I went to a wedding, my girlfriend's friend was getting married.
For context I'm a brown skinned native American man and my girlfriend was a white girl.
The pastor of the wedding had never met the people he was marrying and assumed that I was the groom.
I told him I wasn't and he moved on.
I thought that was the end of it.
Queue the pre-wedding little religious ceremony thing and the same pastor who had met me assuming I was the groom and shook my hand said that he believed that with the power of Christ any relationship can work, even ones between people of different races.
He looked directly at me when he said it.
I was the only non-white person at the wedding. I've never wanted to beat an old man's ass before. I didn't know I had that urge within me.
The church is just another avenue of oppression, no surprise it is full of people who can manage to be bigoted about topics their religion does not even actually talk about.
When we were young and first married, my wife and I decided to try a church that we had saw online. The website and name made it seem like it would be alright and more modern thinking. We were wrong.
We pull up and the church building is a double wide trailer, a congregation of about 30 people. The preacher appears to be in his 70s.
He sees that he has guests and singles us out and puts us on the spot to introduce ourselves to whole congregation. He never refers to my wife by her name instead just calling her “Wife”. He prays for us multiple times during the service and bring us up during the sermon. (Still just referring to us as TORFdot0 and wife)
Speaking of the sermon, he begins the sermon talking about the gay democrat agenda and how the gays are ruining God’s institution of marriage and how it will soon be illegal to be married to a woman. This gets an audible sigh from the ladies in the front row.
He also preached to cherish our Bible before the black socialist devil in the white house takes them from us.
He compared the Bible to an old hound dog and started barking for going on two minutes. It’s like a dog because it warns us of things to come.
After what seems like an eternity of a sermon, he invites the kids up to the alter for some “Hallelujah” Candy (it’s the Sunday before Halloween). One child takes a second handful of candy and the elderly pastor chastises him and then bends him over his knee and starts spanking him in front of the congregation.
Needless to say we did not give that church a second visit.
Went to a wedding and the pastor’s pre-ceremony sermon was fire and brimstone followed by a rant about how it was God who gave him the right to marry, not the state. Lots of stuff about the wife being subservient to the husband and acting as his servant. The deep state government was being controlled by a satanists who call themselves secular humanists. Marriage can only happen between a man and a woman and the state was defiling marriage by allowing gays to marry, but it wasn’t real marriage according to God. Some really wacky stuff to talk about at a celebration. Killed the mood.
Turns out my friends had joined one of those extreme, right-wing cults and this was their normal pastor. This group was worse than any of the usual bad actors and interacting with any of their congregation was weird. We fell out of touch for some reason.
So I come from a muslim(ish?) background, but no one in my family or extended family goes to mosque or anything, or says “selam aleykum” everytime we meet (we just say “merhabalar” (i.e. ‘hello’)). It’s just a cultural thing. Most cultural christians want a priest at a funeral, and most cultural muslims want an imam.
Anyway, back to my great aunt’s funeral. The imam was there, doing the prayer in arabic because that’s what you do, even though no one could understand what he was saying. At one point however, he switched to a language that we could understand, and it was very clear he was telling us that we were bad people and bad muslims for not attending mosque, and that our aunt will pay the consequences of our failings.
Needless to say, at the next few funerals we went with a different imam. A nicer one. One who understands that religion is not a key aspect of many people’s lives, but that spirituality in times of distress can be a great comfort.
When i was six i had to sit in my own poop for an hour long sermon because nobody would let me get up to go. Course they also had to sit in it with no reaction heh
Not a church service, but I attended a church wedding.
Pastor gave a sermon as is tradition during a church wedding. Every minute or so, he somehow managed to work in “and since you are in a place of God, you should not disrespect the bride and groom or our worshippers by using your phones”.
Bitch, I’m here to support my friend who’s getting married, not your church or your worshippers. I know for a fact that my friend chose to get married in the church because it’s cheaper, not because she’s super religious. Also I’m agnostic and haven’t read the Bible, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t say “thou shalt not use mobile phones in churches”.
I very pointedly had my phone out for his entire sermon out of spite
I didn’t grow up in a church that had one of those. So I’ve always wondered what would they do if you came to Sunday service, in a hobo outfit and took some of the money in the collection plate. The defense being, ‘What? I’m poor. I’m homeless. Jesus would have given.’
