It was, in fact, the only book that was excluded from the Dead Sea Scroll collection. As it appears in our Bibles, it's a folk tale. It's an entertaining yarn of a gutsy Jewish heroine, but asserting that one of it's primary messages is God's sovereignty is just too much of a stretch. You can certainly read between the lines to make that point. But honestly, if that's a point you want to make, then preach from a text that actually and directly expresses that concept. There are plenty of those. Plenty.

Several of those text snippets were brought to bear as the point was made, but the connection, quite frankly, wasn't either developed or convincing. It's a common approach to scripture in the Bible-believing world, I know. Perhaps that works for most folks. I'm sure most of the thousands of others in the room had no trouble with it. But it's always felt a little Isaiah 28:13 to me.

Outside of the Bend-it-like-Bible-Beckham interpretive approach, there was also something else that I struggled with, a story shared during the message. Let's, for the sake of the Blessed Bullet Points, call it point number four. It was, on the surface, a cute little anecdote about the pastor's wife and son at a Chik-Fil-A. A little girl was acting out in the munchkin habitrail, and bullying/lashing out at their son. The irate wife went and talked to the woman who was in charge of the unruly girl, and discovered that the woman was 1) the grandmother and 2) a Christian. The grandmother, pleased to find a fellow believer, shared then her sorrow that the girl's parents were 1) having problems and, worse yet, 2) unbelievers. Aha! That must be why the girl is a nasty little piece of work. Her parents are unbelievers! Of course they're having problems. If they were like us, well, then things would be fine.

It seemed a strangely graceless and insular little story, one that seemed...to my ears...to speak to the great challenge facing much of Big Church American utilitarian Christianity. Americans come to church so that we can succeed and prosper...which, of course, is the whole point of Christian faith. We come to Jesus so that we can be strong and feel important and better about ourselves. Isn't that what the Apostle Paul taught?

And what better way to feel better about yourself than to know that you're better than others? Marital struggles and brokenness must be something only endured by infidels and practitioners of "inferior" religions.

Honestly, the message wasn't a total fumble. There was some good carpe diem stuff in there. But for me...well...it just came across as a bit too predigested and a bit too simplistic and a bit too smug.

I came away from my Mclean Bible experience in much the same way I came away from my reading of Joel Osteen's "Your Best Life Now." Meaning, I found in it more that was graceful and good than I'd expected. The essential teachings of Jesus were there, up to a point, most likely in enough quantity that lives are being transformed and conformed to His grace. Westboro Baptist it most certainly is not. But while it made for an interesting and very, very different Sunday, I cannot imagine attending a church like Mclean Bible, nor would I use it as a model on which to build ministry.

Ultimately, it felt too conformed to the world. In skillfully using the tools of the marketplace, it has wildly succeeded according to the terms of the marketplace. But...as the early church learned when it conformed itself to the power of the state and reaped worldly prosperity...sometimes that comes with a cost.

What Mclean Bible Church Does Right

Being open to the positive is important, so let's take a look at what MBC does well.

The first moments of my arrival at Mclean Bible surfaced the first thing they do right: parking. They have parking down to a science. They have to. When you're trying to transition thousands of people out of the 9:00 AM service and transition in thousands of people for a 10:45 AM service, things need to go like clockwork. That's some serious believer volume to turn over. I arrived a tick early, so finding a spot was easy. It was a bit of a zoo when I left...I'm not used to sitting in traffic for five minutes just to get out of church...but the whole experience had a "leaving the stadium after the big game" sort of feel. The combination their parking lot volunteers and the law enforcement folks directing traffic for the church out on Route 7 make things work as well as you could reasonably expect.

As I walked into the campus from the two-level parking garage, I noted the next thing they do right: facility. It's highly functional, and very familiar. From the exterior, the building gives off none of the classical visual cues that would make you think "house of worship." Honestly, it looks more like a Nordstrom. When one enters, the interior is instantly familiar to any American. It's like some combination of a Cineplex and a Mall. There are nicely produced displays everywhere. The smell of coffee from the coffee bar fills the air on the lower level. Wending your way upstairs, the large airy lobby has arrays of volunteers sitting behind an elegantly curving information desk. It's like the rental car booths at a nice airport, only nicer. Entering the cavernous primary sanctuary is like entering a theater. It is an immense windowless auditorium, festooned with a half dozen large screens. At the front of the sanctuary, diaphanous scrims were illuminated with simple images of vines. On the walls of sanctuary, crosses were integrated into the sound damping elements. The sanctuary was designed by the same architectural firm that created the Strathmore theater. The firm lists Mclean Bible Church as one of it's "performing arts" clients. It's very well done.

