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.
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.
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 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.
It was right around the release of Star Wars Episode I, and the new pastor thought if he brought modern pop culture references into his sermon, maybe The Youths would sit up and pay attention.
The sermon was a whole thing about “being a Jedi Knight for God” and it was insufferable. I’m not sure time has ever gone by slower. I was twelve and absolutely not won over, I wanted to crawl out of the pew and die.
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.
Being a kid with ADHD, all of them. Each and every service drove me to the brink of insanity. I stopped going once I was old enough to decide for myself.
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.
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.
Could be hot Texas southern Baptist sermons running way too long while we all fan ourselves with paper fans we made from the printed agenda, or maybe it was a lively one on some random church-hopping day with speaking in tongues and prophets translating, or maybe it was one where my uncle said shit that was masked condescension cast towards his kids, or or or. It was definitely NOT one where I “went to the bathroom” but actually went hiking.
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 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.