Not church per se, but my uncle blew his brains out. At the wake, the priest turned his little speech into how evil abortion is. Yes, let’s talk about killing babies… Anything not to tell about the dude who killed himself.
This is a grand example of how people in such positions, are prone to making any and every moment about something that’s been on their minds when it really shouldn’t be.
(Sorry for your loss. That must have really hurt to get the news.)
All of them. But specifically this one place my parents took me to that just started speaking in tongues right in the middle of the sermon. This went on for like, half an hour, everyone just flailing around and speaking in “tongues”, which was just them making up a bunch of gibberish.
My dad said it wasn’t a great service.
He’s right, it was the worst.
Also, that, plus many other stupid and incongruent moments led to my exodus from the church, and religion as a whole.
I’m much happier now, not being forced to attend these silly wastes of time that are church sermons.
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.
Ugh, I imagine the pastor going through his sermon mentally before the ceremony and thinking he would get bonus points for incorporating how “inclusive” marriage through Christ is. 🙄
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.
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.
After looking up how much money my local megachurch took in last year ($60 mil) versus how much they spent on charity ($3 mil), I think you were probably justified.
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.
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 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
I let my college RA bring me along one weekend to a megachurch she attended. The pep rally vibe I can accept as just not my style of worship, but the order of service was short on scripture and long on homilies of questionable theology.
I was raised religion-free, my mother didn't push any beliefs on me (one of the few things she did right) so I grew up as a natural atheist. One Easter when I was very young, I don't remember how young precisely but I was probably 10 or younger, one of our neighbor families offered to take me to church for Mass. I guess they thought they were going to save my soul or something. My mother left the decision up to me. Now, in my mind Easter was bunnies and candy and egg hunts and all that good stuff so hell yes, I wanted to go. I don't know what I expected but what I definitely didn't expect was sitting quietly on an uncomfortable bench for (what seemed like to me) four hours while some guy talked at me. If I wasn't an atheist before that would have sealed the deal.
There was the one where the guy said “feminism is the worst thing that has ever happened to women.”
The one where the guy said “[Jesus] rolled away the stone and crawled out of his tomb fully healed even though his legs were broken” was pretty interesting giving the blatant blasphemy of it all. He had to apologize next week.