The displays tastefully distributed throughout the building told the story of another MBC skillset: breadth. They do everything. There's a ministry for everyone. There are ministries of service. Ethnic ministries. Cultural ministries. There's a gigantonormous hippity happenin' youth ministry. There are small groups and a "university," there are umpty-zillion support groups and book groups. I suspect they may be lacking a Gay Men's Chorus, but outside of that, there's something for almost everyone. They have a ferociously entrepreneurial approach to ministry...and it clearly succeeds in building up the church.

As I settled into a seat in the upper tiers, I waited for things to begin, and when they did, I discovered the next thing that MBC does right: music. The guitarist who opened up with an acoustic version of a hymn precisely five minutes before the service was really very solid. The praise team that came out to begin the service with several Christian Contemporary tunes was also solid, and not nearly as overbrimming with weepy-emo Jesusness as I'd feared. Unlike many of my Presbyterian comrades, I know this music now. The only song I didn't already know was one that had been written for the church, and it was melodically simple enough that I could follow it even on the practice run-through. CCM is not and will never be my first preference in worship, but I like it well enough, and sang along robustly. It worked.

With the service now cranking into full swing, another MBC strength surfaced: choreography. I'm not talking about dancing, although there was a troupe of multiethnic munchkins who came out and did an It's-A-Small-World-After-Jesus routine that wouldn't have felt out of place at Disney. I mean the seamlessness of the event. Everything worked. The timing of transitions between one element of the service and another was perfect. The transitions between worship leaders was without flaw. The highly complex presentation used to augment the service...which required coordination of varying images across multiple screens...were sharp, seamless and thoroughly professional. MBC openly declares excellence as a primary governing ethic, and it shows throughout their worship. It exudes a sleek competence. As toight as a toiger, as they say.

Related to this focus on excellence is another evident strength: brand identity. The service I attended was running simultaneously with an EXTREEEME youth service in a smaller, 500 seat venue on site. Other services on other campuses in two neighboring counties were also cranking at the same time. But when time comes for the message, it's exactly the same everywhere. Outside of the primary sanctuary, MBC worshippers look up at the big screen at the appointed time, and get the same perfectly produced and packaged message that you'd get at the auditorium in the mothership. It's all MBC...and that's smart branding.

As the service progressed, I looked around at the now-packed sanctuary. Here, I saw yet another strength, one that's a serious kick in the ovaries for progressive Jesus people: diversity. MBC is a poster child for the multiethnic church. The largest group in attendance was Anglo...but just barely. There was a large Asian contingent, many African-Americans, and an impressive array of families that mixed ethnicity. There were young adults, young families, and middle-aged folk. The only group that seemed underrepresented were old white people. Guess we oldliners have to have some niche. It was as diverse as the throng you might see milling about in a mall in a major metropolitan area.

Let's see. Hmmm. Anything else? Possibly...but those are the primary strengths I observed. Next up:

Where Mclean Bible Church Might Need A Little Help.

Resolution Number One: Mclean Bible Church

With Twenty Ten now a whopping three days old, I have today fulfilled one of my resolutions for the year. That resolution was a pretty straightforward one. I vowed to at some point attend Mclean Bible Church.

That congregation is the 800 pound Jeezilla in the Washington Metropolitan Area. It's a megachurch in every way, shape, and form. It's got a huge honking main campus near Tysons Corner. It has several satellite campuses. It has scores of ministries, and scores of pastors. It has tens of thousands who attend regularly, or, at least, semi-regularly. They are the AmeriChrist Inc. Industry Standard, as ranked by J.D. Power and Associates.

I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about MBC. I freely admit it. But for all of my kvetching about their odd take on scripture, snarking at their fundamentalism and grumbling at their fungally spreading immensitude, I've never been there. That seems, at a bare minimum, unfair. How can I criticize something I've never experienced? How can I claim to have knowledge of a place I've never been, or make statements about a worship in which I've never participated?

Well, to be honest, one can talk about things one hasn't experienced. But I felt like adding some basis in reality to my perceptions of the place. Heck, up until today, I'd never even been to anything that could be described as a megachurch. I've been to biggish churches, sure, with attendance in the high hundreds or even close to a thousand. But the Jesus MegaCenter experience was not something I could claim to ever have had.

So having returned from vacay just a tiny bit early, and with a Sunday morning ahead of me, I decided to descend into the MBC vortex. Before I went, I spent some time getting myself centered and focused. Do not prejudge. Do not enter with preconceptions. Cleanse your mind, and enter as if you had no knowledge of this place.

I spent some time in prayer. I spent some time reading scripture. I girded my loins. Or at least took a shower and put on some fresh underwear. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

I got in my car, and trundled off to meet Goliath.

Tomorrow: What Mclean Bible Church Does Right.