Years after leaving the church, my mom told me a story about an encounter she witnessed with our pastor and a family that attended the church. They had bought a new car; a nice, big SUV, with all these special features and gizmos and gadgets. They had screens in the seats the kids could watch on long drives. It was a very nice, fairly expensive vehicle.
My pastor berated them for it. How much money did you spend on yourself? How much did you give to some company to make yourself feel better when you could have given it to someone in need? How many people could that money have fed? How many people could it shelter? What could we, the church, have done with that money, if you had given it to us rather than kept it for yourselves?
The message was clear and it was a message that they heard well; my mom heard it too. Spending money on yourself is a sin. If you have cash, it should go to the church. If not directly to the church, then in some way that it helps the church. You should not live a life on your own, you should be leaf cutter ants for the colony.
When I was very young, my church was small. Then it started growing. They built extensions. They built a rec center, with an indoor basketball court. I had so much fun in that rec center. Then they built some more, some nurseries, some schoolrooms, all connected in this evergrowing complex of Christianity.
The second sanctuary, though, was something else. It was massive, easily overshadowing the rest of the church entirely. It had thousands of seats, and balconies for even more. It had a big stage with room for a live band. It was impressive. But there was one part of the sanctuary that always kind of bothered me. I never really knew why. I know why now.
The second sanctuary had a massive multimedia system. Microphones and speakers and cameras that zoomed in on the pastor's face and stretched it out to fill two of the largest TV screens I've ever seen in person. Every Sunday he'd stand on stage and preach and say this and that and the other and little by little his wannabe megachurch grew and grew and more and more people were watching him. His face.
He stood there in the parking lot of that wannabe megachurch and berated a family for wasting money. How much good could the cost of that big building have done, pastor? How many people could those TVs have fed? How many homes could you have built instead? How much medicine could you have provided? How many people could you have actually helped, actually physically brought to Christ by pulling them through their troubles with the power of God's children working together?
A bigass stage with cameras and TVs stretching your boring-perfect demon white smile out to all the ones that are giving you your money. You hypocrite. You absolute hypocrite. When a churchgoer acts in their self interest, it's greed, it's sin. When a Man Of God builds a shrine to his own ego, spending so much more than that family ever could have, that's heavenly. That's God's divine will.
When I was a kid, I told someone at school what church I went to and they said their parents told them it was a cult. It wasn't, but if that man had had his way, it could've been. A spiritual enterprise of millions of dollars based on the ego of a prideful hypocrite.
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