I was around 9 or 10 when this happened. I went with my best friend and his mother. Everyone made a big deal about there being someone new at the church. Then i was handed a gold plate bowl thing of money, so i started stuffing handfuls of money into my pockets thinking everyone was welcoming me with cash. My friend was giggling, i looked at his mother and she was shaking her head. I passed the plate along but kept what was in my pockets.
I might be mixing up events, but I thought that it was a photo-op when mass protests were happening in D.C. You know… appeal to the Christians. Am I mixing it up with something else?
No I just thought it was funny. But in reality the worst “sermon” (so to speak) I attended was when the speaker started going off about men in tight pants and women in “spanx”. He very clearly didn’t understand what spanx were and was most likely talking about yoga pants. That’s not even to mention the homophobic rant where he implied that all fashion designers were perverted gay men who designed tight pants so that they could look lustfully at other men in tight pants
This reminds me of a tweet I saw where a pastor was saying that "it's a good thing that homosexuality is against God's law cuz if it weren't guys would just be banging each other left and right" and the person who was reposting it said "I know something about you that you don't know"
I don’t even know if it was a church service per se, since it was a broader thing, but my mother’s funeral might count because it ended with my siblings implying they intended to ghost me from then on.
On a less solemn but more bitter note, there was a Buddhist temple where I used to live even though I don’t remember if I ever went inside or not. I have a single Buddhist friend, and he warned me (because he was not like other Buddhists) that other Buddhists’ notion of karma was such that, along with seeing people with disabilities as having had a past life of sin (or the equivalent Buddhist loanword), some fear it as associative in nature and will go so far as not touch an individual who has a visible medical condition, which I’m the only one with (everyone else’s medical history is invisible), and I remarked (referring to Joseph Smith having lived in the area) something like “at least Mormons treat those with respect who they deem as the equivalent to being cursed”, which began a theological debate over why it’s “meh” when Buddhists deem someone as cursed but “oh no” when those of us who are under the Mormon umbrella do. Nobody mentioned is hostile to me, but there’s an air of backhandedness towards me whenever I’m around. Fortunately it was only ever relevant once.
The power team. Apparently vast amounts of sweat, tearing phone books in half, bending steel rods and blowing up hot water bottles is godly and there were several alter calls.
Then I had to see them at Jr. High the next day to preach about how bad drugs are.
OMG I had a visit in elementary school from these guys! The school was a sad fundie kid-prison, but these guys were pretty neat. Rolled up a frying pan and did the blowing up a hot water bottle thing.
I find it so weird hearing about them again lol.
IDK, power to 'em. (Lol pun) Unlike a lot of nasty political preaching, I hope these guys are just being straight-edge motivators preaching the Gospel.
Well I’ve only ever been to one and it was my uncle’s wedding. no complaints, ceremony was short but its the only church service I’ve ever been to so that’s it.
I have clear memories of the pastor at my parents’ church talking about how the gay agenda’s next steps were legalizing bestiality and pedophilia. Probably would’ve been somewhere around 2014-2015. Looking back, it was absolutely the beginning of the end of me having anything to do with religion, so maybe it’s actually the best sermon I ever sat through.
I’ve blanked a lot out of my memory but I do remember one particularly awkward time where the pastor spent way too long explaining how god designed the asshole and its not for fucking.
When I was a freshman in college, I let this youth group convince me to visit their weird church. The “pastor” was a young guy who spent the entire sermon talking about how he squandered his time in college before eventually dropping out. Fortunately, the old pastor took pity on him and gave him a job as an assistant—running errands, cleaning, etc. Then one day the old pastor died, so our hero basically just took over since no one else wanted to.
When it was done he tried to sell us bags of stale coffee.
I threw up in one once. I actually don't recall anything any worse than what it usually was. I actually went further into the evangelical baptist rabbit hole as my family drifted a bit from it, but that would reverse and end with me being an atheist-leaning agnostic.
I do remember Sunday school teachers being angry that I was allowed to have D&D books and games. In a different church when I was in middle or high school, I quoted the movie name "Oh God you Devil" and my buddy whose family took me to church slapped me. That was a good time. /s